Expert Insights: The Crazy, Mixed-Up World of "Nuclear Waste" Submitted by Mary Claire Birdsong on Mon, 07/23/2012 - 1:18pm Expert Insights: The Crazy, Mixed-Up World of "Nuclear Waste" An exclusive written interview with nuclear energy expert Dr. Ted Rockwell (TR) by high school student, Mary Claire Birdsong (MCB).
Dr. Theodore Rockwell
Format: Mary Claire Birdsong, age 17, corresponded with senior scientist Dr. Ted Rockwell via email from March 2012 through April 2012. Topic: The conversation covered the subject of spent nuclear “waste,” safety, storage, and containment.
MCB: What is your take on current US policy towards the storage of spent nuclear fuel? Is it an effective or necessary policy? TR: I think it’s absurd, in the most literal meaning of the word. Ridiculous. Bizarre. Silly. One can argue that that the most important question is: Did our RadProt policy protect us; and it did. But a more important question is: Protect us from what? What basis is there for assuming that some material in sealed containers could hurt anyone? Critics argue that nuclear waste stays toxic for thousands of years; that humanity has never faced such a long-term hazard . Anthropologists have talked about setting up a “nuclear priesthood” to pass on word of where radioactivity is buried, so as civilizations rise and die out, people a million years from now will be warned to stay away from this dreadful poison. That picture has no relevance to the real world. The material nuclear critics call “waste” is actually used fuel waiting to be recycled. Like all radioactive materials, used fuel continually decreases in toxicity, whereas non-radioactive pollutants like mercury, lead, arsenic, selenium, cadmium, chromium, etc. maintain their toxicity undiminished forever. After a few hundred years, used fuel is no more toxic than the original ore, yet we plan to bury it 1,000 feet underground. The top 1,000 feet of U.S. soil contains more lethal doses of natural poisons than all the used nuclear fuel together. We make 10,000 times more lethal doses of chlorine each year than “nuclear waste,” and put it in our drinking water to kill germs. Even anti-nuclear activist, Sheldon Novick, author of The Careless Atom, wrote: “Once radioactive materials have decayed past the point at which their internal generation of heat is dangerous… well within a single human lifetime – it is difficult to see in what way they are more or less hazardous than other poisons produced by industry.” (The Electric War: The Fight over Nuclear Power, Sierra Club Books, 1977) And that’s if we turned it loose, which we don’t. During the first decades of nuclear power, there was no demand from the public to move the used fuel, until full-page ads by the industry in major papers telling people that used nuclear fuel containers were terrorist targets. (They were pressuring the Government to build Yucca Mountain. Many people in the industry believed that once Yucca Mountain was built, the public would be convinced the problem was solved. I never bought that. I believe that we have so terrified people with the “one gamma ray can kill you” mantra, that nothing nuclear will calm them.) This created the “Mobile Chernobyl” problem. The nuclear community created this problem themselves. In an escalating effort to answer unreasonable demands for “more safety,” they offered Yucca Mountain, convinced that they could swallow the cost, and that this extreme solution would surely satisfy the most unreasonable skeptic. But the public reaction was just the opposite. People quite understandably concluded that the problem must be extraordinarily dangerous to require such extraordinary protective measures. So that’s the “high-level waste problem.” In addition, there is “low-level waste,” consisting of a larger volume of contaminated rags, tools, work clothes, etc. The radiation level from this
material is too low to be hazardous, but any amount of radioactivity produced on the job is controlled and disposed of in special facilities, designed to handle low-radiation level material. Radioactive fission products are not a public hazard. Our power plants and their fuel have never released a dangerous amount of radioactivity into the environment. High-level radioactivity is bound within the refractory ceramic fuel pellets where it was formed. These pellets are clad in stainless zirconium alloy tubes, and kept in water pools for several years, until less than 1% of the initial radioactivity remains. Then the fuel elements are removed from the water and are sealed into high integrity used-fuel containers, which are nearly indestructible. These containers are stood on a concrete or asphalt platform until the contents are recycled to recover most of the fissionable material still in them. Right now, it’s cheaper to keep using new uranium, but eventually the used nuclear fuel will all be recycled. The containers have been sitting there up to half a century, hurting no one, having no impact on the environment. They could stay there another century. Some plant owners invite the public—school children, church groups, scout troops—to visit and see these used fuel containers up close, touch them, measure their radiation level, to understand firsthand that they are neither mysterious nor dangerous.
