Insurmountable Risks: the Dangers of Using Nuclear Power to Combat

published jointly by IEER Press Takoma Park, Maryland and RDR Books Muskegon, Michigan / Berkeley, California Insurmountable Risks published jointly by RDR Books IEER Press 1487 Glen Avenue 6935 Laurel Avenue, Suite 201 Muskegon, MI 49441 Takoma Park, MD 20912 Phone: (510) 595-0595 Phone: (301) 270-5500 Fax: (510) 228-0300 Fax: (301) 270-3029 E-mail: [email protected] E-mail [email protected] www.rdrbooks.com www.ieer.org Copyright 2006 by Institute for Energy and Environmental Research All Rights Reserved ISBN: 1-57143-162-4 After Jan. 1, 2007: 978-1-57143-162-2 Library of Congress Control Number: 2006928939 Cover photo © Corbis Corporation. All Rights Reserved Cover design and production: Richard Harris Distributed in the United Kingdom and Europe by Roundhouse Publishing Ltd., Millstone, Limers Lane, Northam, North Devon EX39 2RG, United Kingdom Printed in Canada For non-commercial use only Dedicated to my nephew Grant Turner Koh and the world he will grow up in. For non-commercial use only For non-commercial use only Acknowledgements Work on this report began nearly three years ago when I first became aware of the nuclear power study conducted at the Massachusetts Insti- tute of Technology. Over that time I have benefited from many discus- sions on the topic of nuclear power and global climate change from for- mal conferences to casual dinners. First and foremost among those that I would like to thank is Dr. Arjun Makhijani, President of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER). His help and guidance in framing this study was invaluable and I greatly benefited from his review of its contents as well. This work would not be what it is today without Dr. Makhijani’s significant intellectual contributions. For example, his historical analysis of U.S. nuclear mythology, originally presented in Nuclear Power Deception by Dr. Makhijani and Scott Saleska, was one of the central themes around which I wrote the introduction to this work. In addition, Dr. Makhijani was the first to recognize the significance of our economic projections in which each of the alternatives for reducing greenhouse gas emissions tended to have a cost between six and seven cents per kilowatt-hour when projected over the near to medium-term. The recognition that these alternatives would be economically competitive with new nuclear power became one the central conclusion of my current analysis. Dr. Makhijani was also instrumental in framing my discussion of the link between nuclear disarmament and non- proliferation and my discussion of long-term nuclear waste management. I would also like to thank Melissa Kemp, a policy analyst and organizer for Public Citizen’s Energy Program, for her help in framing my discussion of renewable energy resources. In particular, I am grateful for her encouragement in examining the potential for economically competitive solar power to be developed in the coming years. I am extremely grateful to Lois Chalmers, the IEER librarian, for all of her tireless work in obtaining the information and resources that I re- quired to complete this analysis and for having the patience to so care- fully fact check the citations in this report. Her attention to detail has added much to the strength of this work. In addition, I would also like to thank Michael Borucke, now a member of the Science and Technology Team at Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management (NES- CAUM), for his help in checking many of the calculations in this report while working for IEER. As always, however, I remain solely responsi- ble for the contents of this report, including any omissions or errors. i For non-commercial use only Outreach work on Insurmountable Risks is part of IEER’s ongoing program on energy and the environment. In this light, I would like to thank Sara Barczak, Safe Energy Director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, for her encouragement in completing this work, for reviewing its contents, and for helping IEER to conduct outreach on these issues throughout the Southeastern United States. Finally, I would like to gratefully acknowledge the foundations that have generously supported IEER during the preparation of this report: Colombe Foundation, Educational Foundation of Amer- ica, Ford Foundation, John Merck Fund, Livingry Foun- dation, New Cycle Foundation, New-Land Foundation, Ploughshares Fund, Public Welfare Foundation, Stewart R. Mott Charitable Trust, and Town Creek Foundation. I would also like to thank those individuals who have become donors to IEER. Your support is deeply appreciated and helps make our work possible. Brice Smith Takoma Park, Maryland May 11, 2006 ii For non-commercial use only Foreword: The return of the nuclear messiahs Here is a book for the times. Uranium enrichment and reprocessing, once terms reserved for eggheads dealing