Nuclear Power – Yes Please! (why we need nuclear energy to beat climate change)

Ideal Mission Statement

“The minimum standard for a government to enjoy the goodwill of its people is honesty. No government can consider that it serves its people if it blatantly lies to those people.” Paul Chambers 2010

Reminder Examples of Unacceptable Concealment

It is clear from public records that are now available that the AEC knew all along that any use of nuclear weapons would create a public health catastrophe. Nevertheless, in the name of national security the Eisenhower Administration veiled all radiation research in secrecy and disinformation. And, in 1955, with the creation of the first nuclear power plant, it extended that veil to cover the civilian sector. For nearly four more decades all information regarding the public health impacts of radiation would be rife with critical flaws. The Atomic Energy Commission and its descendant, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, would hide—literally—mountains of data and obfuscate or distort the information that was released. Employees of both government and civilian industries would be compelled to sign secrecy agreements, violations of which would constitute grounds for prosecution on charges of treason or espionage. Scientists who independently studied the human health impacts of low-level radiation would be vilified, their reputations smeared. Laurie Garrett 2000

A former US secretary of the Interior during the 1960’s, describes how he learned that AEC officials lied about the cancers induced by the Nevada tests in the course of his unsuccessful legal representation of some of the ‘downwinder’ victims.

As Chairperson of the Australian Atomic Weapons Test Safety Commission, Sir Ernest Titterton regularly assured the Australian people that they were in no danger from the British nuclear tests on their land. As in other countries, the significance of the fallout was never communicated to the public. Dr Hedley Marston (CSIRO) undertook to collect thyroid glands from grazing animals for analysis to determine the extent of radioactive contamination from the British 1956 Operation Buffalo tests in SA. He found heavily contaminated areas 1,500 – 2,000 miles away from the Maralinga test site, even reaching areas of Queensland. When Sir Ernest Titterton was asked to comment on Dr Marston’s findings, he simply reasserted the tests were carried out safely. R. Bertell

In late 1945 the US army stated that all deaths due to radiation effects from the H/N atomic bombs had already occurred. They maintained this absurdity for 5 years & no official investigation of the survivors’ health was made, despite press stories of large increases in cancer in the exposed population. In 1950, after countless deaths from exposure had already occurred, the US government set up the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission to study the remaining survivors.
A large excess of cancer among the heavily radiated was reported by the Hiroshima Cancer Registry but not by the ABCC. The HCR showed a 400% increase in non-leukaemia cancer for the highly exposed group, while the ABCC found only 30% increase. The ABCC figures were used for risk assessment. There was a great deal of messing about with choices of control groups in the A-bomb studies in order to make the results tidy & to show there was very little problem with radiation. The US certainly did not want to believe their weapon had caused such long term effects in innocent people. In addition, such effects would make it clearer that no one could really win an atomic war. The problem of the inadequacy of the controls became evident in the 1963 UNSCEAR report, where a higher leukaemia level was visible in that group. C. Busby UK

Henry Myers, (chief scientific advisor to the US House Committee on Interior & Insular Affairs 1980, with a Ph.D. in nuclear physics) in his role of highlighting nuclear safety issues, readily found people lied about what they had done to make plants safer, let problems fester until it was too late, & used psychological forms of avoidance to convince themselves & the public, that nuclear reactors were safe. Myers encountered human weaknesses far beyond what he had thought likely, or what his education & experience had prepared him for. Based on the subcommittee’s investigations, Myers estimated that as many as 75% of all the reactors in operation or under construction (at least 100) had “serious problems” that should’ve required costly repairs or closure. Myers often found cracks, leaks, faulty welds, false records & human vice in his investigations. S. Cook 2009

The European Parliament’s Green Party launched a study into nuclear accidents, released in 2007. Countless incidents had been insufficiently documented or not noted at all. Operators at the Shika-1 boiling water reactor lost control of it for about 15 minutes in 1999 but disclosed only a month before the Green Party report was released. S. Cook 2009

Before he resigned from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Peter Bradford said, “The first casualty of nuclear power was the truth”. He said, “the history of nuclear power is a history of silenced concerns, rigged studies, and suppressed scientists”.

A former Chief Scientist for the UK Ministry of Power, Sir Kelvin Spencer, has said:

“We must remember that government scientists are in chains. Speaking as a one-time government scientist I well know that ‘reasonably achievable’ has to be interpreted, (so long as one is in government service) as whatever level of contamination is compatible with the economic well-being of the industry responsible for the pollution under scrutiny.”

