By Ed Hiserodt
Published: 2007-04-30 05:00

First shift at Milwaukee’s Falk Corp. began on the morning of December 6, 2006 just like it had for decades at the giant industrial complex. The company’s skilled workers filed in, replacing the third-shift workers who were headed home for some well-earned rest after spending the night at the giant factory building gears for other industrial consumers. Without a hitch the first-shift crew picked up where third shift left off and were busily working when some began to notice signs that something was wrong. Just before 8:00 a.m. the smell of natural gas began to fill the air, and employees began to evacuate. Minutes later, at 8:07, the plant was torn apart by a colossal fireball in an explosion that rocked the city, blowing out windows blocks away. “It was like a bomb went off or a plane crashed,” said 42-year veteran Falk machinist David Sternig, describing the blast that left three dead and 46 injured.

The terrible tragedy in Milwaukee underscored the incredible power stored in the fuels used to generate power to supply the energy needs of the modern, industrialized world. In a power plant, the energy catastrophically released all at once in an explosion of the type that devastated Falk Corp. is released gradually while under control. Tamed, it is used to heat water into steam, which in turn spins giant turbines that power electric generators. The benign and useful power that flows out of every electrical outlet in your house is the direct result of mankind’s ability to harness the destructive energies contained in fuels like natural gas, petroleum, or coal. And it is no different with nuclear energy. Every fuel that stores the energy we tap in order to power the modern world has the potential to escape our control and violently destroy lives and property.

Nuclear, coal, gas: they all have the power to destroy. But of these three, one has gotten a bad rap. While it is business as usual for coal and gas, the widespread perception persists that nuclear energy is fraught with unique and terrifying danger. Say “nuclear” out loud, and people tend to think of mushroom clouds, radiation, and nuclear winter. Despite these fears, nuclear energy is clean, reliable, and safe — more so, in fact, than the alternatives, as an examination of the myths about nuclear energy reveals.

MYTH: Nuclear plants emit dangerous radiation.

TRUTH: Have you ever known anyone killed in a car accident? I have — two uncles, a roommate, and a girlfriend from college. How about anyone killed from radiation, or maybe even injured slightly? If you’re like me and nearly all other Americans, you can’t name a single person you know who has been injured by radiation.

The fact is, nuclear power plants emit less radiation during normal operation than do coal-fired power plants. In an article published in 1993 in Oak Ridge National Laboratory Review, ORNL physicist Alex Gabbard pointed out “that coal-fired power plants throughout the world are the major sources of radioactive materials released to the environment.” According to Gabbard, radiation from coal combustion “is 100 times that from nuclear plants.” Yet even at that level, radiation from coal is completely negligible. Nuclear reactors emit much less radiation than coal-fired power plants.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission limits radiation at the plant boundary to 5 millirems per year. (It seldom gets anywhere near that.) If you were to stand unclothed at the boundary for 120 years, you would receive as much radiation as a person living on the Colorado plateau does in one year from natural background radiation.

Moreover, the U.S. capitol building has long been known to emit too much radiation to be licensed as a nuclear power plant.

Consider too that unlike coal- or oil-fired plants, nuclear power plants do not have smokestacks spewing pollutants into the atmosphere. In the case of nuclear plants, the wastes are contained within the plant itself. Often mistaken for smokestacks, some nuclear power plants, like some coal- or oil-fired plants, have cooling towers that emit water vapor.

Finally, it is important to keep in mind that radiation is all around us every day. According to the Department of Energy, the average American receives 300 millirems of radiation each year from natural sources, but that amount is higher in some places. For instance, in Denver, Colorado, because of the proximity of the Rocky Mountains and because there is less atmosphere overhead to protect from cosmic rays, residents receive almost double the national average background radiation. I wonder, does the EPA know about this? Perhaps Coloradans should be evacuated!

MYTH: Radiation, even in small doses, is deadly.

TRUTH: For more than 50 years, government regulators have based radiation precautions on radiation’s likelihood to cause cancer. In determining cancer rates and deaths associated with radiation, the government uses something called Linear No-Threshold Theory (LNT). And LNT theory has been overstating the risk associated with radiation exposure.

