Nuclear power plants are vulnerable to many events that could lead to meltdowns, including human and mechanical errors; impacts from climate change, global warming, and earthquakes; and, we now know, terrorist attacks.
A recent near miss at the Davis-Besse reactor twenty-one miles southeast of Toledo, Ohio, caused the reactor to come within days or weeks of a major catastrophe. To save money, the owner, First Energy, had persuaded the NRC to delay inspections of a vital safety component beyond the due date of December 31, 2001.1
When the reactor was eventually shut down in February 2002 for an early refuelling outage, to their horror the inspectors came upon a cavity, where corrosion had eaten its way through six inches of carbon steel on top of the six-and-a-half-inch reactor pressure vessel. Less than half-an-inch of stainless steel liner of the reactor remained to separate the pressurized internal radioactive environment from the reactor containment building. This stainless steel liner was bulging outward but luckily had not ruptured.
How did this hole occur? Reactor coolant water, which contains boron, had escaped through cracks and flanges around the control rod drive mechanisms, to drip and crystallize on the exterior surface of the carbon steel reactor head. Because boric acid is very corrosive, over time the boron acid ate its way through the carbon steel, creating a hole four-by-five-by-six inches. As a result, a wide surface area of thin stainless steel was exposed to extremely high pressures beneath it.
Had this steel ruptured, reactor coolant water would almost certainly have been released as a high-pressure jet stream. This energetic jet stream would almost certainly have damaged reactor safety equipment located immediately above it. It also could potentially have created a shock wave powerful enough to break control rods that were already cracked. These would then have been ejected as missiles, which would have created chaos among safety equipment, including specific control rods that close down the reactor. This cascade of events could have initiated a core melt-down.2
But that is not the end of the story. Later in 2002, the owner of the Davis-Besse plant informed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that when the hole was discovered, a large amount of debris was simultaneously discovered in the containment building, which could potentially have blocked the emergency sump intake screen, rendering the sump inoperable in the event of a loss-of-coolant accident. This would have caused both the Emergency Core Cooling Systems and the Containment Spray systems to be rendered inoperable, because both require emergency sump suction during the recirculation phase. So exactly when the Emergency Core Cooling system might have been needed, it was inoperable, as was the filter to remove escaping radioactive iodine in the event of a meltdown.3
A senior NRC manager who had been involved in the decision to allow Davis-Besse to continue operation said he felt the agency’s hands were tied: “We can argue this, but this agency does not take precipitous action to shut down a nuclear power plant because we have a suspicion of something without enough evidence to warrant it. … If we were in the same situation again, we’d probably make the same decision” to allow them to operate until February 16.4
The Davis-Besse emergency is one of many, if not all so serious, that confront the nuclear industry every year. Statistically speaking, an accidental meltdown is almost a certainty sooner or later in one of the 4385 nuclear power plants located in thirty-three countries around the world. Human error, compromise, laziness, and greed are implicit in the affairs of men; when these attributes are applied to the generation of atomic energy, the results can be catastrophic.