This government attitude clearly shows how public health is of secondary concern.

Dr S.G. Goss, a senior former member of the research staff at the National Radiological Protection Board, wrote of the culture of that organisation in the ‘New Scientist’ (1977):

“The Royal Commission on Environmental Protection criticizes the NRPB for bias towards understating risks & for not being seen to be independent of the UKAEA. These faults in the management were known to exist when the NRPB was set up, & if they were not obvious to outsiders interested in radiation protection, it was not for want of trying to make them understand…
My post on the NRPB was concerned with risk estimation &, as expected, it soon became obvious that the management were biased toward underestimating radiation risks. It was also soon clear that the ways of controlling staff used by the UKAEA’s own Health & Safety Branch would be applied in the NRPB.”

“Were we to reduce the maximum permissible exposure by a factor of ten, I seriously doubt that many of our present nuclear power plants would find it feasible to continue in operation.” stated Dr. Morgan. Furthermore, to admit that standards had been too lax would open a floodgate to compensation claims being made not only by radiation workers but by hundreds of thousands of veterans and downwinders. There were powerful incentives to keep the researchers away from the data. Karl Morgan, as chairman of the International Commission on Radiation Protection, wrote in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in 1987 that he thought the current radiation risk had been underestimated by a factor of ten. Morgan had previously supported rapid expansion of the nuclear industry and his assertion caused a great alarm throughout the industry.

Dr Mancuso’s funding was cut off and he was ordered not to publish his findings. He was denied further access to the workers’ data. After twelve years and $5.2 million, the Energy Research and Development Administration (formerly the Atomic Energy Commission) removed Mancuso from the study. In 1977 he was ordered to give up his files or have them seized. When he refused to yield the data, ERDA asked the University of Pittsburgh vice chancellor to intervene. Fortunately the university refused. Practically everyone who sided with Mancuso and Stewart were subjected to character assassination or lost their funding.

Dr. John Gofman, director of radiobiological studies at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories was a brilliant nuclear chemist who had discovered a way of separating plutonium from uranium that had provided the Manhattan Project with plutonium for its bombs. In 1969 his findings corroborated with Stewarts’. He concluded that there was no basis for the AEC’s claim that there was a so-called safe threshold of radiation and that the cancer risk from radiation was roughly twenty times worse than previously thought. This meant that the hazard to future generations in the form of genetic damage had been underestimated even more seriously. His staff and budget were slashed, his work censored and he became known as the enemy within. Gofman resigned from Livermore in 1972, calling Livermore a “scientific whorehouse”.

So it comes to this: we must trust our scientific experts on matters of science, because there isn’t a workable alternative. Because scientists are not (in most cases) licensed, we need to pay attention to who the experts actually are – by asking questions about their credentials, their past & current research, the venues in which they are subjecting their claims to scrutiny, & the sources of financial support they are receiving. N. Oreskes & E. M. Conway 2010

Simple Lesson from the US Love Canal Tragedy

What went wrong? What might the residents have done to come closer to the truth, to worry less about extremely unlikely harms, to concentrate more on mitigating whatever hazards there might be, & to avoid the vast disruption & consequent harm of being forced to move?

Their first error was to rely too much & too soon on scientific experts to inform them, which is to say that they first needed to know something about the subject themselves before making use of experts. Aaron Wildavsky 1995

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Has the Early Nuclear Industry been guided by Excessive Pressures & Bias?

Have Unacceptable Failures of Attitudes Resulted?

After the war, the US was left with a tremendous industrial complex devoted to building atomic bombs. But the knowledge & the physical infrastructure developed for the bomb could easily be turned to generating nuclear electricity. So this new technology of nuclear power (which, strictly speaking, did not yet exist) had a tremendous amount of momentum as it headed into the post-war years.

Although after the war many scientists returned to the research they had pursued earlier, plenty of others were hooked on the power of the atom. Given all this, Chauncey Starr says, the attitude among many scientists was, “what do we do now?” The obvious answer was to put the war machine to work developing nuclear power. “I don’t think we thought very deeply about it. Just let’s try it.”
Once it was clear that a chain reaction in uranium was possible, scientists didn’t have to stop & think what this might mean. Decades of speculation & prediction had already created an image of a world with nuclear power. For Leo Szilard & others, it was taken for granted that atomic energy would be the source of unbounded power. Unfortunately, this compelling image had been created from little more than the basic fact that the atomic nucleus held a great deal of power. It did not take into account (because no one knew) what sorts of things might have to be done to release that power. There was no place in the vision for the problems of nuclear waste or the dangers of radioactivity, & so at first, they were not taken as seriously as they deserved.

