Twenty some years ago – I made my first film. It was nearly unwatchable but boy did it get attention. Done in the afterglow of the meltdown at Three Mile Island, my UCLA Film School Project uncovered the hidden and accident strewn past of the American nuclear power industry.
I discovered that the first nuclear reactor ever to supply residential power was in the San Fernando Valley. Edward R. Murrow brought out a crew to record the scene as the electrons raced from the experimental reactor over transmission lines to the bedroom of a young boy who flipped the light switch in his bedroom so he could study. Murrow wasn’t there three years later when the reactor suffered a meltdown that could have wiped out the Valley. Like many accidents that followed, this one remained a virtual secret.
Digging through public government files and using the Freedom of Information Act, I found countless examples like this of reactor accidents (some that blew up), deaths from radiation exposure, deaths from exploding fuel rods that impaled nuclear workers to the ceiling of the containment building, leaking barrels of waste, lost nuclear dumping grounds and more. My work was used by public interest groups, journalists, public health officials and lawmakers to bring the nuclear industry to heel. Even when confronted with facts to the contrary, the official story was always that things were OK and that the technology was safe.
But as public pressure mounted after Chernobyl and Three Mile Island the nuclear power option appeared to be dead. In fact, it’s just been lying dormant and the nuclear industry is planning a revival.
After a long hiatus many countries are contemplating building new nuclear power plants – including Iran. In the U.S., the uranium mines that were abandoned in Wyoming and in Navajo country have been quietly reopened. Their owners believed that their old friend, Dick Cheney, would come through.
The reason used by Cheney and other proponents for the revival of nuclear power give this question a rather ghoulish irony. After years of arguing that global warming is a figment of the imagination of tree-hugging, Volvo driving, New York Times reading liberals, they now use global warming to justify the need to fast track the building of new nuclear reactors. They argue that, Since nukes aren’t carbon emitting – they are good. They’ve even funneled money to one of the founders of Greenpeace who’s trotted out to put a smiley “environmentalist” face on Mr. Atom.
Proponents tout technological breakthroughs that supposedly resolve the longstanding problems of risk of accident, vulnerability to terrorist attack, proliferation, and waste disposal. In fact, many of these “fresh” approaches appear to be old technologies dusted off and presented as new. They say that “new” designs, such as breeder reactors (that would produce more plutonium than they consume) and graphite-based reactors are ready to come to the rescue. But these are really just variants of old technologies that failed repeatedly in the past. One prominent physicist, Professor Frank von Hippel of Princeton, has described the new proposals as the same old thing with “lipstick.”
We suggest, given the potential consequences of a huge new wave of nuclear activity, that regulators and citizens take a moment to think about letting the genies back out of the bottle. Each of the proposed “new” technologies was previously tried, and we need to understand what happened. Then take a look at what could happen today throughout the world.
For example:
· Breeder reactors. Reactors that “breed” plutonium as they produce electricity have long been a dream of nuclear advocates, and they are now pushing for wide-scale use of them. But they make stuff that can be used for bombs; they rely on liquid sodium metal for coolant, that explodes in the presence of water and burns in the presence of air; can melt if the coolant gets blocked; can blow up like a nuclear weapon if the fuel melts into a critical configuration. Let’s see how well breeders have worked in the past. Let’s travel to Idaho in the U.S., to the site of the Experimental Breeder Reactor (EBR-1) that melted down in 1955; to the Fermi nuclear power plant in Detroit, whose breeder reactor melted in 1966 (the focus of the book, We Almost Lost Detroit); to the troubled Super-Phoenix breeder in France.
· Graphite reactors. Most reactors use water to “moderate” the nuclear reaction (slow down the neutrons to make them more effective); proponents now suggest using graphite – carbon, like pencil lead. Let’s travel to the site of the Windscale reactor in England, where graphite caught fire in 1957 and released large amounts of radioactivity into the countryside; and to Chernobyl, where its graphite caught fire in 1986; and to Fort St. Vrain in Colorado in the U.S., where the “pebble bed” type of graphite reactor now being touted had so many failures it was down more than it was up and running and eventually had to be shut down.
· Reprocessing. Separating the plutonium out of “spent” reactor fuel so it can be used in reactors – or bombs—has always been enticing. Let’s travel to Sellafield in England, with its large radioactivity releases into the Irish sea; and the abandoned commercial reprocessing facility in West Valley, New York, site of one of the most difficult cleanup operations in the U.S. because of all the contamination; and to Hanford, Washington, where radioactivity from leaking high level waste tanks from reprocessing is migrating toward the Columbia River.
· Nuclear Terrorism. Terrorists disrupting the coolant of a reactor or spent fuel pool can cause the former to melt and the latter to catch fire, with massive radioactivity release – one thousand times or more the long-lived radioactivity of the Hiroshima bomb. Let’s go to Germany and examine the German government study that found terrorists flying a jumbo jet into a reactor can cause unacceptable damage; and to U.S. plants, where half of the reactors have failed mock terrorist tests, even with six months warning to the day and only having to defend against a handful of supposed attackers.
· Nuclear Proliferation. Nuclear reactor technology and the spread of nuclear weapons have long been connected. Let’s go to Belgium, to the centrifuge facility where Dr. Khan of Pakistan stole the diagrams used to enrich uranium in his home country for its nuclear bombs. Let’s go to Canada, from which the reactor used by India to produce material for its first nuclear weapons came. Let’s go to Apollo, Pennsylvania, from which a large quantity of weapons-grade uranium was diverted to Israel for its weapons program.
· Nuclear Waste Disposal. Let’s visit the site of the proposed Yucca Mountain high level waste disposal facility in Nevada; then go to Lyon Kansas, where deep underground burial was first proposed until it was discovered that the local community was right in pointing out numerous leakage pathways back to the surface. Let’s look at the history of ocean disposal of radioactive waste, in the seas off Europe. Let’s look at the leaking “low-level” radioactive dumps at Maxey Flats, Kentucky and Sheffield, Illinois.
My past worked uncovered an astonishing number of past nuclear mishaps: we found films of the inside of the melted core of the SRE reactor and the long, laborious cleanup after the accident; the SL-1 reactor explosion, leaving a worker impaled on the reactor roof by a control rod when the reactor had a destructive “power excursion”; footage from submersibles of decaying barrels of radioactive waste dumped in the ocean, with fish swimming by; two reactors in the very midst of blowing up when power ran out of control; and much more.
Conclusion
The past is prologue. What is being proposed in light of a nuclear revival is a return to what was done decades ago and left behind a troubling trail of problems that will be with us for generations. Taking a serious look at the past will help illuminate our choices for the future.
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