Walter C Patterson NUCLEAR POWER SECOND EDITION PENGUIN BOOKS 1 Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England Viking Penguin Inc., 40 West 23rd Street, New York, New York 10010, U S A Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 2801 John Street, Markham, Ontario, Canada L3R 1114 Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand First published 1976 Reprinted 1976, 1977 (twice), 1978 Reprinted with Postscript 1980 Reprinted 1981 Second edition 1983 Reprinted with Postscript 1986 Copyright @ Walter C. Patterson, 1976, 1980, 1983, 1986 All rights reserved Made and printed in Great Britain by Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press) Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk. Filmset in Monophoto Plantin by Northumberland Press Ltd, Gateshead Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser 2 Walter C. Patterson Walter C. Patterson was born in Canada in 1936. He was educated in Winnipeg and gained a postgraduate degree in nuclear physics from the University of Manitoba. In 1960 he came to the United Kingdom to teach and write and in the late sixties he became involved in environmental work. In 1972 he joined the staff of Friends of the Earth in London, where he was energy specialist until 1978. During this time he appeared as their lead witness at the Windscale Inquiry. Since 1978 he has been an independent commentator and consultant, involved in energy and nuclear policy issues in many different countries. He is the author of The Fissile Society (1977), Fluidized Bed Energy Technology: Coming to a Boil (1978), The Plutonium Business and the Spread of the Bomb (Paladin 1984), and Going Critical: an unofficial history of British nuclear power (Paladin 1985). He is a contributor to New Scientist, the Guardian and many other publications and he broadcasts on radio and television. He continues to be an adviser to Friends of the Earth and he is also an editorial adviser to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. In 1985 he served as special adviser to the House of Commons Select Committee on Environment, for their study of radioactive waste. He was also series adviser to the B BC television drama Edge of Darkness. Walt Patterson has an English wife and two daughters. His other interests include 'music, from Josquin to jazz; travelling, the slower the better; learning languages to the level of intelligible mediocrity; the care and feeding of the family computers; brewing beer and consuming the product'. To my parents, who didn't worry when I dropped nuclear physics; and to Cleone, who didn't worry when I picked it up again. 3 Contents List of Figures Preface Preface to the Second Edition Introduction: The Nuclear Predicament PART ONE THE WORLD OF NUCLEAR FISSION What is a Reactor? Reactor Types The Nuclear Fuel Cycle PART TWO THE WORLD AND NUCLEAR FISSION Beginnings Reactors Off and Running The Charge of the Light Brigade Nuclenomics Spreading the Risk and Risking the Spread The Nuclear Horizon Postscript Appendix A: Nuclear jargon Appendix B: Ionizing Radiation and Life Appendix C: Bibliography: A Nuclear Bookshelf Appendix D: Nuclear Organizations Pro and Con Index 4 List of Figures 1. Nuclear power station 2. Magnox reactor 3. Advanced gas-cooled reactor (AGR) 4. High-temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTGR) 5. Pressurized water reactor (PWR) 6. Boiling water reactor (BWR) 7. CANDU reactor 8. Fast breeder reactor (FBR) 9. The nuclear fuel cycle 5 Preface to the first edition Nuclear reactors are fascinating. They are the heart of the technology which may shape the world of our near future, or may obliterate it. Born amid the tightest of military security during the Second World War, nuclear reactors have always impressed the layman as esoteric, fantastic entities, beyond ordinary comprehension. Such an impression is unwarranted. As we balance on the threshold of total commitment to a nuclear pathway it is vitally important that nuclear policy be based on broad public understanding - of nuclear technology, of its applications, and of its implications. Nuclear physics and nuclear engineering are, to be sure, specialized subjects, dealing in phenomena which sometimes seem almost Carrollian in their unexpectedness. But the essential features of nuclear reactors have changed very little in the four decades of their existence; what has changed is their size, and their context. The present book is an attempt to describe the reactors themselves - and to describe, too, the effect they have had, and are having, on the world in which we live. Of necessity the description is one man's view of an ever more controversial nexus of issues. It will strike some as unduly pessimistic about nuclear prospects, and others as entirely too absorbed in a subject from