The early government control of nuclear power created a culture of secrecy that permeated the industry, even after commercial business had taken over all but the military aspects. Too often, the first instinct of both government officials & corporate managers was to hide information, to mislead, or even lie. The result was predictable – eventually a portion of the public assumed that nuclear officials were hiding something or lying, even when they weren’t. The Manhattan Project left nuclear power with a complex & contradictory psychological legacy.

Looking back on the early days, Alvin Weinberg recalls that even before the end of the war, Enrico Fermi was warning his colleagues that the costs of nuclear power might be higher than people wanted to pay. Fermi said, “it was not clear that the public would accept an energy source that produced this much radioactivity, & that could be subject to diversion of material for bombs.” But few paid any attention.

Years later, David Lillienthal, the first chairman of the AEC, reflected on the motivations of the scientists. They shared a conviction, he said, “that somehow or other the discovery that produced a terrible weapon simply HAD to have an important peaceful use. Everyone, our leaders, laymen, scientists & military men wanted to establish a beneficial use of this great discovery. We were grimly determined to prove that this discovery was not just a weapon.”

Most scientists at the time were generally unconcerned with the relatively minor risks that might be caused by fallout from weapons tests. Willard Libby in a 1955 congressional hearing said: “people have got to learn to live with the facts of life, & part of the facts of life are fallout”.

The Plowshare & nuclear plane programs went on so long as they did because there were essentially no brakes to slow their momentum. The true believers at the AEC & on the Joint Committee had nearly complete discretion in developing atomic energy, & they tended to dismiss negative results as due to lack of effort or insufficient vision. It was not impossible, merely extremely difficult, to build a nuclear-powered aircraft or find a practical peaceful use for atomic bombs, & so the supporters of these projects argued that the proper response to problems was to try harder & spend more money.
Throughout the 1950’s, the AEC, the Joint Committee & the President all pushed for nuclear power. In 1954 Congress passed a revised atomic Energy Act that changed the ground rules for developing nuclear power, & was designed to encourage business to get involved. The AEC would still however own the fuel & simply lease it out to companies operating reactors. This gave the commission great influence over the economics of nuclear power. For many years the AEC would subsidise the nuclear industry with fuel charges that represented only a fraction of the real fuel cost.

There was steady government pressure on utilities to adopt nuclear power. But companies were having trouble getting sufficient liability insurance. Insurance companies would provide no more than about $65 million for a single plant, but the potential liability was much greater. According to a 1957 AEC safety study, a serious accident at a large reactor could conceivably kill thousands of people & cause billions of dollars of property damage. Even if the chances of such an accident were extremely small, no utility would be willing to risk bankruptcy by building a nuclear plant without enough insurance. In response, Congress passed the Price-Anderson Act of 1957. It required a plant operating company to buy as much liability insurance as was available, with the government committed to pay for damages above $65m, up to a limit of $560 million only. If a major accident ever did cause billions of dollars in damage, then some victims would be uncompensated.

At the beginning of the 1960’s, even the most optimistic cost estimates had nuclear electricity being significantly more expensive than electricity from coal. The combination of technological enthusiasm & government pressure was enough to convince some utilities to invest in nuclear power even when they knew they would lose money. GE’s vice president of planning, John McKitterick said in 1970, “If we couldn’t get orders out of the utility industry, with every tick of the clock it became progressively more likely that some competing technology would be developed that would supersede the economic viability of our own. Our people understood this was a game of massive stakes, & that if we didn’t force the utility industry to put those stations on line, we’d end up with nothing”.

Only years later would it become evident how badly the reactor manufacturers had misjudged, or misrepresented the real costs of building nuclear power plants. On average, nuclear plants ordered in the mid to late 1960’s cost twice as much to build as estimated. GE & Westinghouse quickly realised what was happening & stopped offering the turnkey contracts in 1966. But by then they had already agreed to build a dozen nuclear plants for a fixed price. Later unofficial estimates indicate those twelve plants cost both companies about $1 billion in losses.

