[THS] 5! How Nuclear Power's "Peaceful Atom" Became a Serial Killer

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http://www.alternet.org/story/150369/how_nuclear_power%27s_%22peaceful_atom%22_became_a_serial_killer_?page=entire

How Nuclear Power's "Peaceful Atom" Became a Serial Killer

The nuclear industry is a snake-oil culture of habitual misrepresentation, pervasive
wishful thinking, deep denial, and occasional outright deception.
March 25, 2011  |

When nuclear reactors blow, the first thing that melts down is the truth.  Just as in
the Chernobyl catastrophe almost 25 years ago when Soviet authorities denied the
extent of radiation and downplayed the dire situation that was spiraling out of
control, Japanese authorities spent the first week of the Fukushima crisis issuing
conflicting and confusing reports.  We were told that radiation levels were up, then
down, then up, but nobody aside from those Japanese bureaucrats could verify the
levels and few trusted their accuracy.  The situation is under control, they told us,
but workers are being evacuated.  There is no danger of contamination, but stay
inside and seal your doors.

The First Atomic Snow Job

The bureaucratization of horror into bland and reassuring pronouncements was to be
expected, especially from an industry where misinformation is the rule.  Although you
might suppose that the nuclear industry’s outstanding characteristic would be its
expertise, since it’s loaded with junior Einsteins who grasp the math and physics
required to master the most awesomely sophisticated technology humans have ever
created, think again.  Based on the record, it’s most outstanding characteristic is a
fundamental dishonesty.  I learned that the hard way as a grassroots activist
organizing opposition to a scheme hatched by a consortium of nuclear utilities to park
thousands of tons of highly radioactive fuel rods, like the ones now burning at
Fukushima, in my Utah backyard.

Here’s what I took away from that experience: the nuclear industry is a snake-oil
culture of habitual misrepresentation, pervasive wishful thinking, deep denial, and
occasional outright deception.  For more than 50 years, it has habitually lied about
risks and costs while covering up every violation and failure it could.  Whether or not
its proponents and spokespeople are dishonest or merely deluded can be debated,
but the outcome -- dangerous misinformation and the meltdown of honest civic
discourse -- remains the same, as we once again see at Fukushima.

Established at the dawn of the nuclear age, the pattern of dissemblance had become
a well-worn rut long before the Japanese reactors spun out of control.  In the early
1950s, the disciples of nuclear power, or the “peaceful atom” as it was then called,
insisted that nuclear power would soon become so cheap and efficient that it would
be offered to consumers for free.  Visionaries that they were, they suggested that
cities would be constructed with building materials impregnated with uranium so that
snow removal would be unnecessary.  Atomic bombs, they urged, should be used to
carve out new coastal harbors for ships.  In low doses, they swore, radiation was
actually beneficial to one’s health.

Such notions and outright fantasies, as well as propaganda for a new industry and a
new way of war -- even if laughable today -- had tragic results back then.
Thousands of American GIs, for instance, were marched into ground zero just after
above-ground nuclear tests had been set off to observe their responses to what
military planners assumed would be the atomic battlefield of the future.  Ignorance,
it turns out, is not bliss, and thousands of those soldiers later became ill.  Many died
young.

Unwary civilians who lived downwind of America’s western testing grounds were also
exposed to nuclear fallout and they, too, suffered horribly from a variety of cancers
and other illnesses.  Uranium miners exposed to radiation in the tunnels where they
wrestled from the earth the raw materials for the nuclear age also became ill and
died too soon, as did workers processing that uranium into weapons and fuel.  Many
of those miners were poor Navajos from my backyard in Utah where a new uranium
boom, part of the so-called nuclear renaissance, was -- before Fukushima -- set to
take shape.

How Unlikely Risks Become Inevitable

In the future, today’s low-risk claims from industry advocates will undoubtedly seem
as tragically naïve as yesterday’s false claims.  Yes, the likelihood that any specific
nuclear power plant reactor will melt down may be slim indeed -- which hardly
means inconceivable -- but to act as though nuclear risks are limited to the operation
of power plants is misleading in the extreme.  “Spent fuel” from reactors (the kind
burning in Japan as I write) is produced as a plant operates, and that fuel remains
super hot and dangerous for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.  As we are
learning to our sorrow at the Fukushima complex, such used fuel is hardly “spent.”
In fact, it can be even more radioactive and dangerous than reactor cores.

Spent fuel continues to pile up in a nuclear waste stream that will have to be closely
managed and monitored for eons, so long that those designing nuclear-waste
repositories struggle with the problem of signage that might be intelligible in a future
so distant today’s languages may not be understood.  You might think that a danger
virulent enough to outlast human languages would be a danger to avoid, but the
hubris of the nuclear establishment is equal to its willingness to deceive.

