The Myth of "Clean & Green" Nuclear Energy

Just how "clean" is nuclear energy?

I'll cite this example from the February 2005 issue of Wired titled: "Nuclear Now! How clean, green atomic energy can stop global warming."

After some 20+ paragraphs extolling the virtues of atomic energy, we finally are given a small hint:

What's still missing is a place to put radioactive waste.

Now, check out this piece from the NY Times today regarding the Feed Materials Production Center, a uranium-enrichment facility in Fernald, Ohio.

From the time it opened in 1951 until it closed in 1989, the Feed Materials Production Center in Fernald enriched 500 million pounds of uranium, 67 percent of all the uranium used in the nation’s cold war nuclear weapons program.

The center also created 1.5 billion pounds of radioactive waste. It operated in obscurity until 1985, when neighbors discovered that the plant’s waste had polluted their air, soil and drinking water.

In just under 40 years, they enriched a half-billion pounds of uranium and generated three times that amount of radioactive waste. That sounds clean and efficient to me.

The site originally included a leaky silo filled with highly radioactive uranium sludge. At the time it was the largest concentration of poisonous radon gas in the world.

Officials at the Fernald center dumped radioactive waste into pits just 20 yards from a creek that sits directly atop the Great Miami Aquifer, one of the biggest and cleanest aquifers east of the Mississippi.

Rainwater carried uranium into the creek, where it sank and contaminated 225 acres, or about 0.062 percent of the aquifer, according to figures on the Web site of the Fernald Citizens Advisory Board, which represented the center’s neighbors through the cleanup process.

When the Department of Energy ran out of room to bury waste at the 1,050-acre Fernald site, officials ordered it packed into 100,000 metal drums, which were left outside, exposed to the elements. Accidental releases covered 11 square miles of surrounding farmland in radioactive dust.

This is sounding better all the time, isn't it?

The Department of Energy spent $216 million on buildings just to clean the site. When the buildings were no longer needed, each one had to be demolished, decontaminated and placed in the landfill. The department also built a pumping system to suck contaminated water out of the aquifer and purify it. That process will continue until the entire aquifer is clean, in about 2023.

All this and 1.5 BILLION pounds of radioactive waste came from ONE facility. About 22% of the waste was moved to storage sites in Texas, Nevada and Arizona. The remaining waste will stay in a landfill in Fernald. And keep in mind, the waste is moved by rail through America's communities which is not without dangers.

Pre-waste nuclear power is absolutely attractive for many reasons as this article at Physorg.com states.

Before rushing to build new reactors it would behoove us to address the very un-green waste aspects.

Take a look at what the Center for Media and Democracy has to say on the matter:

One of the most audacious disinformation campaigns coming from the nuclear industry is its slow but steady attempt to corner the energy market as a "clean, green energy source." As global warming became a household term, and attention focused on carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired plants as a major contributing factor to climate change, the nuclear industry recreated itself as the cure to global warming.

There are some hopeful alternatives being tested which involve transmutation, as explained in this article from May 2006 in The Economist. However, there is still not universal agreement among scientists concerning effectiveness or safety:

The Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER), based in Washington, DC, believes that if uranium is separated from spent fuel and then stored as low-level waste, it could pose a greater risk to the public than if it were placed in a repository deep underground. It also points out that some of the long-lived components of spent fuel cannot practicably be transmuted. For example, it would take more than a century to destroy half of the radioactive selenium present in spent fuel, because that element is very inefficient at capturing neutrons. The IEER describes evaluations in favour of transmutation as “seriously deficient” and made “mainly by those who would like to see a continuation of nuclear power”.

This issue is one in which we all need to pay closer attention and carefully evaluate.


crossposted at B3