If nothing else, the nuclear industry’s lessons in the importance of learning have dispelled the technological hubris with which it began the nuclear era. No one in the nuclear industry realised just how much learning this new & complex technology demanded. Blinded by such technological hubris, the industry didn’t think it had much to learn. Time after time, the industry believed that it understood the technology very well, only to be surprised again. One of those surprises had arisen in the steam generator of a PWR.
With the exception of a few nuclear enthusiasts, no one in the utility industry was in a hurry to build atomic power plants. Without the push from the AEC & the Joint Committee, LWR’s would not have been locked in so quickly, & there might have been a real competition from the CANDU heavy-water technology & the gas-cooled reactors from the UK & France.

That shouldn’t be surprising. In the ideal world of economics, the central authority may be an objective body, making its decisions on the basis of calculations & expert opinions in an effort to settle on the best technology. But in reality, government bodies are subject to all sorts of pressures, both internal & external, that urge them to push a technology in one direction or another.
It starts with the prejudices & motives of the people involved. Just as individual economic players in a market are not totally rational, neither are individuals in government bodies.

Institutional inertia also often influences decision-making bodies. Once people have resolved to go in a certain direction or have spent a great deal of time & effort on one option, they tend to resist the alternatives. Changes threaten their way of thinking, perhaps even their jobs.

All excerpts are from Robert Pool (1997), who had his manuscript viewed by Richard Rhodes amongst other experts.

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Don’t worry Peter no-one bothers to read Macca’s posts!

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Is There A Conspiracy to Mislead the Public? II
Idaho Falls SL-1

It appeared that contrary to reports at the time, there was some release of radioactivity into the atmosphere. About 791 people involved in the cleanup & rescue attempt received significant doses of radioactivity even at a time when safety thresholds were higher than at present. Some of these have now developed cancers of different kinds but the US AEC were so far refusing to follow up & find all those involved.

The body impaled on the ceiling was very difficult to remove. When rescuers got it outside it was giving off 1,500 roentgens per hour. In the process of bringing out the bodies not only did the rescuers become contaminated but so did every vehicle & piece of equipment they touched. The ground around the plant & even the public highway outside it were made radioactive. Those trying to clean it up became frustrated as the more they tried, the more the radiation seemed to spread.

It took about 18 months to clean up the reactor building & initially the men had to work wearing protective suits for four hours at a time, during which period they actually went into the radioactive zone for only 8 minutes. It took several relays of men just to loosen a simple nut & bolt. It also transpired that some of those in charge had falsified the records of radiation doses to make them appear lower than they really were.

Finally, in discussing how the accident occurred, the theory put forward was that it was known that one of the men involved was suffering from severe emotional problems & might well have removed the control rod as a bizarre suicide act. Judith Cook 1986

Falsifying radiation records is deliberate deception, as is downplaying uncomfortable doses.

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Reflections on Nuclear Power from pioneer Dr Alvin Weinberg

Possible failure of nuclear energy was far from our minds at Geneva in 1955. Here was this gathering of the world’s nuclear scientists, including Bohr, Wigner, Cockcroft, Teller, Heisenberg, Perrin & the political functionaries. It would’ve been the height of bad manners to suggest that nuclear energy would not necessarily succeed. Nor did anyone even consider this possibility, since nuclear power was being generated already in some places & we were all caught up in the promise of the ‘miraculous’ new source of energy. As one goes through the 15 volume proceedings there is hardly a suspicion that the problems mentioned by Enrico Fermi in 1944 (immense radioactivity & plutonium diversion) might prove intractable. (James Conant felt in 1951 that the waste issue was also intractable).

The nuclear reality was turning out to be far less utopian than the visions I had promoted in the 1960’s. The underlying issues were the same two that Enrico Fermi had warned us about at the New Piles Committee in 1944, where reactors created radioactivity on an enormous, unprecedented scale, & breeders were potential bomb factories. If a reactor failed catastrophically, radioactivity would be widely spread.

Because radioactivity was hazardous, government regulation of nuclear power became onerous & intrusive. As a result, a component like a valve in a nuclear plant might cost 5x more than a similar part in a fossil-fuel plant. Maintenance of radioactive pumps, heat exchangers etc, was far more expensive than we had predicted.

I think the nuclear establishment made a serious mistake when it first established ‘acceptable’ levels of public exposure. When I started to work on the Manhattan project in 1941, the allowable dose to workers was set at 100 mrems per day (or 36 rems per year). This was derived from experience with X-ray workers & was about 10x lower than the doses that produced manifest harm like radiation burns. This was later reduced to about 5 rems per year for workers, with the allowable public exposure about 10x less than occupational limits. Relating public exposure to occupational exposure was in retrospect a blunder, since the occupational standards had been set to avoid acute radiation effects (skin-burn) not long-term effects like cancer. Unfortunately, little was known in the early days about radiation-induced cancer.

