http://www.alternet.org/story/38261/

Getting Off Our Nuclear Power Fixation

By J.A. Savage, AlterNet

Posted on July 1, 2006

My favorite internet date site posits a question: "What is the 
best/worst lie you've told?"

     * "I've never seen that man before in my life."
     * "I've had a vasectomy."
     * "I know what I'm doing."
     * "I'm not married."
     * "Nuclear power is clean and safe."

I made that last one up. But if the power industry and the federal 
government had their profiles up on that website, that would be their 
answer.

Despite Vice President Dick Cheney's contention that nuclear power is 
"carbon-free," nukes contribute to the greenhouse effect. The 
government is betting billions of dollars of our money, and could 
simply give it away to developers to build new nuclear plants. And, 
our country's aging nuke fleet is getting plastic surgery while its 
innards decay and get ever closer to fatal accidents.

Let's start with the greenhouse lie. Instead of coal or natural gas, 
nukes run on uranium. Like coal, uranium has to be mined. It also has 
to be converted, enriched and transported. Add that up and you get 
more greenhouse gas emissions than a natural gas-fired power plant, 
according to one of the few studies done on the complicated issue by 
the scientists at the German Oko-Institut. Meanwhile, the nuclear 
industry would have you believe that solar and wind power create more 
greenhouse gases than nuclear.

Not only does nuclear power contribute to the greenhouse effect, and 
so, indirectly affecting the planet's health and your well-being, it 
very well could affect your health and the planet's health directly 
-- by killing everything in sight in an accident.

This is how nuclear energy works on a basic physics level. When atom 
of a special type of element, uranium 235, is bombarded by neutrons, 
the uranium releases more neutrons that split more uranium atoms in a 
chain reaction. This is fission. Nuclear power plants use the heat 
given off from that process to boil water. The steam from that water 
turns the same basic turbines that you find in other power plants 
fueled by natural gas or coal to make the heat. It's a huge, scary 
engineering problem just meant to boil water. As antinuclear guru 
Amory Lovins quipped, it's like using a chainsaw to cut butter.

The difference is the radioactivity is contained -- at least we hope 
it remains contained -- within the reactor where the fission is 
constantly exploding at a molecular level. If that radioactivity 
escapes the reactor (that happens on occasion) or is released through 
contaminated water spills (that happens with great regularity), then 
it's a health and safety problem.

The thing about deadly radioactivity is that you can't see it coming. 
You can't smell it. You can't feel it until it's too late.

On a basic physiology level, when radioactivity is absorbed by a 
body, it wreaks havoc on DNA molecules. Studies show ingested and 
inhaled uranium emissions may affect babies in the womb and increase 
risk of cancers such as leukemia. It may damage chromosomes. In high 
concentrations, it kills immediately.

That's not a problem, according to the government, because no matter 
how complicated it gets to boil water to make electricity, there 
won't be any accidents. The chief federal nuclear regulator, Nils 
Diaz, chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said in April that 
the agency is "ensuring safety in the civilian uses of nuclear 
materials."

The government/industry's plan is to contain all that nasty, deadly 
fission by building a huge box around it. The boxes, the reactor 
vessels, are made of thick carbon steel, lined with stainless steel. 
"That oughta keep 'er," some engineer figured. After decades of 
operation, though, it doesn't. The lesson happened in 2002 when the 
Davis-Besse nuclear plant's reactor head was found to have been worn 
away -- from a two-feet-thick exterior to a 3/8-inch layer of 
stainless steel. Even that last bit had bubbled outwards from the 
pressure of keeping radioactive action on the inside. The plant, near 
Toledo, Ohio, had a hole in its reactor head wide enough and deep 
enough to put a fist into, according to former Nuclear Regulatory 
Commission member Victor Gilinsky. Corrosion on that part reduced the 
head by 70 pounds of steel. Workers found the problem inadvertantly, 
leaving the reactor perilously close to unleashing a jet of 
radioactive steam from the pressurized vessel.