Even though today’s reactors were designed for a forty-year life span, the NRC, acceding to industry pressure, is currently approving twenty-year extensions to the original forty-year licenses for nuclear power plants.6 But as David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer from the Union of Concerned Scientists, points out, nuclear power plants are like people: they have numerous problems in their infancy and youth, they operate relatively smoothly in early-to-middle life, and they start to show signs of stress and manifest pathology as they age.7
Every U.S. nuclear power plant is moving into the old-age cycle, and the number of near-misses is increasing. In a thirteen-month period from March 7, 2000, to April 2, 2001, eight nuclear power plants were forced to shut down because of potentially serious equipment failures associated with aging of their mechanical parts—one shut down on average every sixty days. The NRC aging-management programs are thus failing to head off the equipment failures these programs are designed to prevent.8
Specific examples include the Oconee Unit 3 in South Carolina where, on February 19, 2001, boric acid was found on the exterior surface of the reactor vessel head around two control rod drive mechanism (CRDM) nozzles. Further investigation found circumferential cracks that went right through the reactor vessel head wall above the weld areas where the nozzles were attached to the reactor vessel head. On January 9, 2002, at Quad Cities Unit 1, in Illinois, operators shut down the reactor when one of the jet pumps inside the reactor vessel had failed. Further investigation found that the hold-down beam for jet pump 20 had cracked apart, and pieces had damaged the impeller of the recirculation pump, causing it to shut off. On October 7, 2000, workers found boric acid on the containment floor at the Summer nuclear plant in South Carolina, and this finding led to the discovery of a through-wall crack where a major pipe was welded to the reactor vessel nozzle. This area had been previously inspected in 1993, but the crack was missed because an air gap between the pipe weld area and the inspection detector had created a “noisy” output, which masked the indications of the crack. And on February 15, 2000, a steam generator at Indian Point Unit 2 plant in New York, thirty-five miles from the center of Manhattan, released 19,197 gallons of intensely radioactive water from the primary coolant into the atmosphere.9 The owner of the plant had detected indications of degradation during steam generator inspections in 1997 but had failed to do anything about the problem.10
As the Union of Concerned Scientists notes, “These examples illustrate two fundamental flaws in current aging management programs:
1. looking in the wrong spots with the right inspection techniques (as happened at the Oconee and Quad Cities plants)
2. looking in the right spots with the wrong inspection techniques (as happened with the Summer and Indian Point plants).”11
Although aging management programs should find these problems before they become self revealing, they have not.
Serious problems associated with metal fatigue and aging in reactors occur within the steam generators, with many experiencing cracked and broken steam generator tubes. Steam generator tubes are very important because they constitute more than 50% of the barrier between the primary coolant and secondary coolant in a pressurized water reactor. And there is no containment vessel over the steam generator or any other mechanism to prevent fission products from entering the environment. Most importantly, leakage of primary coolant from the steam generator in the event of a rupture could seriously deplete the primary coolant, leading to a meltdown.12 Yet the NRC for the last ten years, although they have been aware of this problem, have allowed many nuclear power plants to operate with thousands of cracked steam generator tubes.13
The NRC is also allowing plant owners to test their emergency equipment less frequently than required by law and to operate degraded equipment. Furthermore, the NRC does not make public its risk assessment studies on nuclear power plants, even though by law it is obliged to do so. David Lochbaum says this “agency continues to make regulatory decisions affecting the lives of millions of Americans in a vacuum.”14
It is impossible to know whether an aging plant can operate safely for another twenty years. As Lochbaum points out, “There needs to be strong aging management programs at all reactors to ensure failures are found before it is too late.” The best way to prevent recurrent problems at aging reactors, Lochbaum argues, “would be for the NRC to suspend the issuance of license renewals until the nuclear industry has demonstrated that it takes plant safety seriously. Plant owners will continue to follow lax aging management programs and allow failures to reveal themselves unless the NRC imposes stronger standards.” Construction of new reactors is enormously expensive, whereas reactors that have been operating for many years are relatively inexpensive to maintain, and the profits to their owners are large.15 Right now, as Lochbaum points out, the owners have few economic incentives to retire their aging plants voluntarily.16
In August 2003, France experienced such a severe heat wave that 14,000 people died. Many of these were old people, who lived in non-air-conditioned apartments. The hot weather and lack of rainfall severely reduced supplies of cold river water, and when the river levels fell, the French power company, Electricite de France, resorted to cooling its nuclear power plants by hosing down their outsides with garden sprinklers supplied by reservoirs.17 Eventually, because the reactors were operating at higher-than-normal temperatures, the company was permitted to discharge secondary cooling water into the rivers where the plants are located at temperatures that destroy aquatic life.18
The impact of global warming presents a very serious situation for nuclear energy for several reasons:
• Global warming can induce unpredicted and extreme weather events that could heat up the rivers and lakes from which nuclear power plants extract their cooling water. An adequate supply of water itself may also cease to exist as drought conditions take over.
• Nuclear power plants were designed thirty to forty years ago, before the advent of global warming was considered, and nuclear regulations are not cognizant of global warming. Current regulators tend to minimize the risk. For instance, Scott Burnell, a spokesman at NRC, said new power plant guidelines were unnecessary, because “global warming occurs on such a slow scale that we would be able to deal with any changes at an operational level as opposed to a policy level.”19
• The extrusion of very hot water from reactors poses an enormous risk to aquatic life already feeling the stresses of global warming. Five or six years of water temperatures lethal for salmon could induce extinction in certain areas.
