A TYPICALLY FALLACIOUS AND MISLEADING NUCLEAR ENERGY ADVERTISMENT
The Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), the propaganda wing and trade group for the American nuclear industry, spends millions of dollars annually to engineer public opinion. Advertisements such as the one on page 5 have been published extensively by the NEI in Scientific American, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, and Capitol Hill publications such as Roll Call, Congress Daily AM, and The Hill.1 The primary goal of such ads is to establish the premise that nuclear energy is “cleaner and greener” than traditional sources of electricity. Sentences such as “our 103 nuclear power plants don’t burn anything, so they don’t produce greenhouse gases” imply that nuclear energy is a more environmentally conscious choice than, say, electricity produced from coal or oil—the traditional sources of fuel across the globe—one that will produce far less carbon dioxide and thus spare us the global warming problems now associated with these other energy sources.
But a clear-eyed look at the true costs of nuclear energy production tells a very different story. The fact is, it takes energy to make energy—even nuclear energy. And the true “energetic costs” of making nuclear energy—the amounts of traditionally generated fuel it takes to create “new” nuclear energy—have not been tallied up until very recently. Certainly, they are absent from the NEI ads.
What exactly is nuclear power? It is a very expensive, sophisticated, and dangerous way to boil water. Uranium fuel rods are placed in water in a reactor core, they reach critical mass, and they produce vast quantities of heat, which boils the water. Steam is directed through pipes to turn a turbine, which generates electricity. The scientists who were involved in the Manhattan Project creating nuclear weapons developed a way to harness nuclear energy to generate electricity. Because their guilt was so great, they were determined to use their ghastly new invention to help the human race.2 Nuclear fission harnessed “atoms for peace,” and the nuclear PR industry proclaimed that nuclear power would provide an endless supply of electricity—referred to as “sunshine units”—that would be good for the environment and “too cheap to meter.”
They were wrong. Although a nuclear power plant itself releases no carbon dioxide, the production of nuclear electricity depends upon a vast, complex, and hidden industrial infrastructure that is never featured by the nuclear industry in its propaganda, but that actually releases a large amount of carbon dioxide as well as other global warming gases. One is led to believe that the nuclear reactor stands alone, an autonomous creator of energy. In fact, the vast infrastructure necessary to create nuclear energy, called the nuclear fuel cycle, is a prodigious user of fossil fuel and coal.
The production of carbon dioxide (CO2) is one measurement that indicates the amount of energy used in the production of the nuclear fuel cycle. Most of the energy used to create nuclear energy—to mine uranium ore for fuel, to crush and mill the ore, to enrich the uranium, to create the concrete and steel for the reactor, and to store the thermally and radioactively hot nuclear waste—comes from the consumption of fossil fuels, that is, coal or oil. When these materials are burned to produce energy, they form CO2 (reflecting coal and oil’s origins in ancient trees and other organic carboniferous material laid down under the earth’s crust millions of years ago). For each ton of carbon burned, 3.7 tons of CO2 gas are added to the atmosphere, and this is the source of today’s global warming.
CO2 and other gases hover in the lower atmosphere or troposphere, covering the earth like a blanket, and this gaseous layer behaves like glass in a greenhouse. Visible white light from the sun enters the atmosphere, heating up the surface of the earth, but the infrared heat radiation created cannot pass back through the terrestrial layer of trapped gases. Carbon dioxide accounts for 50% of the global warming phenomenon,3 and other rare gases comprise the rest.4
The total energy input of the nuclear fuel cycle—the energetic costs of nuclear power—must be openly and honestly assessed if nuclear power is to be compared fairly with other energy sources. Very few studies are yet available that analyze the total life cycle of nuclear power and its final energy input versus output. One of the best is a study by Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Smith titled “Nuclear Power—the Energy Balance.” Much of the material for the next section has been derived from this excellent report.