Then there's the continuing safety and health risks of old nukes -- 
the kind, like Nine Mile Point in New York, or Hatch, in Georgia, 
that might be in your own backyard. You don't hear much about them, 
but on any given day there are two or three "incidents" at reactors 
across the country serious enough to report to the government, and 
often serious enough to cause the reactor to shut down.

Like humans, the older the plants get, the more things go wrong. A 
steam generator replacement, like grandma's hip replacement, only 
buys so much time. The reactor's steel, like human bones, gets more 
brittle with age. For a price, plant owners can give their nuclear 
facilities the equivalent of bone replacements, organ transplants, 
face lifts and tummy tucks, but what they will still have in the end 
is an old nuclear plant.

In engineering parlance, this is called the "bathtub" curve. When new 
nuclear plants start out expensively fussy, their kinks aren't worked 
out and they are prone to accidents. As they mature, they tend to run 
with fewer problems. In middle age, they are at the bottom of the 
bathtub, running relatively inexpensively along with little input 
other than maintenance and fuel. When they age, though, they begin to 
climb the curve of the bathtub -- with risks and costs increasing.

When the industry and regulators refer to their safety records for 
the last 25 years, they are pointing to the low water line at the 
bottom of the bathtub.

We can only hope the industry is correct when it claims that it can 
keep these aging plants from accidents that cause radioactive 
release. And yet, as they approach the end of their original 40-year 
licensed lives, nuclear power plant owners across the nation have 
applied for 20-year license extensions. The Nuclear Regulatory 
Commission has approved 42 extensions -- nearly half the nation's 
nuclear power plants.

There's health problems. There's safety problems. Then, there's money.

Even though relatively warm, fuzzy and uncomplicated renewable energy 
developers are pounding at the government's door, the feds are so set 
on building new nuclear reactors that they're simply giving away 
money to the industry.

Lawmakers who crafted the 2005 Energy Policy Act (EPAct) are on a 
mission to get new nukes built. They've devised a plan so the 
financial risk -- and perhaps the entire cost -- of new nuclear 
plants may be completely borne by taxpayers.

The incredible deal under EPAct the nuclear industry got for new 
nukes includes giving the Department of Energy broad authority to 
underwrite loans to build nuclear plants with no limit on the number 
of projects or total principal that could be guaranteed, according to 
a Congressional Budget Office. It also allows the government to take 
over a loan and make payments on behalf of borrowers prior to a 
default. "Such payments could result in DOE effectively providing a 
direct loan with as much as a 100 percent subsidy rate -- essentially 
a grant -- that could be used by the borrower to pay off its debts," 
according to the budget office. DOE's money is, however, our money.

These days, most of us have a personal choice in our economic 
behavior. We can spend a few more cents on recycled toilet paper or 
organic food, knowing that, in the long run, we are doing something 
to help prolong our environment.

When it comes to energy, few of us have any personal choice unless we 
can afford to install solar power for our homes and businesses. None 
of us can sort out which electrons come from nuclear power when we 
plug our computers or toaster. If we want to get rid of this 
dangerous technology; if we don't want to be responsible for more 
deaths, not to mention the danger to life and habitat in the event of 
an accident; if we don't want to bankrupt our own pockets as well as 
our state's funds by pursuing the massive expense of continuing 
nuclear power, then we have to influence policymakers.

Getting rid of nuclear power cannot be accomplished on a personal, 
everyday consumption level. Yet on a personal level, we can make it 
clear to politicians that this is an issue that can't be ignored. 
Nuclear waste remains lethal for about a quarter of a million years. 
It is not going to go away for a very, very long time. It could 
bankrupt us all. Policymakers must prevent license extensions on a 
legal level. States must fight to regain their rights over 
environmental and economic decisions when it comes to nuclear power.

It won't be easy, but hell, it's worth your DNA, your safety, your life.

J.A. Savage is editor of California Energy Circuit.