MCB: Dr. Rockwell, do you believe that sealing the nuclear material waiting to be recycled - in steel containers - is an effective method for containing potentially toxic material? TR: In every real sense, this problem was solved before it began. Nuclear plants produce less than one-millionth the volume of radioactive material from an equivalent coal-fired plant, so it can be put into sealed, steel containers and controlled, rather than dumped into the environment. Fifty thousand tons of used fuel was produced by all U.S. nuclear plants over the past 40 years. This is less than 2 pounds per person served. You could put each American’s lifetime share of used fuel into a 12-ounce soda pop can. So, it’s no problem to keep it in these containers and never dump it into the biosphere. Each person’s corresponding waste from a coal-fired plant is 140,000 pounds of solids, including toxic metals such as arsenic, lead, molybdenum, cadmium and chromium. The mercury may have already gone out the stack. The ash is also richer in uranium and thorium than some uranium ores now being profitably processed by the uranium industry. The stack also releases the acids that cause acid rain, and carbon dioxide gas equal to the output of a million and a half automobiles, for each person’s lifetime production of electricity. As previously noted, modern coal plants are now putting in facilities to capture and remove these pollutants. U.S. Naval reactors can now operate for the life of the ship—a million miles traveled, without refueling. All of the radioactivity from that operation stays locked up within the fuel elements, without causing any undue swelling or distortion. That illustrates how small a quantity we’re dealing with. Compare that to wastes produced by other industries. Even the volume of waste from construction and operation of solar, wind and other renewables is greater on a per-kilowatt-hour basis than used nuclear fuel, and some of the solar power poisons are highly toxic forever.
The “problem” of nuclear waste provides income, reputation and jobs for many people. But so does building new nuclear power plants and operating them. We need to stop working on problems that aren’t real, start building more of the plants we know how to build, and keep looking for ways to make better and better plants. It is difficult to solve vaguely defined problems. For example, the oft-stated objective, “we have to find a safe solution to the nuclear waste problem” has to be clarified. Since “nuclear waste” has never created any measurable problem in the real world, we should define what problem we are trying to solve, and how we would measure the effectiveness of any proposed solution. As President Obama said, the current measures for handling used fuel and “nuclear waste” can be continued for decades without undue risk, so there is no short-term “waste crisis.”
MCB: Dr. Rockwell, critics of nuclear energy ask, "What about those huge waste tanks that have been leaking radioactivity into the ground for years?" Is the real “nuclear waste problem” only one of public perception, or is there anything concrete that should be improved upon in the waste storage system? TR: Those tanks, at the Hanford site in the state of Washington, were built during World War II, to handle liquids used in the Army’s Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. They have nothing to do with the commercial nuclear power plants. If no nuclear power plants had ever been built, the situation at Hanford would still exist. We’ve learned a lot since then, and there are no such tanks associated with the commercial nuclear plants. Incidentally, Hanford is now being cleaned up, and there is no evidence of danger to people or to any of the surrounding environment.
MCB: Do you believe radioactive byproduct leaks in used nuclear fuel waiting to be recycled is the most significant danger to commercial nuclear storage? Is this a valid danger, or hype? The phrase “exposed to radioactivity” may make exciting headlines, but it is not evidence of bodily harm. We are all exposed to radioactivity, every day and night, and it does us no harm. In fact, it is essential to Life. What we have is a clumsy and expensive solution to a non-problem. The sensible way to solve any problem is to first, define the problem: how bad is it? How bad could it get to be, under worst reasonable premises? And keep in mind that, in the real world, numbers count. Another important question is: how does your solution compare with the other options available?