A natural disaster, accident, or terrorist attack that might be statistically unlikely in
any year or decade becomes ever more likely at the half-century, century, or half-
millennium mark.  Given enough time, in fact, the unlikely becomes almost inevitable.
Even if you and I are not the victims of some future apocalyptic disturbance of that
lethal residue, to consign our children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren to such
peril is plainly and profoundly immoral.

Nuclear proponents have long wanted to limit the discussion of risk to plant operation
alone, not to the storage of dangerous wastes, and they remain eager to ignore
altogether the risks inherent in transporting nuclear waste (often called  “mobile
Chernobyl” by nuclear critics).  Moving those spent fuel rods to future repositories
represents a rarely acknowledged category of potential catastrophe.  Just imagine a
trainload of hot nuclear waste derailing catastrophically along a major urban corridor
with the ensuing evacuations of nearby inhabitants. It means, in essence, that one of
those Fukushima “pools” of out-of-control waste could “go nuclear” anywhere in our
landscape.

Risk is about more than likelihood; it’s also about impact.  If I tell you that your
chances of being bitten by a mosquito as you cross my yard are one in a hundred,
you’ll think of that risk differently than if I give you the same odds on a deadly pit
viper.  As events unfold in Japan, it’s ever clearer that we’re talking pit viper, not
mosquito.  You wouldn’t know it though if you were to debate nuclear industry
representatives, who consistently downplay both odds and impact, and dismiss those
who claim otherwise as hysterical doomsayers.  Fukushima will assumedly make their
task somewhat more difficult.

Hidden Costs and Wasted Subsidies

The true costs of nuclear power are another subject carefully fudged and obscured
by nuclear power advocates.  From its inception in federally funded labs, nuclear
power has been highly subsidized.  A recent report by the Union of Concerned
Scientists found that “more than 30 subsidies have supported every stage of the
nuclear fuel cycle from uranium mining to long-term waste storage.  Added together,
these subsidies have often exceeded the average market price for the power
produced.”  When it comes to producing electricity, these subsidies are so extensive,
the report concludes, that “in some cases it would have cost taxpayers less to simply
buy the kilowatts on the open market and give them away.”

If the nuclear club in Congress, led by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell,
gets its way, billions more in subsidies will be forthcoming, including massive federal
loan guarantees to build the next generation of nuclear plants.  These are particularly
important to the industry, since bankers won’t otherwise touch projects that are
notorious for mammoth cost overruns, lengthy delays, and abrupt cancellations.

The Obama administration has already proposed an additional $36 billion in such
guarantees to underwrite new plant construction.  That includes $4 billion for the
construction of two new nuclear reactors on the Gulf Coast that are to be operated in
partnership with Tokyo Electric Power Company -- that’s right, the very outfit that
runs the Fukushima complex.  Yet when I debate nuclear advocates, they always
claim that, in cost terms, nuclear power outcompetes alternative sources of energy
like wind and solar.

That government gravy train doesn’t just stop at new power plants either.  The feds
have long assumed the epic costs of waste management and storage.  If another
multi-billion dollar project like the now-abandoned Yucca Mountain repository in
Nevada is built, it will be with dollars from taxpayers and captive ratepayers (the free
market be damned).  Industry spokesmen insist that subsidizing such projects will be
well worth it, since they will create thousands of new jobs.  Unfortunately for them, a
definitive 2009 University of Massachusetts study that analyzed various infrastructure
investments including wind, solar, and retrofitting buildings to conserve energy
placed nuclear dead last in job creation.

Finally, the recently renewed Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act limits
the liability of nuclear utilities should a catastrophe like the one in Japan happen here
in the United States.  The costs of recovery from the Fukushima catastrophe will be
astronomical.  In the U.S., nuclear utilities would be off the hook for any of those
costs and you, the citizen, would foot the bill.  Despite their assurances that nothing
can go wrong here, nuclear industry officials have made sure that in their business
risk and reward are carefully separated.  It’s a scenario we should all know well:
private corporations take away profits when things go well, and taxpayers assume
responsibility when shit happens.

Finally, nuclear power boosters like to proclaim themselves “green” and to claim that
their industry is the ideal antidote to global warming since it produces no greenhouse
gas emissions.  In doing so, they hide the real environmental footprint of nuclear
energy.

It’s quite true that no carbon dioxide comes out of power-plant smokestacks.
However, maintaining any future infrastructure to handle the industry’s toxic waste is
guaranteed to produce lots of carbon dioxide.  So does mining uranium and
processing it into fuel rods, building massive reactors from concrete and steel, and
then behemoth repositories capable of holding waste for 1,000 years.  Radiation from
the Fukushima meltdown is now entering the Japanese food chain.  How green is
that?

The Watchdogs Play Dead

Over the course of nuclear power’s history, there have been scores of mishaps,
accidents, violations, and problems that, chances are, you’ve never heard about.
Beyond the unavoidable bad PR over the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in
1979, the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986, and now the Japanese catastrophe, the
industry has an excellent record -- of covering up its failures.