• As temperatures rise, so the human need for more air-conditioning and more electricity to drive air conditioners increases. This then becomes a vicious cycle: more heat, more air conditioners, more electricity, more CO2 production, and more stress upon nuclear power plants and their associated environment.
Many nuclear power plants around the world are susceptible to the effects of tsunamis because they are located by the sea, from whence they extract their cooling water. In 2004, a tsunami struck a reactor in India; although it did not induce a major accident, it did cause a degree of damage. The height of the tsunami that originated off the coast of Thailand in December 2004 was a massive ninety-eight feet. In California, the reactor at Humbolt Bay is only twelve feet above sea level. Although it is now closed down, it still contains much of its highly radioactive fuel.
Diablo Canyon and San Onofre, both also in California, are similarly vulnerable to tsunamis and are also located adjacent to earthquake faults. Although nuclear reactors are designed to withstand serious earthquakes, a quake large enough could trigger a very severe accident. This is true as well for many of the reactors in Japan, a country riven with earthquake faults, and for many other earthquake-prone countries. Pacific Gas and Electric, the company that owns the Humboldt Bay reactor, decided to close it down because of the risk that an earthquake could trigger a severe accident.20
The report of the 9/11 Commission revealed that al Qaeda had considered plans to attack nuclear power plants. The commission thought that scenario was unlikely, however, because of their mistaken belief that the airspace around nuclear power plants was “restricted” and that planes violating that air space would be shot down before impact.21
They were wrong. No-fly zones around reactors do not exist on a standard basis, even today; they are imposed only at times of heightened threat. No surface-to-air missiles are deployed around nuclear power plants. (Many such missiles are deployed around Washington, D.C., however, since 9/11.22 Evidently, politicians have decided that it is more important to protect their own lives than those of the millions of people who could die lingering, painful deaths after a terrorist-induced nuclear meltdown.)
According to John Large, a UK consulting engineer, in an article in Global Health Watch,“Nuclear power plants are almost totally ill-prepared for a terrorist attack from the air” because nuclear reactors were designed and constructed more than fifty years ago, well before the large airplanes in common use today were ever conceived.23 According to Large, a full-sized passenger plane travelling at great speed with a full load of fuel could significantly damage a nuclear reactor, while injecting large quantities of burning fuel into vulnerable areas of the building. This, in turn, could induce enough damage that a meltdown would occur, leading to the release of large quantities of radiation.24
Most nuclear reactors are not required by the NRC to be able to withstand attacks from planes or boats.25 Large points out that designs of relevant nuclear power plants are easy to obtain in the open literature,26 and he says that there are no practical measures to take to ensure reactors will not be severely damaged.27 Others, however, have recommended that the vulnerable aspects of a nuclear power plant could be protected by a series of steel beams set vertically in deep concrete foundations connected with bracing beams, a web of high-strength cables, wires, and netting linking the vertical beams to form a protective screen. This so-called Beamhenge would act to slow down an attacking aircraft, fragmenting it into smaller pieces and dispersing the mass of jet fuel, thereby protecting the vulnerable containment vessel, the spent fuel pool, and other vital pieces of equipment. The NRC has yet to implement any such protective measure.28
The external electricity supply to reactors and the emergency diesel generators upon which the safe operation of a nuclear reactor depends are also susceptible to terrorist attack, as is the intake of cooling water from the nearby sea, river, or lake.29
Time magazine recently examined the degree of security available at nuclear power plants post 9/11. Although security at civilian airports has been enormously improved, security at nuclear power plants is virtually unchanged, even though these facilities constitute potential weapons of mass destruction and, as such, are inviting targets for terrorists. In truth, terrorists do not need their own weapons of mass destruction, as such weapons are conveniently deployed all over the world next to large and strategically important populations.