To illustrate how LNT theory works, think about it this way: if 100 people jump off a 100-foot-tall building, we might expect them all to die. If they jump off a 50-foot-tall building, perhaps we can expect 50 to die or be seriously injured. To keep following the pattern, if the same 100 people jump from a height of one foot, under LNT theory, we would expect one person to die. It’s a linear formula. But do one out of 100 people die from a one-foot jump? Of course not — there is a threshold below which death will no longer occur. But the LNT hypothesis pretends that thresholds like this don’t exist.

The same holds true when LNT theory is applied to radiation. Consider an exposure of 100 rems of radiation over a short period of time — as in the case of Japanese bomb survivors. These unfortunates were found to have a relative risk of cancer death of about 3 percent above their unexposed peers. Following LNT theory, then someone who had been exposed to 1 rem (1,000 millirems) would have an increased risk of 0.03 percent. Continuing the linear relationship, an exposure of 100 millirems would result in a 0.003 percent increase, and an exposure of 10 millirems a 0.0003 rise over an unexposed person. To put that in perspective, 10 millirems is the radiation dose that airline passengers get from cosmic radiation during a round-trip, coast-to-coast jet flight. According to the LNT hypothesis, if 100 million passengers fly from New York to Los Angeles, 300 of them would die from cancer (0.0003 percent x 100,000,000 = 300 cancer deaths). But as has been proven, LNT theory does not apply to radiation.

Moreover, not only do the thresholds ignored by LNT theory exist, but below those thresholds, low-level exposure to otherwise dangerous substances have proven to be beneficial. We don’t die when we get tiny amounts of arsenic, selenium, and other poisonous elements — we must have them to live. Likewise, we must drink water to maintain good health — but too much water can result in potentially deadly water intoxication. Similarly, in proper amounts, vitamins are vital to good health. But even vitamins have a threshold over which they are harmful. In the case of radiation, even though a massive dose can kill you, it can benefit you in small amounts. This beneficial effect is called hormesis. Interestingly, those Japanese at Nagasaki and Hiroshima who received fewer than 70 rems (about 200 times the average U.S. background exposure) had less cancer and are outliving those who were not exposed.

MYTH: We can’t handle all that deadly nuclear waste.

TRUTH: The supposed difficulty presented by nuclear waste has long been a point of emphasis for environmentalists and other critics of nuclear power. As far back as 1975, Ralph Nader was warning it would take an army to guard the nation’s nuclear industry and its waste. “Some people believe there may be a million people with direct and backup assignments to guard the nuclear industry by the year 2000,” Nader warned then. Of course, this army of guards never materialized.

In fact, such wastes as are produced are small in scale. Because very little fuel is required in the generation of nuclear energy, there is correspondingly little waste. What wastes are produced, moreover, aren’t necessarily wastes at all. In the United States we have been led to believe that spent fuel rods are nuclear wastes. Not so. They contain valuable uranium, plutonium, and other important medical and industrial isotopes that we currently spend considerable sums to have transmuted from other elements. With appropriate reprocessing facilities, these can be successfully recovered and reused from the supposed nuclear waste.

Both France and the United Kingdom operate reprocessing facilities. These take in spent fuel rods and strip away built-up wastes while recovering the vast majority of the still-useful fuel. In the UK, for instance, according to BBC News, the Sellafield reprocessing center “receives waste nuclear fuel from 34 plants around the world. The metallic outer casing is first stripped away and the spent fuel is then dissolved in hot nitric acid. This produces three things — uranium (96%) and plutonium (1%) and highly radioactive waste (3%).” Both the recovered uranium and plutonium are turned into fuel pellets that can be used to create more energy in nuclear plants. And it is a lot of energy. According to the BBC, “each six-gramme [plutonium fuel] pellet holds the equivalent energy of one tonne of coal.” This from a process that reduces nuclear waste by a whopping 97 percent!