To quote the final conclusion of their lengthy analysis, “The use of nuclear power causes, at the end of the road and under the most favourable conditions, approximately one-third as much carbon dioxide (CO2) emission as gas-fired electricity production. The rich uranium ores required to achieve this reduction are, however, so limited that if the entire present world electricity demand were to be provided by nuclear power, these ores would be exhausted within nine years. Use of the remaining poorer ores in nuclear reactors would produce more CO2 emission than burning fossil fuels directly.”5 In this instance, nuclear reactors are best understood as complicated, expensive, and inefficient gas burners.6
The nuclear fuel cycle is composed of many interesting and complicated steps, each of which entails its own energetic costs. The next sections enumerate the parts of the nuclear fuel cycle and examine the energy input necessary for each step. (These energetic analyses are rough estimates, but they are the best available at this time.)
The largest unavoidable energy cost associated with nuclear power relates to the processes of mining and milling uranium fuel. Variable grades of uranium ore exist at different mines around the world. A greater amount of energy is required to extract uranium from a mine containing a low-grade uranium concentration of 0.1% than from another mine containing a uranium concentration of 1%—ten times more. Therefore the specific energy expenditure required for uranium extraction from the original ore body is largely dependent upon the ore grade. The energy used to mine the uranium is fossil fuel—the kind of energy nuclear power is touted as replacing—with the concurrent production of carbon dioxide.
There is a point at which the concentration of uranium becomes so low that the energy required to extract and to refine a dilute uranium ore concentration from the ground is greater than the amount of electricity generated by the nuclear reactor. For example, 162 tons of natural uranium must be extracted from the earth’s crust each year to fuel one nuclear power plant. If the uranium is in granite ore, with a low-grade uranium concentration of 4 grams per ton of rock (0.0004%), then 40 million tons of granite will need to be mined. This rock will need to be ground into fine powder and chemically treated with sulphuric acid and other chemicals to extract the uranium from the rock (milling). Assuming an extraction capacity of 50% (an unrealistically high estimate), 80 million tons of granite will therefore need to be treated. The dimensions of this mass of rock are one hundred meters high and three kilometers long. The extraction of uranium from this granite rock would consume over thirty times the energy generated in the reactor from the extracted uranium.7
The high-grade uranium ores are finite—global high-grade reserves amount to 3.5 million tons. Given that the current use of uranium is about 67,000 tons per year, these reserves would supply fifty more years of nuclear power at current production levels (but only three years, as noted above, if all the world’s energy needs were met by nuclear energy). The total of all the uranium reserves, including high and low grade, is estimated to be approximately 14.4 million tons, but most of these ores would be extremely expensive to mine, and the ore grades would be too low for electricity production. Many uranium mines are therefore out of use already.8
The mining and milling of uranium is a complex process. The rock itself must be excavated by bulldozers and shovels and then transported by truck to the milling plants. All these machines use diesel oil. Furthermore, the maintenance shops that service this equipment consume electricity and hence fuel oils. The uranium-bearing rock is then ground to a powder in electrically powered mills; the powder is treated with chemicals, usually sulphuric acid; then several other chemicals (many of which are highly corrosive and poisonous) are used to convert the uranium to a compound called yellow cake. Fuel is also needed during this process to create steam and heated gases, and all the chemicals used in the mills must be manufactured at other chemical plants.
The specific energy expenditure of the milling process depends upon which of the two types of available ore are processed. Soft ores, in which uranium is contained in sandstones, shales, and calcretes, with uranium concentrations ranging from 10% down to 0.01%, require 2.33 gigajoules per ton of ore extracted (1 giga-joule = 1 billion joules).9 Hard ores, including quartz pebble conglomerates and granites, with grades that vary from 0.1% to 0.001% or less, require 5.5 gigajoules per ton of ore extracted. In either case, when the ore grade reaches 0.01% the nuclear fuel cycle becomes energetically non-productive, because so much energy is expended to mine and mill the low-grade ores.10
If the mill tailings that remain after the extraction of the uranium were to be subject to remediation, as they should be, massive quantities of fossil fuel would be required for this process as well. Millions of tons of radioactive material that is currently dumped on the ground, often on native Indian tribal land, emitting radioactive elements to the air and water, need instead to be buried deeply in the ground where the uranium originally emanated. This single remediation process, which should be scrupulously observed, by itself makes the energetic price of nuclear electricity unreasonable.11
These tailings would need to be:
• neutralized with limestone;
• immobilized by mixing them with bentonite to isolate them from ground water;
• transported and placed back into the mine;
• covered with overburden or soil and then with indigenous vegetation.