What WAS known was that background radiation subjected all of us to about 100-200 mrems per year. We could have set radiation standards, even in the earliest days, in relation to the NBR. In the very first report by the National Academy of Sciences on the setting of radiation standards, this approach was discussed, but it was not adopted by the NCRP. This was a blunder the whole nuclear enterprise fell into.

As I reflect on my own involvement in the waste problem, I have some regrets. Most importantly, during my years at ORNL I paid too little attention to the waste problem. Designing & building reactors was what interested me, not nuclear waste. I did not aggressively push the work on waste disposal at ORNL.

Nuclear energy will always be a demanding technology, one that requires a level of technical sophistication that American utilities generally do not posses.

One of my first jobs at the Metallurgical Laboratory in 1942 was to help Dr Edward Teller estimate how much radioactivity would be released from an air-cooled graphite reactor due to the graphite oxidation. Thus even in the earliest days we were aware that our marvellous new energy source had a profound deficiency. Along with the energy came radioactivity on an unprecedented scale. Safety was not dominant in our thinking (during wartime) but was more secondary.

But now we realised that a failure of the safety features could in extreme cases, lead to the failure of pressure vessel & containment. The containment & safety features in such cases became effectively in parallel, & NOT in series as the AEC had previously argued. So there were in these extreme cases only TWO barriers instead of three between the radioactive fuel & the public. We could no longer argue that the widespread damage described in the Brookhaven WASH-740 was impossible.

An admission of using another way to claim safety, which misleads the public

We then had to change the basis of our claim that reactors were ‘safe’. Instead of claiming that because reactors were contained, no accident would cause off-site consequences, we had to argue that, yes, a severe accident was possible, but the probability of its occurrence was so small that reactors must be still regarded as ‘safe’. Reactor safety then became ‘probabilistic’ & not ‘deterministic’. Does the public regard risk a probability x consequences? Or does the public only consider consequences without understanding probabilities?

Well the Rasmussen Report 1974-75 claimed an unbelievable risk of 1 major accident in 1 million reactor years. TMI 1979 & Chernobyl 1986, proved that wrong, even with the lower number of reactors operating then. With so many people in the modern world making major mistakes, probabilistic assessments are grossly misleading if they do not allow for such human failures, & are therefore of no practical value. Even the NRC repudiated the Rasmussen Report before the TMI accident.

By 1972, reactor safety had become a primary source of contention between the nuclear industry & the intervenors. I found myself increasingly at odds with the AEC reactor division. After all, we were pushing molten salt reactors & not LMFBR’s. We were also being troublesome over the question of reactor safety. One day Floyd Culler & I was talking to Chet Holifield about our work on reactor safety. Chet was clearly showing signs of exasperation & blurted out, “Alvin, if you are concerned about the safety of reactors, then I think it may be time for you to leave nuclear energy.”

Is that the way to treat an experienced pioneer when he is advocating safety issues? Shortly after the above conversation, Dr Weinberg lost his job.

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Over last weekend, much of South Australia was blacked-out for several hours, because of loss of power from the grid interconnection with Victoria. Apparently, S.A. now relies upon renewables, mainly wind power, aiming to supply as much as 50% of our total power demand. When Alinta closes down the brown coal-fuelled Port Augusta power stations in 2017, we will be able to generate only 10% or so of our base-load power requirements by local gas or oil-fuelled generators – the remainder must come from intermittent renewable sources or from interstate.
We really need an efficient commercial operator, such as BHP, to replace our uneconomic, polluting, obsolete generating system. If we install modern high-temperature molten salt or liquid metal cooled nuclear reactors, then we will be able to produce a zero-carbon cost-effective electricity supply, hydrogen to replace our natural gas supply, and gigalitres of distilled water to irrigate our thirsty crops and water our livestock.
And yes, the Chinese can do it within 3 years, so why can’t we, if we are only half as smart as we claim to be? Of course, we don’t have the advantage of living in a one-party authoritarian state, so it would require that our politicians get off their fat armchairs and unite to legislate for the common good, instead of studying popularity polls.
In May 2015, I made a peer-reviewed submission to the South Australian Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Submission on a web-site http://www.sa-nuclear-proposal.net , which I hope offers an unbiased assessment of the benefits of a nuclear power industry, in terms that are comprehensible to anyone who completed Year 12.
For a broader view of solutions of the problems of climate change, please refer to my web-site http://www.nvicon.org

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