Time magazine opens its article with an attack scenario that goes like this:
The first hint of trouble probably would be no more than shadows flitting through the darkness outside one of the nation’s nuclear reactors. Beyond the fencing, black-clad snipers would take aim at sentries atop guard towers ringing the site. The guards tend to doubt they would be safe in their bullet-resistant enclosures; they call such perches iron coffins, which is what they could become if the terrorists used deadly but easily obtainable .50 caliber sniper rifles.
The saboteurs would break through fences using bolt cutters or Bangalore torpedoes, pipe-shaped explosives developed by the British in India nearly a century ago. The terrorists would blast through outer walls using platter charges, directed explosives developed during World War II, giving them access to the heart of the plant. They would use gun-mounted lasers and infra-red devices to blind the plant’s cameras, and electronic jammers to paralyze communications among its defenders. They would probably be armed with hand-drawn maps, drawings of control panels, weak spots in the site’s defenses—provided by a covert comrade working inside the plant.30
Once inside the plant with access to the control room they would and could easily flip a few well-learned switches, shutting pumps and operating key valves to cause a deadly loss of coolant. As the nuclear engineer David Lochbaum says, it may sound farfetched, but “it’s irreversible once that last switch is flipped.”31
Many of the scenarios above were taken from a DOE training video for guards at nuclear power plants. As Paul Blanch, a nuclear safety expert, writes, “A knowledgeable terrorist inside a control room can cause a meltdown in fairly short order.”32
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in its Design Basis Threat (DBT)—a scenario projecting the maximum threat that nuclear plant security systems are required to protect against—has always insisted that nuclear plants need only be protected against an attack by a maximum of three people outside with the help of one insider. They also have assumed that the attackers would act as a single team and be armed only with hand-held automatic rifles. Now, after 9/11, the NRC requires that guards can protect against up to eight attackers. Yet nineteen highly organized men made the attack on 9/11.33
The security guards at nuclear power plants complain of low morale, inadequate training, exhaustion from excessive overtime, and poor pay. They often are expected to work seventy-two hours a week, and not infrequently they go to sleep on the job.34 They state that they would not be prepared to die to save the reactor, considering their poor compensation and the treatment they routinely receive from management.35
The NRC defends the poor state of security at nuclear reactors by saying that a force as large as the 9/11 team constitutes an enemy of the state, rendering the protection of nuclear power plants the job of the Pentagon and the federal government (who would never get to the reactor in time).36
Wackenhut Corporation, the huge security firm contracted to guard half the country’s reactors, is the same company that has been contracted to test the security at the reactors. Since, by law, each plant must be tested once every three years, Wackenhut must conduct simulated test attacks an average of twice a month. In 2003, Wackenhut “attackers” tipped off Wackenhut guards about the details of the drill.37 Wackenhut employee Kathy Davidson at Pilgrim Nuclear Station in Massachusetts was fired from her job because she complained that security was inadequate at the plants. Davidson later told Time magazine that, of the twenty-nine classroom exercises Wackenhut conducted to prove that guards could defend against terrorists, the attackers won twenty-eight.38
According to Edwin Lyman, a physicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, a terrorist-induced meltdown could kill more than half-a-million people. Yet Marvin Fertel from the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry’s research institute, continues to insist that only about one hundred people would be killed in such an attack, and the chances of terrorists achieving this goal are “so incredibly low it is not credible.”39
Congressman Christopher Shays, who chairs the House Reform Committee’s panel on national security and emerging threats, believes that the NRC’s DBT prediction is artificially low because of economic pressures, amounting to how much security we can afford, not how much we need. Some nuclear security officials call it “the funding basis threat.”40
A recent study by the National Academy of Sciences on the dangers posed by terrorists to 43,600 tons of spent fuel stored at the sixty-four power plant sites across the United States concluded that an additional study of security at the nation’s nuclear plants is urgently needed.41
What would a catastrophe at a nuclear power plant in the U.S. look like?
Let’s consider the two large Indian Point reactors located in the town of Buchanan in Westchester County, thirty-five miles from midtown Manhattan.42 Indian Point 2 is a 971-megawatt reactor and Indian Point 3 is a 984-megawatt reactor; the licensed operator for both plants is Entergy Nuclear. Both reactors are aging and adjacent to a very large population base: More than 305,000 people live within a ten-mile radius of the plants, and 17 million live within fifty miles. They are in close proximity to a reservoir system that waters 9 million people and to the financial capital of the world.
