From the point of view of spent-fuel storage safety, the loss of water is a very serious matter. According to the National Academy of Sciences, due to the enormous decay heat and the reactivity of zirconium, the zirconium cladding can spontaneously combust around eight hundred to one thousand degrees centigrade. It is strongly exothermic and the result could be runaway oxidation that proceeds as a burn front, as in a forest fire or fireworks sparkler.
In 2003, several colleagues and I were stricken from the Christmas card list of many people in the nuclear industry when we published a paper raising concerns about the vulnerability of spent-fuel pools to acts of terror and other events such as earthquakes. We took the literature of the previous twenty-five to thirty years on nuclear spent-fuel safety to the logical extreme. Unhappy with us, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued a number of statements and papers in rebuttal. This prompted Congress to ask the National Academy of Sciences to clarify the issue. We went before a special panel, and my colleague Frank von Hippel presented to them what might happen in the case of a pool fire. He illustrated that a pool fire at a commercial nuclear power plant in the United States could be sixty times greater in size than the cordon sanitaire around Chornobyl. We also provided the standard damage estimates that the industry uses to calculate the monetary and carcinogenic estimates. This kind of accident could destabilize and devastate entire nations. The academy agreed with us. They pointed out that these pools are particularly vulnerable to terrorist attacks and that the fires could be significant. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, however, did nothing to acknowledge the importance of this study.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission created a workbook involving the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. It provides emergency scenarios, such as what would you do if you received a phone call from the staff at San Onofre informing you that they had just had an earthquake, that the roof of the reactor was gone, that the pool was draining, that they had just put a full fresh core in there and the tops of the fuel were already exposed. What might happen? The answer: approximately 86 million curies of the 26 billion curies of radioactivity that would be released into the environment would be cesium-137. Doses within one to ten miles would be anything from prompt lethal to fatal for half of the people (median lethal). From 450 to 5,200 rems is what is known as an ablation dose, which would destroy the thyroid of anyone in a ten-mile radius.
Another exercise concerned a terrorist who has placed a shaped charge on a cask at the Prairie Island Nuclear Generating Plant. What would the release and the doses be? The answer: A cask would release as much as 34,000 curies of radioactivity. Everyone within a ten-mile radius would have a near-lethal if not prompt lethal dose. The reactor is cheek by jowl with the territory of a small Native American tribe. The total effective dose estimate would be 1.9 to 4 rems, while the thyroid dose estimate would be 0.1 to 0.2 rems, which is extremely high. It is also worth noting that within a ten-mile radius of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station is the world’s largest U.S. Marine Corps base, Camp Pendleton, where there are stationed 64,000 marines and support. This surely has some national security ramifications.
Much has been written and said about Fukushima. What I find interesting is what is not said. There were nine dry casks at the site and they were unscathed by the earthquake and the tsunami. We recommended in 2003 that the spent-fuel pools be returned to their original purpose, which was temporary storage for a five-year period to allow for decay heat before moving them. We suggested that the remaining spent fuel be placed in dry-hardened storage. We estimated it would cost about $3.5 billion to $7 billion and that it would take about ten years. The Electric Power Research Institute estimated it would cost $3.9 billion and that it was prohibitively expensive because the reactor would be out of operation for a while. Even while it was operating, the profits from the reactor were small. My impression is that they treat these reactors as if they were ATM machines. If the consumer were to pay for this, there would be an enormous reduction in potential risks and hazards.
The entire framework for the disposal of high-level radioactive waste, however, is collapsing in the United States. The Yucca Mountain site can no longer be used, and the NRC’s attempt to jam as much spent fuel as possible into spent-fuel pools has been rejected by a federal court on the grounds that their assumptions about the consequences of spent-fuel fires had not been tested in a lab. The NRC has now embarked on a very time-consuming environmental impact statement.
Meanwhile, we have a long-term abundance of natural gas, which is making these older single-unit reactors more vulnerable economically. This is placing more pressure on an industry that is more economically motivated than motivated by waste management.
The United States also has about 100 million gallons of military high-level radioactive waste in tanks that are larger than most state capitol domes. Roughly a third of them have leaked. After thirty years, we have spent $120 billion trying to stabilize them, and we have been able to stabilize about 11 percent of the radioactivity. This is a national priority because we must protect rivers such as the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest and the Savannah River, which supplies drinking water to the southeastern area of the United States.
We have been searching for somewhere to dispose of this toxic waste for close to sixty years, but we need to understand that some of the largest concentrations of artificial radioactivity on the planet are going to remain in storage at U.S. reactors. We have put the disposal cart before the storage horse. We have always thought that we would find a place and there was no need to take the extraordinary steps that nations such as Germany have done to protect their spent fuel. We need a national policy that reduces the hazards presented by these pools and a safe storage policy before we start looking for a geological repository. Storage and stabilization of military high-level waste must also be a national priority. This will be expensive, but the costs of doing too little to fix America’s high-level radioactive waste storage vulnerabilities are incalculable.
14
Seventy Years of Radioactive Risks in Japan and America
Kevin Kamps
In August 2010, I was invited on a speaking tour of Japan. My first stops on the tour were Okuma and Futaba, from where I could see the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. From a bluff over the Pacific, I could see the six reactors three and a half miles to the north. Three and a half miles to the south, I could see the Fukushima Daini nuclear power plant with its four reactors.
More reactors were in operation at Daini on March 11, 2011. A single offsite power line saved it from the catastrophe that befell Daiichi, where offsite power lines were lost to the earthquake and the emergency diesel generators were lost to the tsunami. With six reactors (three in operation) and seven spent-fuel pools at Daiichi, the four operating reactors and four pools at Daini, and one reactor and pool at the Tokai nuclear plant closer to Tokyo, then–prime minister Naoto Kan and then–chief cabinet secretary Yukio Edano admitted they had feared a “demonic chain reaction” of reactor meltdowns and pool fires. If that scenario had played out, 30 million people would have been evacuated from Tokyo—a situation akin to what filmmaker Akira Kurosawa envisioned in his 1990 film Dreams, where atomic reactors are seen exploding behind Mount Fuji.
The reactors at Fukushima Daiichi were General Electric Mark I boiling-water reactors, which ties the disaster to the United States. Yet our nuclear involvement in Japan stretches back seventy years to when Enrico Fermi fired up the world’s first atomic reactor, the Chicago Pile-1, as part of the Manhattan Project. The original plan was to build the prototype reactor twenty miles outside downtown Chicago where the original Argonne National Laboratory was located. But there was no time, and Fermi proceeded to launch the reactor at the University of Chicago on the edge of downtown Chicago. He did not even inform the president of the university. He had convinced his superiors that it would be safe, but he took some precautions. He assigned some graduate students to a “suicide squad” tasked with pouring a chemical solution on the pile in the event of a mishap. He also stationed a man who came to be known as the Safety Control Rod Axe Man (SCRAM), who could use an axe to sever a rope holding the control rod by a pulley, causing it to fall into the out-of-control reactor. The term SCRAM has stuck in the nuclear power industry. However, as we saw at Fukushima, you can SCRAM a reactor when a 9.0 earthquake strikes, but the decay heat is enough to lead to a meltdown if you cannot cool the cores.