The energy expenditure for adequate remediation is estimated to be 4.2 gigajoules per metric ton of tailings, four times the 1.06 gigajoules per metric ton expended on the original mining. The remediation process also involves the extensive use of fossil fuels and the production of more carbon dioxide.12
Before uranium can be enriched, it must be converted to uranium hexafluoride gas, because it is in this form that the fissionable uranium 235 can be separated from the non-fissionable uranium 238. Uranium hexafluoride is the only uranium compound that is gaseous at low temperatures and therefore is easy to work with. The specific energetic requirements for this conversion are 1.478 gigajoules per kilogram of uranium.
Enrichment of uranium 235 from 0.7% to 3% is also a very energetic process. Specific energetic expenditures for enrichment include construction, operation, and maintenance of the enrichment plant. Uranium can be enriched using one of two basic methods—gaseous diffusion and ultracentrifuge—both of which require very large amounts of energy. (Enrichment by ultracentrifuge has a lower direct energy cost, but the financial costs of the operation and maintenance of ultracentrifuge enrichment are much higher than gaseous diffusion because of the short technical life of the centrifuges.)
In the United States, enrichment facilities have historically been located at Paducah, Kentucky, and Portsmouth, Ohio, with a discarded facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. In 2001, however, the privately owned and operated United States Enrichment Corp. consolidated its operation in Paducah. The Paducah enrichment facility uses the electrical output of two dirty, old 1,000 megawatt coal-fired plants for its operation,13 contributing significant carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. It has also recently been revealed by the U.S. Department of Energy that CFC 114 gas—a compound that is a potent global warmer and that destroys the stratospheric ozone layer—leaks unabated from the hundreds of miles of cooling pipes used in the uranium enrichment operation at Paducah, Kentucky, and its sister facility in Ohio.14
The specific energetic costs of enrichment are measured in joules per separative work unit (SWU). Averaging the current world use of the two different processes—30% gaseous diffusion and 70% ultracentrifuge—the energetic costs are 0.000555 peta-joules per 1,000 SWU. (A petajoule is 1 million billion joules.)15
The enriched uranium hexafluoride gas is then made into solid fuel pellets of uranium dioxide, the size of a cigarette filter. These pellets are packed into a zirconium fuel rod measuring twelve feet long and half-an-inch thick. A typical 1,000 megawatt reactor contains 50,000 fuel rods—about one hundred tons of uranium. Again fossil fuel is used in the fabrication process, and the specific energy expenditure is 0.00379 petajoules per ton of uranium.
All nuclear power plants in the United States were constructed between the years 1980 to 1985 or before, and no new plants have been ordered since 1978. The construction of a nuclear power plant requires an immense aggregate of goods and services. Nuclear technology is a very high-tech process, requiring an extensive industrial and economic infrastructure. A huge amount of concrete and steel is used to build a reactor. Furthermore, construction has become ever more complex because of increased safety concerns following the meltdowns at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
Estimates vary for the energetic costs of reactor construction from 40 to 120 petajoules. The mean value of 80 petajoules has been used in the study of Storm van Leeuwen and Smith.
When the reactor is finally closed at the end of its working life, the intensely radioactive products—cobalt 60 and iron 55 formed inside the reactor vessel from neutron bombardment—must be allowed to decay considerably before the reactor can even be entered. (Additional residual contaminating radioactive elements, which are also very dangerous, include tritium, carbon 14, and calcium 41, among others.16) Thus, these huge, intensely radioactive mausoleums must be guarded and protected from damage or unwarranted intrusion for a period of ten to hundred years before the actual process of dismantling can begin.
The steps involved in decommissioning and dismantling include:
• operation and maintenance of the reactor during the safeguarded period after the final shutdown;
• clean-up of the radioactive parts of the reactor before dismantling;
• demolition of the radioactive components;
• dismantling;
• packaging and permanent disposal of the dismantled wastes.