The co-dependent relationship between the nuclear corporations and the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission (NRC), the federal agency charged with licensing and
monitoring them, resembles the cozy relationship between the Securities Exchange
Commission and Wall Street before the global economic meltdown of 2008.  The NRC
relies heavily on the industry’s own reports since only a small fraction of its activities
can be inspected yearly.

A report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, “The NRC and Nuclear Power Plant
Safety in 2010,” which highlights the NRC’s haphazard record of inspection and
enforcement, makes clear just why the honor system that assumes utilities will
honestly report problems has never worked.  It describes 14 recent serious “near
miss” violations that initially went unreported.  At the Indian Point Nuclear Power
Plant, only 38 miles north of the New York metropolitan area, for instance, NRC
inspectors ignored a leaking water containment system for 15 years.

After a leaking roof forced the shutdown of two reactors at the Calvert Cliffs nuclear
facility in Maryland, plant managers admitted that it had been leaking for eight years.
When Honeywell hired temporary workers to replace striking union members at its
uranium refinery in Illinois, they were slipped the correct answers to a test required
for those allowed to work at nuclear plants, because otherwise they had neither the
knowledge nor experience to pass.

The regulation of Japan’s nuclear industry mirrors the American model.  Japan’s
legacy of regulatory scandals, falsified safety records, underestimated risks, and
cover-ups includes an incident in 1999 when workers mixed uranium in open buckets
and exposed hundreds of coworkers to radiation.  Two later died.  Other scandals
involved hiding cracks in steam pipes from regulators in 1989, lying about a fire and
explosion at a plant near Tokyo in 1997, and covering up damage to a plant from an
earthquake in 2007.

In the wake of the Fukushima catastrophe, we will no doubt discover how there, too,
so-called watchdogs rolled over and played dead.  In recent years, in fact, the
Fukushima complex had the highest accident rate of any of the big Japanese nuclear
plants.  We’ve already learned that an engineer who helped design and supervise the
construction of the steel pressure vessel that holds the melting fuel rods in Reactor
No. 4 warned that it was damaged during production.  He had himself initially
orchestrated a cover-up of this fact, but revealed it a decade later -- only to be
ignored.  During the complex’s construction by General Electric some 35 years ago,
Dale Bridenbaugh, a GE employee, resigned after becoming convinced that the
reactors being built were seriously flawed.  He, too, was ignored.  The Vermont
Yankee reactor in Vermont and 23 others around the U.S. replicate that design.

Stay tuned, since more examples of reckless management will surely come to light...

Risk Is Not a Math Problem

That culture of secrecy is a logical fit for an industry that is authoritarian by nature.
Unlike solar or wind power, nuclear power requires massive investments of capital,
highly specialized expertise, robust security, and centralized control.  Any local citizen
facing the impact of a uranium mine, a power plant, or a proposed waste depository
will attest that the owners, operators, and regulators of the industry are remote,
unresponsive, and inaccessible.  They misinform because they have the power to get
away with it.  The absence of meaningful checks and balances enables them.

Risk, antinuclear advocates quickly learn, is not simply some complicated math
problem to be resolved by experts.  Risk is, above all, a question of who is put at risk
for whose benefit, of how the rewards, costs, and liabilities of an activity are
distributed and whether that distribution is fair.  Those are political questions that
citizens directly affected should be answering for themselves.  When it comes to
nuclear power, that doesn’t happen because the industry is undemocratic to its core.
Corporate officers treat downwind stakeholders with the same contempt they reserve
for honest accountings of the industry’s costs and dangers.

It may be difficult for the average citizen to unpack the technicalities of nuclear
power, or understand the complex physics and engineering involved in splitting
atoms to make steam to produce electricity.  But most of us are good at detecting
bullshit.  We know when something like the nuclear industry doesn’t pass the smell
test.

There is a growing realization that our carbon-based energy system is warming and
endangering this planet, but replacing coal and oil with nuclear power is like trading
heroin for crack -- different addictions, but no less unhealthy or risky.  The “nuclear
renaissance,” like the “peaceful atom” before it, is the energy equivalent of a three-
card monte game, involving the same capitalist crooks who gave us oil spills, bank
bailouts, and so many of the other rip-offs and scams that have plagued our lives in
this new century.

They are serial killers.  Stop them before they kill again.  Credibility counts and you
don’t need a PhD or a Geiger counter to detect it.


Chip Ward was a founder of HEAL Utah, a grassroots group that has led the
opposition to the disposal of nuclear waste in Utah and the construction of a new
reactor next to Green River. A TomDispatch regular, he is the author of Canaries on
the Rim: Living Downwind in the West and Hope’s Horizon: Three Visions for Healing
the American Land.