MCB: Dr. Rockwell, what is the risk to human life - either death or disease - by exposure to commercial grade spent nuclear fuel waiting to be recycled, absent a major accident? So we ask: How many people are killed or injured each year by “nuclear waste”? How much environmental damage does it cause? The answer, of course, is “none.” But what about Fukushima? The answer there is the same. The IAEA International Fact Finding Mission reported: To date no health effects have been reported in any person as a result of radiation exposure from the nuclear accident" This includes the operators who, from the beginning, worked in the dark, trying to get the situation under control. These are the operators much of the media called “the suicide squad.” None of them has received a lasting radiation injury. Not one! So the designation of the situation as a “nuclear disaster” is really misleading. There are lessons we can all learn from Fukushima. One of the most important lessons is that working under a radiation protection policy whose sole aim is to reduce harmless radiation even further imposes terrible burdens on the people with no compensating benefit. We should get into that whole subject in another interview session. Dr. Jerry Cuttler, former President of the Canadian Nuclear Society, addressed the problem this way. He referred to the review of radiation protection policy, and wrote: This article is directly relevant to the Fukushima evacuation, which was totally unnecessary. The 1990 article from Radiation Research, by Daniel Billen, discusses the spontaneous DNA damage rate and points out that the DNA damage rate from 1 cGy/year of ionizing radiation (10 mSv/year equivalent of gamma radiation) is many orders of magnitude smaller than this endogenous rate of DNA damage.
MCB: World-wide, scientific objectivity seems to get thrown out of the window when a major disaster occurs. Do you consider the mandatory evacuations after nuclear energy “disasters,” such as Fukushima or Chernobyl, to be warranted -- based on good science? Is the potential damage to human life, homes, soil, etc. significant enough to validate such action in a Fukushima / Chernobyl level accident? I think it is very unethical for the radiation protection organizations to frighten and evacuate more than 90,000 people from their homes, in order to "protect" them from such a low hypothetical risk of excess cancer mortality. This caused enormous human suffering (and financial loss), without even considering that such low level radiation is actually stimulatory (reduces cancer mortality). The proper course of action is to return to the radiation protection standard established by the ICRP in 1934. Lauriston Taylor, founder and first president of the NCRP stated in 1980: “No
one has been identifiably injured by radiation while working within the first numerical standards set by the ICRP in 1934 (safe dose limit: 0.2 rad per day).” The concern about preserving the human gene pool is a bogus concern of the early geneticists and their "science" of eugenics.
MCB: If a Yucca-Mountain style repository for waste isn't necessary, what is the practical alternative? Just how close to society can nuclear waste be safely stored? Well, in a nuclear submarine, thirty years worth of nuclear waste, after powering the ship a million miles, is stored right in the interstices of the fuel material itself. The sailors work and sleep within 100 meters of the reactor, for months at a time. And they generally end up with less radiation dose than their families at home, because they are shielded from cosmic rays and other earthly radiation sources by the ship’s hull and the ocean. One of the major advantages of nuclear fission over chemical combustion processes is that the fission process releases 100 million times as much energy as a chemical reaction: 200Mev vs a few ev. So this means that any chemical fuel, like coal or gas, will consume millions of times more fuel, and produce millions of time more waste, than a nuclear reactor. So that’s the first big advantage of nuclear over chemical fuels: much less waste. (The waste from coal has all sorts of problems associated with it. The waste from gas is CO2, which we’re trying to get away from.) The second advantage of nuclear is that its waste is continually getting less and less toxic, while mercury, arsenic, selenium and other non-radioactive waste products generally maintain full strength toxicity forever. That’s often cited as an unprecedented problem, but that characterization defies logic and common sense. So what we have is a remarkably small quantity of moderately toxic material that we can put into sealed containers. And then we encounter the third characteristic of “nuclear waste.” It is actually a fuel for a more advanced type of reactor. So despite the talk of having to isolate it for a million years, we only have to keep it until the advanced reactors, that have been proved in principle, have become economical enough to start building them in quantity. If that day proves to be not far off, then we ought to proceed with it. If it’s a long time off, then we ought to get started working on the problem. What danger does this used fuel pose? First, you have to surround it with radiation shielding: usually lead, iron, or concrete. Then you have to keep people from eating it. So long as you store it in its original fuel rods - highly refractory ceramic – that’s clearly no problem. If you have chemically separated some of the fission products, then you have to immobilize the radioactive mix, in a glassy matrix, if it’s highly radioactive; in concrete or other matrix, if it’s less so. Sources: http://www.ourenergypolicy.org/commentary-on-the-appropriate-radiation-l...