After sufficient time is given for the radioactive decay period, the reactor must be cut apart into small pieces either by humans or by remote control, and the still-radioactive pieces must be packed into containers for transportation and final disposal at some distant location. There is very limited experience available on which to base energetic cost estimates for decommissioning and dismantling, because a large nuclear power plant has never actually been dismantled completely after a long operational lifetime. However, based on the scarce available data, the energetic debt for this exercise is estimated to be in the range of 80–160 petajoules, the high end of the range being the most probable.17 Traditional coal- or gas-fired plants can be dismantled in the conventional way as any building, because they are not radioactive and therefore do not pose a risk to the public health and safety. The discarded materials, rubble, and scrap from conventional buildings can be reused. For comparison: Construction and dismantling of a gas-fired plant require about 24 petajoules together. The energy requirements of construction and dismantling of a nuclear power plant may sum up to about 240 petajoules.
At the end of its lifetime, the reactor will need to be cleaned of extensive quantities of accumulated radioactive material called CRUD (Chalk River Unidentified Deposits, so named because these materials were first found in the Chalk River reactor). CRUD is a collection of radioactive elements that come from the reactor itself—from the cooling system and the highly radioactive fission and “actinide” elements that have escaped from leaking and damaged fuel rods. This process, which is separate from decommissioning, may be energetically very expensive and will need as much energy debt as 50% of the original energetic construction costs, which is 20 to 60 petajoules.18
The water that cools the reactor core becomes heavily contaminated with tritium, or radioactive hydrogen, and with carbon 14, the longterm medical and ecological effects of which are not well understood and are rarely discussed or addressed by the nuclear industry or anyone else. The radioactive life of tritium is more than 200 years, and the radioactive life of carbon 14 is 114,600 years. A sustainable energy system would necessitate a closed loop for tritium and carbon 14, such that they never enter the ecosphere. Theoretically this water should be stored, immobilized into drying agents or into cement, and placed in appropriate long-lived containers. Instead, it is routinely and blithely discharged into seas, rivers, or lakes, from which people obtain their drinking water.19 Implementing proper disposal techniques would require a huge number of waste containers and massive energy expenditure.
The fact that there is thus far no adequate knowledge of the long-term biological dangers and because of the absolutely immense expense associated with sequestering the tritium and carbon 14 from nuclear power plants, there is no adequate estimate of the energetic costs required to prevent the release of these isotopes. Hence, the true energetic and economic costs of nuclear power are presently grossly underestimated.20
Radioactive waste is classified in vaguely defined categories as low level, intermediate level, and high level, according to the concentration and types of radioactive elements. There are five types of specific containers available to transport these wastes depending upon the category, which are labelled V1 to V5. The production, filling, handling, and transport of the radioactive waste in containers V2 to V4 is estimated to use per ton almost as much energy as the specific construction energy of the atomic power reactor itself. The total may sum up to a very large amount as noted previously—about 20 petajoules.21
In addition to handling the reactor wastes, the energetic costs of nuclear electricity include those associated with interim storage of irradiated fuel elements. The magnitude of the radiation generated in a nuclear power plant is almost beyond belief. The original uranium fuel that is subject to the fission process becomes 1 billion times more radioactive in the reactor core.22 A thousand megawatt nuclear power plant contains as much long-lived radiation as that produced by the explosion of one thousand Hiroshima-sized bombs. Every year, one-third of the now-intensely radioactive fuel rods must be removed from the reactor, because they are so contaminated with fission products that they hinder the efficiency of the electricity production.
These rods emit so much radiation that a lethal dose can be acquired by a person standing in close proximity to a single spent fuel rod within seconds. But they are also extremely thermally hot and must therefore be stored for thirty to sixty years in a heavily shielded building and continually cooled by air or water. If they are not continually cooled, the zirconium cladding of the rod could become so hot that it would spontaneously burn, releasing its radioactive inventory. Finally, after an adequate cooling period, the rods must eventually be packed into a container by remote control.
