by Chip Ward
Le Monde diplomatique (March 28 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, its 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
fifty 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 naive 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 thirty 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 US, 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 fourteen 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 fifteen 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 Number 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 US 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.
This article was first published in TomDispatch (March 24 2011).
_____
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 {1} and Hope’s
Horizon: Three Visions for Healing the American Land {2}. To listen to
Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Ward discusses
the endless legacy of nuclear power, click {3}, or download it to your
iPod {4}.
Links:
{1} http://www.amazon.com/dp/1859843212/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
{2} http://www.amazon.com/dp/1559639776/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
{3} http://tomdispatch.blogspot.com/2011/03/fed-up-and-atom.html
{4}
http://mondediplo.com/http%3A%2F%2Fitunes.apple.com%2Fus%2Fpodcast%2Ftomcast-from-tomdispatch-com%2Fid357095817
http://mondediplo.com/openpage/how-the-peaceful-atom-became-a-serial-killer