My distractions are a theme it seems in my first Substacks. Similarly to the last piece, I was embarking on another topic when I saw the headline from the Guardian, “Revealed: Sellafield nuclear site has leak that could pose risk to public.”
According to The Guardian, “Sellafield, a sprawling 6 sq km (2 sq mile) site on the Cumbrian coast employing 11,000 people, stores and treats nuclear waste from weapons programmes and nuclear power generation, and is the largest such facility in Europe.” The site has a troubled history including a devastating fire in 1957.
The building that is leaking, called “Magnox swarf storage Silo (MSSS)”—straight out of a sci-fi or super hero movie—has been leaking for three years already. Norway is concerned about prevailing winds bringing radioactive plumes over its territory and Ireland has been concerned about Sellafield for almost twenty years.
I encourage you to read the full Guardian article, especially as the forces that believe nuclear power is the answer to our energy troubles are trying to convince us that it will solve our carbon/greenhouse gas problems. Someone just told me that history is trying to be re-written (I can only guess by the nuclear industry) purporting that the anti-nuke movement in which I worked personally, was seeded by Big Oil—that those of us who thought and think nuclear is a bad idea were fed inflammatory information by Big Oil.
“Oh Brother,” is all I can say.
I will digress here to explain my expertise in this, lest you think I am frivolously being duped by Big Oil. Over forty years ago I worked for the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG). For those of you who don't know, PIRGs were started by Ralph Nader and his Nader's Raiders. Located mostly on state university campuses, PIRGs were designed to cultivate responsible government and consumer advocacy through educating and activating students and consumers about the way local, state and federal legislatures work, how regulatory agencies and special interests work, where information comes from: what is real information, versus manipulated or skewed information, and fighting for consumer protection.
My work at NYPIRG was part of a project to shut down the Indian Point nuclear power plant, built only 30 miles north of New York City, and to stop the transportation of radioactive waste through Manhattan. I testified before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, I lobbied Congress, I worked with the state legislature and regulatory bodies. I dealt with the press. I was quoted in New York Times articles about evacuation and safety issues. Our excellent project team meticulously culled and researched copious amounts of documents, worked with experts, lawyers, scientists and activists. None of us nor any of the people we worked with was directly or indirectly fed information from Big Oil. Let’s put that modern-day myth to rest. And let’s call it what it is—a lie.
According to the World Nuclear Industry, nuclear’s share of global electricity is at the lowest in 40 years, around 9.2%. Nuclear power plants are closing—Germany shut its last three nuclear plants in April of this year and in the United States there are 25 reactors in the process of “decommissioning,”—an Orwellian term meaning trying to figure out how to clean up and store the copious amounts of radioactive waste generated by the plants, and where to put it.
In spite of the soaring costs and insurmountable issues of radioactive waste, nuclear proponents keep trying to reignite the industry and the now worn out and debunked myths/lies about the outsized benefits of nuclear energy. Every few years they circle around, bombarding whatever outlets they can with propaganda. Propaganda that is worn out and needs to be put to rest.
The staggering data about the life span of nuclear waste comes from the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), hardly bastions of exaggerated dangers. If anything, in my 45 year experience working on environmental issues, I would say they usually grossly understate hazards, rather than acknowledge or inflate them. The NRC flatly states, “Some isotopes decay in hours or even minutes, but others decay very slowly. Strontium-90 and cesium-137 have half-lives of about 30 years (half the radioactivity will decay in 30 years). Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years.”
We are creating waste that remains hazardous—dangerously so—for more 24,000 years.
So we can turn on a lightbulb.
Or, as recently reported in the Wall Street Journal, for the “vast energy requirements of artificial intelligence (AI).” Another Journal article explores Microsoft’s focus on nuclear power to fuel its AI, “…new demand for power for data centers could be five or six times what will be needed for charging electric vehicles.” “AI is Ravenous for Energy” is yet another headline noting that current estimates of AI power needs “would require the entire output of about 15 average-size nuclear power plants.”