in nuclear esoterica, are in the headlines everyday. Politicians and diplomats argue about them and the proliferation threats arising from the spread of commercial nuclear power technology. Yet, strangely, in a parallel universe also being played out on the public stage, is the nuclear industry’s claim, amplified by the megaphones of the media, that nuclear power can play a vital role in saving the Earth from another peril – severe climate disruption caused by the anthropo- genic emissions of greenhouse gases. Could it? Could nuclear power really help save the world from what is arguably the worst environmental scourge ever to confront humanity? History would suggest two things: caution about the nuclear industry’s messianic proclamations and careful analysis of the problem. The early promises of the fervent advocates of nuclear energy were of an economic paradise that nuclear energy would usher in for everyone from the needy to the greedy. No whim or need would go unfulfilled. But it was mainly fantasy and propaganda. Almost two decades ago, browsing through the stacks of a well endowed library, I ran into a 1950 article written by a research engineer by the name of Ward Davidson from Consolidated Edison Company of New York. It was published in the then-nuclear industry journal Atomics. Updating an earlier 1947 opinion, he wrote that the technical problems facing nuclear power were even more daunting than he had imagined. For example, the materials requirements would be stringent, given the high temperatures and damage from high neutron fluxes. Testing of the alloys to ensure the quality and uniformity needed would be difficult. All this meant, of course, that nuclear power would be quite expensive. Reading that prescient 1950 assessment was an eye opener. Like almost everyone else, I believed that the common technical conclusion prevalent in nuclear circles in the 1940s and 1950s was that the nuclear energy would soon be “too cheap to meter.” After all, that statement was made by the Chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in 1954 and endlessly repeated. I had presumed that it was simply a mistake, but who doesn’t make mistakes? This was the first inkling of what further re- iii For non-commercial use only search would decisively show: it was the uniform conclusion of all serious analyses at the time that nuclear electricity would be expensive.1 “Too cheap to meter” was part self-delusion, as shown by the florid and fantastic statements made by the most serious people such as Glenn Seaborg, who led the team that first isolated plutonium, and Robert Hut- chins, the President of the University of Chicago during the Manhattan Project. And it was part organized propaganda designed to hide the hor- rors of the hydrogen bomb. In September of 1953, less than a month after the detonation of the So- viet's first hydrogen bomb, AEC Commissioner Thomas Murray wrote to the commission's chairman that the U.S. could derive “propaganda capi- tal” from a publicity campaign surrounding their recent decision to con- struct the Shippingport nuclear power plant.2 Sterling Cole, the chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in the U.S. Congress, reached a similar conclusion regarding the importance of demonstrating the “benefits” of nuclear power as a counter balance to the immense destruc- tive force of the hydrogen bomb. This conclusion, in fact, led Cole to worry that the Soviets might beat the U.S. to a functional nuclear power plant, and thus steal the claim to being the true promoters of the “peaceful” atom. In a letter to a fellow Congressman, Sterling Cole wrote It is possible that the relations of the United States with every other country in the world could be seriously damaged if Rus- sia were to build an atomic power plant for peacetime use ahead of us. The possibility that Russia might actually dem- onstrate her “peaceful” intentions in the field of atomic energy while we are still concentrating on atomic weapons could be a major blow to our position in the world.3 As early of 1948, the Atomic Energy Commission reported to Congress that “the cost of a nuclear-fuel power plant will be substantially greater than that of a coal-burning plant of similar capacity.”4 In the January 1949 issue of Science, Robert Bacher, one of the original members of the AEC and a member of the scientific team at Los Alamos during the war, cautioned that despite the progress that was being made, it was “far too 1 This Foreword is based on Part I of Makhijani and Saleska 1999. 2 Murray 1953 3 Cole 1953 4 AEC 1948 iv For non-commercial use only early to make any predictions about the economic feasibility of atomic power.”5 One of the most direct of the early critiques of the economics of nuclear power came in a December 1950 speech before the American Associa- tion for the Advancement of Science by C.G.

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