Apart from natural disaster, an Indian Point meltdown caused by a small group of people intent on wreaking disaster could readily be achieved in one of several ways. Terrorists with suicidal tendencies could easily disrupt the external electricity supply of the reactors, or obtain one small speed boat, pack it with Timothy McVeigh fertilizer explosives, and drive it full tilt into the two adjacent intake pipes that suck almost two million gallons of Hudson River cooling water per minute into the reactors. The plant could be shut down immediately, but this would not help because of the intensity of the heat already in the reactor. Within several hours the meltdowns would be in full swing. (Several years ago, I was in a boat, owned by the antinuclear group Riverkeeper, on the Hudson opposite the huge intake pipes of the two Indian Point reactors. Although the Coast Guard was supposed to be protecting them from terrorist intrusion, there was no sign of a Coast Guard boat during the two early afternoon hours we were within view of the pipes.)
Alternatively, a terrorist could drive a truck packed with similar explosives into a strategic area of the plant, triggering a critical situation. Concrete barriers have been erected at several nuclear power plants, but not many, and, as stated in the previous chapter, an inadequate number of guards are protecting against terrorist intrusion. A paper written by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, published in a 2004 technical journal and available on the Internet, indicates that truck bombs of various sizes would have 100% probability of success.43
Or yet again, after a few basic flying lessons, a novice pilot could commandeer a large passenger plane loaded with fuel and fly it into the reactor itself, destroying strategic safety systems and/or emptying the reactor of its cooling water. Or a patient individual bent on destruction could sign up for training as a nuclear power plant operator, obtain a job at Indian Point, and at a certain strategic moment, press the wrong switches and valves, removing the cooling water and initiating a meltdown from the inside.
The meltdown would follow several specific stages:
First, as the cooling water leaks or dissipates from the reactor core, the intensely hot radioactive pellets in the fuel rods overheat and swell, and the zirconium cladding oxidizes and ruptures. Volatile radioactive isotopes that have collected in the gap beneath the zirconium cladding of the fuel rods are then released as gases into the atmosphere of the containment building. These elements include the noble gases argon, krypton, and xenon, as well as radioactive iodine and cesium. This whole period, called the “gap release” phase, will last about thirty seconds.
As the core continues to heat, the radioactive ceramic fuel pellets themselves will begin to melt, and, as they do, large quantities of radioactive isotopes will be released into the reactor vessel and into the containment building atmosphere. The molten fuel will drop to the bottom of the reactor vessel; it will melt the steel and drop through the vessel onto the bottom of the containment building. The period when the reactor vessel is breached is called the “early in-vessel” phase and will last about one hour. At this point, the meltdown is irreversible.
When the molten fuel hits the bottom of the containment building, it will violently react with water that has collected there and with the concrete of the floor, releasing even more isotopes. This is the “ex-vessel” phase, which lasts several hours. When the molten core hits the bottom of the reactor vessel, it may trigger massive steam explosions that could blow the reactor vessel apart, simultaneously creating high velocity “missiles” that could rupture the containment building and violently expel the radioactive gases and aerosols into the outside atmosphere. If the reactor vessel is not itself blown apart, and the molten fuel just drops through the bottom of the reactor vessel onto the floor of the containment building, it could initiate a hydrogen or steam explosion, which would then rupture the containment vessel, causing a rapid purge of the radionuclide content of the containment building atmosphere into the environment.44 This sequence involving the molten fuel penetrating the reactor vessel and the containment building is similar to what the nuclear industry calls the “Melt-through to China Syndrome,” a phrase picked up as the title for the film The China Syndrome, starring Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon, which was released just before the Three Mile Island meltdown.