The United States was to have a commercial reprocessing facility at Barnwell, South Carolina, but the plant was nixed by the Carter administration. Had it been built, the amount of spent nuclear fuel stored by U.S. nuclear power plants could have been reduced by that same 97 percent. As far as the danger posed by the remaining three percent is concerned, its disposal is not nearly the problem it has been portrayed to be (see next myth).

MYTH: Nuclear waste will always be dangerously radioactive.

TRUTH: Shortly after it is produced, high-level nuclear waste is very toxic, but radioactive waste becomes less toxic over time through the natural process of radioactive decay. By convention, scientists measure the rate of this decay in terms of “half-life” — that is, the amount of time it takes for a radioactive isotope to lose half its radioactivity. Radioactively “hot” isotopes lose radiation quickly and so have short half-lives. With half-lives measured in days or less, they soon emit too little radiation to pose a health threat. Substances that lose radiation very, very slowly and have correspondingly long half-lives present little danger to people from the get-go.

The disposal of wastes from a nuclear power plant has often been criticized as a gargantuan problem because of the belief that the waste may be dangerously radioactive for many thousands of years into the future, but as you can see, after a relatively short “cooling” time, the waste poses little health threat. For this reason, some nuclear wastes could even be diluted with water and dumped into the oceans (oceans are already naturally radioactive!) without causing a health problem. It sounds outlandish, but it’s something the British have been doing for years at their Sellafield reprocessing plant. Compare this to the 1,000 tons per day of ash, including arsenic and other toxic heavy metals, that are sent to landfills by a 1,000 megawatt coal power plant. Those landfills stay toxic forever.

MYTH: Chernobyl and Three Mile Island proved nuclear energy is unsafe.

TRUTH: The great nightmare associated with nuclear energy is the “meltdown.” Anti-nuclear activists love to point to a scenario in which a reactor would lose its coolant allowing the fuel rods to melt through the reactor vessel, through several feet of high-strength concrete, and through hundreds of feet of earth till reaching an aquifer whereupon a steam explosion would ensue. Consequently, they eagerly seized upon the accident at Three Mile Island as the embodiment of all their fears — or at least of the fears they wanted the public to have.

The problem was that Three Mile Island was a demonstration of the safety of nuclear plants. Beginning at 4:00 a.m. on March 28, 1979, a series of mishaps resulted in the partial meltdown of the reactor core. By 7:45 a.m. that morning, according to the Smithsonian Institute, “a molten mass of metal and fuel — some twenty tons in all — is spilling into the bottom of the reactor vessel.” Yet that reactor containment vessel worked as designed and by 9:00 a.m. the danger was past: “The reactor vessel holds firm, and the molten uranium, immersed in water, now gradually begins to cool,” the Smithsonian Institute says in its timeline of events at the damaged reactor. Perhaps the final word on Three Mile Island comes from Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore. In October 2006, Moore wrote in Popular Mechanics: “At the time, no one noticed Three Mile Island was a success story; the concrete containment structure prevented radiation from escaping into the environment. There was no injury or death among the public or nuclear workers.”

It is common to mention Chernobyl and Three Mile Island at the same time in debate over nuclear safety, but the two events are substantially different. Chernobyl was the feared “worst case scenario” envisioned by critics of nuclear energy. Whereas at Three Mile Island the nuclear chain reaction was stopped in the first 10 seconds of the event, at Chernobyl the chain reaction continued well into the accident. Although there is almost nothing flammable in a U.S. power reactor, Chernobyl’s was constructed from graphite, a form of carbon that is difficult to ignite, but burns with a very hot flame once ignited. Not only that, but Chernobyl did not even have a containment structure for the reactor, unlike American plants that are built with containment buildings designed to withstand the impact of a jumbo jet. Because there was no containment vessel enclosing Chernobyl’s poorly designed RBMK-type reactors, when the plant exploded, chunks of radioactive material were ejected from the annihilated plant and exposed to the environment.

