Risk Analysis Virtual Issue Nuclear Power, Weapons and Waste

Risk Analysis Virtual Issue Nuclear Power, Weapons and Waste Management: A 40-year Retrospective Edited by Michael Greenberg, Joanna Burger, and Karen Lowrie Introduction Our aim with this virtual issue is to provide a compendium of papers that examines the range of risks and benefits of nuclear power, weapons production, waste management, and associated human dimensions of these risks and benefits to society and individuals. Papers cover topics such as the siting of weapons plants and power plants, commercial power production, nuclear wastes, management of stockpiles, repositories, potential accidents, and environmental justice, especially for Native Americans and people of color. These issues have engaged a wide range of social, physical, and biological scientists, as well as managers and regulators interested in risk. Below we first provide a brief history of nuclear power, weapons production, and waste management. We then present papers selected from the 40-year history of Risk Analysis, divided into four parts representing the past four decades. Under each of these, we provide a brief overview of the major issues and summarize the selected papers within the era. Our comments are meant to introduce the papers, which themselves address the key issues and concerns. The four historical periods are: 1. 1981-1990: Scrutiny of commercial nuclear power technology, siting and public perception. 2. 1991-2000: Nuclear waste management, Yucca and WIPP 3. 2001-2010: Terrorism, equity challenges, and ambiguity about nuclear power 4. 2011-2020: Climate change, underground repositories, and nuclear power post- Fukushima Brief Historical Context On August 6 and August 9, 1945, the United States dropped nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to hasten the end of the Second World War. In December 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower delivered his famous “Atoms for Peace” speech to the United Nations, intending to facilitate the application of nuclear materials and technologies to peaceful uses, such as generating electricity, digging canals, treating diseases, and increasing agricultural production. Eisenhower’s optimistic perspective was supported by distinguished experts. For example, while meeting with reporters in 1954, Lewis Strauss, chair of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, noted that nuclear energy would be so inexpensive to produce that it would not need to be metered. Touted in the U.S, France, the United Kingdom, Germany and other industrialized countries as a way to create wealth and cure poverty, nuclear power promised to be an amazing innovation. In 1979, a few months before the Society for Risk Analysis was created, Oak Ridge scientists Burwell, Ohanian, and Weinberg called for a U.S. siting policy that would accommodate 1000 nuclear power plants (averaging about 1,000 megawatts-electric). Their preference was to cluster ten plants at each site. These were the halcyon days of nuclear power. Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, over 400 nuclear power plants have been built worldwide, with over 100 constructed at over 60 sites in the United States. This was an enormous commitment, but not what was anticipated by nuclear power optimists. To achieve energy and economic efficiency, proponents wanted to build reactors in urban areas. In 1957, a New York utility proposed to build a nuclear power plant in Ravenswood, located about three miles from the United Nations building in New York City. In the early1970s, the first author and a colleague (Greenberg & Kruekeberg,1974) studied a proposed facility at Newbold Island in the Delaware River about 10 miles from Philadelphia and 4 miles from Trenton, New Jersey. Both proposals were rejected. We testified for five days at official hearings about the proposed Newbold Island site, as well as heard arguments and fielded questions from opponents and neutral participants who made a strong case that should there be an accident it would not be feasible to evacuate the more than 10 million people that lived within 50 miles of the site. The opposition in some communities is also illustrated by successful community protests in Harlem against building a small reactor at Columbia University for teaching purposes. Before 1980, it was becoming clear that the promises of nuclear power were going to be hard to meet. Accidents were one reason. In 1957, the Windscale reactor in the U.K and the Ozyorsk facilities in the Soviet Union had serious accidents. In 1979, an accident occurred at the Three Mile Island facility near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. These foreshadowed more consequential accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima that fueled major concern about the benefits and risk of nuclear power, both of nuclear power plants themselves, and in comparison to other forms of energy generation. Nuclear waste management was beginning to be viewed as a U.S. national government problem by the early 1980s, illustrated by the passage of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 that set forth a national approach to managing the increasing stockpile of nuclear