Construction of these highly specialized containers uses as much energy as construction of the original reactor itself, which is 80 gigajoules per metric ton. To make matters worse, spent fuel packaging is a completely new and relatively untested technology for which there is no operational data.23
The calculations for this part of the nuclear fuel cycle have not yet been done. But clearly, huge amounts of fossil fuel will be used to transport the waste over long distances through many towns and cities over long periods of time, to prepare an adequate geological waste storage facility, and to supervise and guard the site for periods of time almost beyond our comprehension—240,000 years.24
Energetic cost assessments provided by the global energy industry are notoriously and consistently fallacious. For instance, BP-Amoco in its 2005 world energy supply assessment, simplistically assessed only the gross electricity production of nuclear power plants, but failed to incorporate the total energy consumption of the nuclear fuel chain.25
In fact, looking at the energetic costs of the nuclear fuel cycle just from mining the ore through reactor construction to dismantling of the reactor, without even assessing the energy costs of storage and transportation of radioactive waste, the total energy debt comes to approximately 240 petajoules (24 million billion joules). The construction and implementation processes involved in a gas-fired plant require only one-tenth that amount—24 petajoules—to produce the same amount of electricity.26
Even utilizing the richest ores available, a nuclear power plant must operate at ten full-load operating years before it has paid off its energy debts. And, as noted above, there is only a finite supply of uranium ore containing reasonable concentrations of uranium 235. When this concentration falls below 0.01%, the costs of energy production from nuclear power can no longer cover the costs of extraction of uranium from the earth, at which time, the nuclear fuel cycle will deliver no net energy; below a certain uranium content, nuclear power produces less energy than is needed to build, fuel, and operate the reactor and to repair the environmental damage.27
Setting aside the energetic costs of the whole fuel cycle, and looking just at the Nuclear Industry’s claim that what transpires in the nuclear plants is “clean and green,” the following conditions would have to be met for nuclear power actually to make the substantial contribution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions that the industry claims is possible (this analysis assumes 2% or more growth in global electricity demand):
• All present-day nuclear power plants—441—would have to be replaced by new ones.
• Half the electricity growth would have to be provided by nuclear power.
• Half of all the world’s coal fired plants would have to be replaced by nuclear power plants.28
This would mean the construction over the next fifty years of some 2,000 to 3,000 nuclear reactors of 1,000 megawatt size—one per week for fifty years! Considering the eight to ten years it takes to construct a new reactor and the finite supply of uranium fuel, such an enterprise is simply not viable.29
As van Leeuwen and Smith write, “the total known reserves of uraniu.… [are] so small one must ask oneself why it is that nuclear power was ever considered as holding promise of very large amounts of energy.” They cite several possible reasons for this anomalous situation:
• The nuclear industry originally postulated that fast-neutron “breeder” reactors would be developed, which would create fuel as well as use it, in a self-sustaining “closed cycle.” These reactors have yet to be realized.
• The industry did no calculations and had no conception of the huge energy costs associated with nuclear power.
• It was not understood for many years exactly how dangerous radioactive waste was and that long term disposal would be so intractable.
• It was not understood that uranium ores of less than 0.01% concentration could never deliver any net energy.
• All environmental damage induced by nuclear power was assumed to be left for future generations to rectify.30
With the knowledge about these topics that is now available, however, clearly the nuclear industry is running a public relations scam of massive proportions.
Disagreements exist about availability of uranium for the intended “nuclear renaissance.” What differentiates the analysis in this chapter by Storm van Leeuwen and Smith is that no association or study group including the World Nuclear Association, has previously analyzed the uranium ore grade–energy relationship.
While highly-enriched military uranium is currently being mixed with low-enriched uranium for nuclear reactors in the United States, this amounts to only six years of the present annual natural uranium demand. There are no indications of new large rich deposits of uranium ore, and the currently known recoverable resources would supply 2,500 “renaissance” reactors for only eight years.
Some argue that reprocessing plutonium for reactor fuel will take care of deficient uranium supplies. Reprocessing is dangerous, extremely costly, and contributes to weapons proliferation.31