So it’s not about the lightbulbs, is it? Not really. It’s about AI and data centers. It’s about Microsoft, Google, Tesla and the rest.
Not one of these articles talking about the needs for nuclear power, or China’s fast-tracking of new nuclear plants, addresses the issue of waste. It is as if there is no waste, much less waste that has to be dealt with for at least 24,000 years. It is hard to put that amount of time into perspective. The Great Pyramid at Giza is about 4,600 years old; the petroglyphs in the Lascaux Caves, France date from 17,000 years ago; a long list of ancient buildings in some some state of ruin around the world are all around 5,000-6000 years old.
So what do we do with the radioactive waste—from the uranium mining, from the nuclear power plants, from the nuclear weapons? Where does it go? And if we keep making it (as in using more nuclear power to turn on our lightbulbs and fuel AI and whatever else we “need”) where does that waste go?
We. Don’t. Know.
What about Rocky Flats in Denver Colorado? The description of what the Department of Energy spent and had to do to “clean-up” that nuclear processing facility and site is extreme and disproportionate to the outcomes. While Rocky Flats was technically producing triggers and other components for nuclear weapons, not power, it was still generating vast quantities of radioactive waste. The same with the Hanford site in Washington State—where an estimated clean up cost of $528 billion (yes, that’s with a “b”) and 580 square miles so contaminated it is said it will never be returned to public use.
Let that sink in.
580 square miles of land now too hot to return to the public and local tribes who gave up that land. That “heat” will last more than 24,000 years. They say “Half-life” of 24,000 years but that’s to make it sound better, as absurd as that sounds. Half of its radioactivity will diminish/“decay” in 24,000 years. Think of it as off-gassing. You have a toxic smell coming off of a material or a paint or solvent. Depending on the material and the air circulation, the smell might dissipate in a few days. But with plutonium, you have to wait 24,000 years to have half of it “off-gas”.
In 2007, during one of the surges of pro-nuclear propaganda, I wrote an op-ed that still stands even 16 years later. What I omitted from it (likely due to space which used to be an issue in the old days when we printed things on paper and not online)) is the devastation caused by uranium mining to fuel nuclear power reactors. The people that pay the horrific health and environmental costs of that extraction are mostly the indigenous people in the Western United States whose water, soils and air are grossly contaminated. Whatever the pro-nuke lobby wants to argue about “carbon footprint,” there are many other issues to consider than simply CO2 when weighing nuclear energy. That is one of many weak links in the climate discussion. Carbon is not the only metric that matters.
When I wrote the following in 2007 it was four years before the Fukushima nuclear accident. Now, going on thirteen years after the accident, the clean-up is ongoing.
In a commentary published in the Dec. 1 Valley News, Olivia Albrecht, a fellow at the Center for Security Policy, argues that it’s time to take a new look at nuclear energy. Finding a reliable energy supply is essential to our economic prosperity, she writes, and lessening dependence on foreign oil is critical to our national security.
Few would disagree. But something else published in that same day’s Valley News should give us pause before we heed her advice and turn to nuclear power. The front of the World & Nation section included a photograph of a new memorial at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in what is now the Ukraine. It honors the workers who tried to protect their community from what developed into the worst nuclear accident in history.
The United States must indeed encourage technological advancements in the production of energy, not just for reasons mentioned by Albrecht, but also to address glaring global warming issues. But that photograph should remind us why nuclear energy should not be part of whatever energy portfolio we develop.
Nuclear energy, once marketed as “too cheap to meter”, as well as a safe and limitless energy supply for the future, has not lived up to its claims. The reality is that the problems that have plagued nuclear energy have never been solved and still exist today. They include:
• Radioactive waste, which is produced during nuclear energy production from uranium mining to end-stage decommissioning, can remain dangerous for up to 24,000 years. There is no known secure, permanent containment technology or location in the United States or elsewhere for this waste.
• The cost for developing a nuclear power plants runs in the billions of dollars, and plants have a life span in the 20- to 40-year range (some have closed after only 10 years of operation). Decommissioning expenses also run in the billions. This technology long ago failed to live up to its too-cheap-to-meter billing.