wastes. Nuclear so-called “spent fuel” rods from power plants were accumulating. These rods are more accurately described as “economically spent,“ because they were thermally hot and radioactive, requiring cooling and shielding. Efforts to find a repository for nuclear waste from nuclear weapons and power plants had begun. Yucca Mountain, Nevada was investigated as an underground repository in the 1970s, as was a salt dome near Lyons, Kansas. Progress was limited. Thus began a period where nuclear weapons plants and nuclear power plants were no longer shrouded in secrecy. Congress and the American people began to examine the risks and benefits of nuclear power and to acknowledge the buildup of nuclear wastes, both from the weapons plants and from commercial facilities. The issues are numerous and varied, and in many respects, relate to larger questions of why and how we examine the use of any technology, its applications, and the range of human dimensions associated with it. The period of questioning of the safety of the nuclear and chemical wastes stockpiled on the nuclear weapons plants led to the formation of the Environmental Management (EM) Program of the Department of Energy (DOE). Following World War II, the U.S. had created a large complex of 50 major sites, 2.4 million acres, and 20,000 facilities that was largely devoted to weapons research and production (DOE, 1996). The DOE EM program, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the U.S. EPA have faced the daunting challenges of managing massive amounts of nuclear and chemical wastes, cleaning up lands to productive uses, determining future land uses and future missions, and protecting human health and the environment (DOE, 1996). Many of these issues remain today, with the waste management issue critical to all aspects of this multi-generational challenge. With this background, we offer 29 papers drawn from the archives of Risk Analysis for inclusion in the virtual issue. We also suggest 38 additional Risk Analysis papers on these topics that are not part of the issue, but could provide a wider examination of some of the issues, and will be useful for graduate students, professionals and others delving into particular topics. Many papers deal with the Department of Energy’s nuclear complex because of the enormous cleanup tasks that remain, some that will likely not be completed in this century (DOE, 2019). But the issues surrounding nuclear stockpiles elsewhere, and the issues concerning commercial nuclear power are present in every country with nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons. The papers in this volume not only provide context for our current thinking about nuclear power, but raise issues related to waste in general, siting of any commercial facilities, climate change, and environmental justice. The backgrounds for each part of the volume are meant not as complete history, but as brief overviews of some of the issues of each period. Each time period could lend itself to a complete volume. Papers are divided into those that are primarily about risk assessment and those that are primarily about risk management. Acknowledgments We thank Professor David Kosson of Vanderbilt University for his constructive suggestions. We appreciate the ongoing financial support and encouragement from the Consortium for Risk Evaluation with Stakeholder Participation through the U.S. Department of Energy (DE-FC01- 06EW07053) for our work, as well as Rutgers University. The views are those of the authors and do not represent the funding agencies. References and Suggested Other Sources Brady J. (2019). “This Company Says the Future of Nuclear Energy is Smaller, Cheaper, and Safer.” National Public Radio, May 8. Burwell C., Ohanian M., & Weinberg M. A (1979). Siting Policy for an Acceptable Nuclear Future. Science, 204, 1043-1051. Department of Energy (DOE). (1996). Charting the Course: The Future Use Report. Department of Energy, Washington, DC. Department of Energy (DOE). (2019). Hanford Lifecycle Scope, Schedule, and Cost Report. DOE/RL-2018-45 (Rev 0). Richland Operations Office, Richland, Washington. Eisenhower D. (1953). Atoms for Peace Speech. December 8. Available at: https://www.iaea.org/about/history/atoms-for-peace-speech. Gagarinskii, A. Y. (2012). Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future. Atomic Energy, 112(4), 307. Greenberg M. & Krueckeberg D. (1974). Demographic analysis for nuclear power plant siting: a set of computerized models and a suggestion for improving siting practices. Journal of Computers and Operations Research, l, 497-506. Pew Research Center. (2017). Trust, Facts, and Democracy. Available at: www.people-press. org/2017/10/05/7-global-warming-and-environmental-regulation-personal-environmentalism/. Russell, M. (1997). Toward a Productive Divorce: Separating DOE Cleanups from Transition Assistance. JIEE No. 97-03. Knoxville, Tenn: The Joint Institute for Energy and Environment. Strauss L. “This Day in Quotes. September 16. Too cheap to meter. The great nuclear quote debate.” Available at: http://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2009/09/too-cheap-to-meter-nuclear- quote-debate.html.

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