And yet, the aftermath of Chernobyl was not as bad as many expected it to be. According to the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), “The accident caused the deaths within a few days or weeks of 30 power plant employees and firemen (including 28 deaths that were due to radiation exposure).” No one wants to see loss of life, but as large industrial incidents go, this was relatively unexceptional. The 1984 gas leak at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, killed at least 3,000 people and, according to some estimates, may have caused the death of 15,000. At Chernobyl, by contrast, fears of mass casualties from the effects of radiation have not been realized. According to the UN, “There have been eleven deaths between 1987 and 1998 among confirmed acute radiation sickness survivors.... There were three cases of coronary heart disease, two cases of myelodysplastic syndrome, two cases of liver cirrhosis, and one death each of lung gangrene, lung tuberculosis and fat embolism. One patient who had been classified with Grade II acute radiation sickness died in 1998 from acute myeloid leukaemia.”

Though tragic, these deaths do not amount to the devastation of much of Russia and Western Europe that was predicted. Among the broader population, even under the microscope of a media that seeks out disasters, the only detectable heath effect was an increase in childhood thyroid cancer. But some have pointed out that this might be an anomaly caused by extra screening after the accident. If you screen more children every year, you will detect more cases of thyroid cancer, Chernobyl notwithstanding. It’s noteworthy that Russia’s childhood thyroid cancers did not go off the scale. In Finland, 2.4 percent of children had thyroid cancer — 90 times that of all persons in the Bryansk area of Russia who were less than 18 in 1986 — at the time of the accident.

The most detrimental effect of Chernobyl was the forced relocation of residents. Ironically, the fallout from the accident emitted less radioactivity than the local soil.

MYTH: There are so many critics of nuclear power that there must be something wrong with the technology.

TRUTH: There have been a lot of critics of nuclear technology, and many of them, maybe even most of them, have been sincere in their concerns. After all, if you are a parent and someone builds a massive power plant somewhere in the region in which you live and you are told that, in an accident, the plant could wipe out life in the entire area, you might be willing to conclude that building the plant is not worth the risk.

But leading critics, those who often have set the terms of the debate, have, unfortunately, been wrong in their assessments of the risks. Three Mile Island proved the effectiveness of the safety measures designed into every Western power plant — and technological advances make modern designs safer than Three Mile Island. This has been known to leading critics of nuclear energy. But they oppose nuclear power not because it is unsafe, but because it is too useful. Cloaked in the garb of “environmentalism,” they use the anti-nuke movement to promote big government and harass productive capitalistic enterprises. Among these is Paul Ehrlich, who is known for his outrageous (and wrong) doomsday predictions. In the May-June 1975 issue of the Federation of American Scientists’ Public Interest Report, Ehrlich wrote: “Giving society cheap, abundant energy … would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” Amory Lovins, another critic and one-time British representative of Friends of the Earth, agrees. “If you ask me,” Lovins said in an interview with Playboy magazine in 1977, “It’d be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it.”

Ehrlich, Lovins, and almost all of the “green” leadership rightly recognize that nuclear energy would lead to prosperity. From their standpoint, that is the problem. Again quoting Ehrlich: “We’ve already had too much economic growth in the U.S. Economic growth in rich countries like ours is the disease, not the cure.”

In fact, to turn our backs on nuclear power may be to court disaster. With growing demand worldwide for energy, we may suffer supply disruptions in some of the fossil fuels that currently support our modern way of life. To fail now to rebuild our nuclear infrastructure would be to court disaster, something one of the chief scientists responsible for the development of nuclear technology was already warning about decades ago.

In 1979, in the wake of the incident at Three Mile Island, famed nuclear scientist Edward Teller issued a prophetic warning that now sounds as relevant today as it did then: “The citizens of the United States have just begun to recognize the impact of the world’s growing energy shortage. Gasoline lines, electrical brownouts and higher prices are minor irritants. They are nothing compared to what may lie ahead. In a struggle for survival, politics, law, religion, and even humanity may be forgotten. When the objective is to stay alive, the end may seem to justify the means. In that event, the world may indeed return to the ‘simpler’ life of the past, but millions of us will not be alive to discover its disadvantages. When our existence is at stake, we cannot afford to turn our backs on any source of energy, we need them all.”