• Unlike other energy sources, nuclear power requires emergency planning and evacuation plans for potential accidents.
• Nuclear power plants present inviting targets to terrorists. If they ever succeed, the results could be catastrophic. The health effects of accidents and disasters can be far reaching and are still not fully understood, but they can include immediate deaths, cancers and other long-term illnesses.
The Chernobyl disaster provides stark evidence of the real price of relying on nuclear energy. It occurred 20 years ago, but the world is still dealing with its ramifications. It has affected the health of millions of residents of the Ukraine and Belarus. Statistics compiled by nuclear physicist, professor Vasily Nesterenko, director of the Institute for Radiation Safety in Belarus show that 90 percent of children in Belarus were healthy before the disaster, but since the disaster only 20 percent are. Thyroid cancers in the area have increased 30 times since the accident, and through the years at least 20,000 children have been treated for cancer and other radiation-related illnesses.
An accident involving radioactivity does not respect geographical or political borders. Northern Europe and the United Kingdom have also suffered from Chernobyl’s radioactive effects. Health officials in the United Kingdom still monitor farms in Wales, Scotland and England that were contaminated from Chernobyl’s radioactive fallout. Studies show that 40 percent of the surface area of Europe was contaminated by the disaster, leaving many European countries still requiring some food monitoring and restrictions. The World Health Organization estimates that the total radioactivity from Chernobyl was 200 times that of the combined releases from the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Proponents of nuclear power often note that Chernobyl was a one-of-a-kind accident that occurred in a poorly managed plant that incorporated a flawed design no longer in use. But in the 50 years that nuclear power has been around, there have been at least 25 nuclear power accidents all over the world in plants of various types of designs.
These are not the statistics of a safe and affordable industry. They are from a flawed technology that has caused much contamination and suffering. Heavily subsidized by governments, nuclear power has been tried, had its chance and failed.
So why would we expend vast sums of time, money and human energy to re-explore this? Yes, let’s make energy policy a priority, but let us explore truly renewable, sustainable, and safe technologies and make them more viable.
For those that think we need nuclear power, do the math—literal and figurative. It’s bad business on every level. But at the most fundamental, you can not solve a problem by destroying the earth. Or claiming something that is highly dangerous is safe just because you want it to be so.
If limitless growth is your path forward, then do the work—figure out the sustainable, healthy, safe way to accomplish that. You don't get to trash the planet, leaving vast areas inhabitable for a fantastical period of time. You need to figure out a way that is mindful of every part of this living planet. I think that humans are smart enough to do that. That means considering not just seven generations, but the next 50 generations.
The other day, I was appalled to see The Economist reporting that 20% of people 18-29 years old think “the Holocaust is a myth.” I am sure these people have never heard of Elie Wiesel, but I can assure you he is rolling in his grave. His signature message was, “Never forget.” And while he certainly meant the Holocaust, he really meant universally, never forget what human beings can do to themselves, each other, and the planet. Never forget that. And always strive to not let it happen again. Make the world a better place.
Which brings us back to nuclear energy. Nuclear energy does not make the world a better place. It does not make it more beautiful. It does not make it safer. It does not make it cleaner. It does nothing, but generate electricity for a finite period of time (almost a blink), while generating vast amounts of dangerous waste, that stays dangerous for a timeframe that is incomprehensible to us.
So Sellafield is leaking. The plant can’t even contain the waste from the past fifty years —how on earth is it supposed to contain the waste for more than 24,000 years?
That is the information we should be looking at. Not whether, generating electricity to turn on a light bulb in a nuclear power plant with nuclear fission causes less CO2 than burning coal.
That’s apples to fried chicken.
Even if it were true, it doesn't matter because on every other metric, nuclear power fails horribly.
Nuclear power was born from war.
It destroys life.
We haven’t even begun to deal with the mess it has already made.
It should not be used, it should not be considered.
It is not the Salvation to our problems.
Full stop.