which they instinctively recoil. It is therefore appropriate to begin with a warning: in nuclear matters never take any one viewpoint as gospel, including this one. For those who wish to pursue questions further I have included in Appendix C a lengthy list of additional sources, annotated to indicate - once again - one man's view of their virtues and shortcomings. In the course of my own involvement with nuclear matters I have been fortunate to encounter many other viewpoints against which to measure my own, some in print and some in person. The staff of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority have been unfailingly helpful to me in spite of our frequently diverging opinions. I should particularly like to thank Ron Truscott and his colleagues of the Public Relations section and Mrs Loma Arnold of the Archives, who made available to me advance copies of Professor Margaret Gowing's superb official history Independence and Deterrence at a crucial stage in my own research. The now sub-divided United States Atomic Energy Commission has supplied me with many useful documents, as have the International Atomic Energy Agency and the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency, the last through the good offices of Bruce Adkins, to whom again my thanks. I have made extensive use of the works of Dr Samuel Glasstone, the late Dr Theos Thompson and Dr J. G. Beckerley, the late Dr Kenneth Jay, my friend and colleague Sheldon Novick, Dr J. E. Coggle, Dr Tom Cochran, Dr John Goftna n, Dr Arthur Tamplin, Dr John Holdren, Richard Lewis, John McPhee, Norman Moss, Dr Peter Metzger, Roger Rapoport, Ted Taylor and Mason Willrich, among many; to all of them my thanks. The publications of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the Pugwash Conferences, the International Commission on Radiological Protection, the National Radiological Protection Board and the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the pages of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Science, Environment, Energy Policy and 6 Nuclear Engineering International have yielded much valuable material, as has the Weekly Energy Report, to whose editor and publisher Llewellyn King my thanks. Many of my journalist colleagues have for many months carried on with me an unending and fruitful colloquy, not only about nuclear affairs but about their context in energy and social policy overall. I expect they will let me know what they think of my effort, in similarly blunt language: in anticipation my thanks to the lot of them, especially to the staff of the New Scientist, who encounter my opinions sooner and more often than most. Even closer to home my colleagues in Friends of the Earth International, without whose active participation this book neither would nor could have been written. Brice Lalonde and Pierre Samuel of Les Amis de la Terre in France, Lennart Daleus of Jordens Vdnner in Sweden, Brian Hurley of FOE Ireland, Holger Strohm of Die Freunde der Erde in West Germany, Kitty Pegels of Vereniging Milieudefensie in the Netherlands, Jim Harding of FOE Inc. in the USA, and many other Friends have provided an international link-up of growing strength. In Britain Dr Peter Chapman of the Open University and Gerald Leach of the International Institute for Environanent and Development have contributed provocative insights and stimulating debate. My Friends of the FOE Ltd office in London have put up with my absence from the team for some weeks without complaint, carrying for me my share of the load. Finally, and most particularly, my warmest thanks to Dr John Price and to Amory Lovins, with whom it is an exhausting pleasure to work, and without whom I might as well stick to cultivating my broccoli. I am grateful to Peter Wright of Penguin Books for the opportunity to amplify fourfold an earlier version of this text. On the home front my thanks and best wishes to Mrs Sue Hunter, who has toiled nobly to turn a tangled typescript into intelligible copy. Lastly to my beloved wife Cleone, who put up with three months of me lying obsessively awake at four in the morning: I promise that I shall never again write about terrorists with nuclear weapons the day before Christmas Eve. I hope. Walt Patterson 31 December 1974 7 Preface to the Second Edition The most difficult task in preparing this second edition has been to decide what material from the first edition to leave out, to make the required room for new. The choice of material to include and to exclude is of course the responsibility of the author, underlining the comment in the first edition: 'Never take any one viewpoint as gospel, including this one.' I am grateful to Penguin Books and Rab McWilliam for the opportunity to revisit at length this endlessly fascinating if often unsettling territory.