The eventual distribution of radioactive elements is dependent upon several factors. If the zirconium fuel cladding oxidizes and burns, generating enormous quantities of heat, the radioactive plume could be elevated in the atmosphere to great heights and spread over a wide geographical area.45 If there is no zirconium burn, the fallout will be more intense because it will be distributed over a smaller surface area. The medical and ecological consequences of the meltdown will also be affected by the prevailing meteorological conditions, including wind speed and direction, atmospheric stability, inversion systems, and whether or not it is raining, because rain efficiently precipitates radioactive fallout.46
In the event of a meltdown, both the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency require an evacuation plan for all people living within a ten-mile radius of the reactor. (In an actual event, the NRC says that it would probably only evacuate a segment of that area. The EPA has no authority to order evacuations at all.) The plan is for an off-site alarm to go off thirty minutes after the event begins, which would allow time for the operators to determine the extent of the damage, timing would coincide with the initiation of the core melt. That would leave seventy-eight minutes from the alarm sounding to the beginning of the radioactive release.47
The 2003 census data estimated that 267,099 people reside within this ten-mile radius, although the transient population could increase that number by 25%.48 For those with nefarious motives, the best time for an attack would be the evening, under cover of darkness, and when the prevailing winds blow toward New York City.49
Prospective radiation doses are calculated in several ways. During the first week, doses of radiation will be incurred from:
• inhalation and direct exposure to the radioactive cloud;
• exposure to the radioactive particles that deposit on the ground, which emit large amounts of gamma radiation. This is called “groundshine.”
Beyond the first week, doses are calculated from:
• groundshine;
• inhalation of resuspended particles from the ground;
• consumption of contaminated food and water.50
The calculations are truly frightening, because people in the evacuation zone will receive enormously high doses of radiation, ranging from a mean of 198 rems to a possible peak of 1,490 rems. In midtown Manhattan, doses will range from a mean of 30 to a peak of 307 rems. The radiation dose at which 50% of the population will be expected to die ranges from 250–380 rems.51
High levels of radiation kill the actively dividing cells in the body—hair-, gut-, and blood-forming elements. Consequently, the symptoms that will be experienced by people in Westchester County and Manhattan include: acute loss of hair, severe nausea, vomiting and diarrhea, bleeding from every orifice—nose, mouth, gums, stomach, and bowel—and massive, overwhelming infection. This collection of symptoms was first experienced by Hiroshima victims and is called acute radiation sickness.
The number of early fatalities from this syndrome within the ten-mile evacuation zone will range from 2,440 to 11,500. If it is raining and the weather conditions maximize the fallout, peak fatalities could reach 26,200 in the ten-mile zone and 43,700 in the fifty-mile zone—this latter number including people in Manhattan.52
Late cancer deaths, which will occur two to sixty years later, range from 9,200 to 89,500 people within the ten-mile zone, and 28,100 to 518,000 people in the fifty-mile zone—more than half a million people.53 The early and late-stage fatalities can be reduced within the ten-mile zone if people take shelter from the radiation exposure in their houses, kindergartens, schools, and workplaces during the acute phases of the radioactive fallout. During the early stages of meltdown, isotopes with very short half-lives emit huge doses of radiation, and it is better for people to stay indoors. As the isotopes decay over several days, so the exposure relatively decreases.54
Evacuation tends to increase the doses received, because people are in non-airtight vehicles or on foot, inhaling the radioactive air and being exposed to the groundshine.55 It would seem prudent, therefore, for people in the ten-mile zone to shelter in their homes, offices, and schools during the acute radioactive phase. However, as stated above, this policy is not the one advocated by the NRC or the EPA, both of which require immediate evacuation.56 Thus, while the Indian Point nuclear power plants I and II operate at full tilt—in a country that insists on car seats and safety belts, no smoking, no swimming without a lifeguard, fire extinguishers and oxygen masks, life vests and air bags—citizens lack the most basic information about how best to protect themselves and their children in the event of a nuclear meltdown. Nor is there any official requirement to supply this information to the general population.57
Now imagine this scene. Over 300,000 people are running and driving away from the stricken reactor along winding Westchester roads, stuck at traffic lights and in traffic jams; all are in a state of panic, anxiety, and acute disarray, trying to reach their children at schools, their spouses and mates. Then they begin to taste a strange, metallic flavor in their mouths. They infer that each breath exposes them to deadly radioactive gases, the radio blasts out dire warnings, yet nobody knows what they are doing and nobody is in control.
And what about Manhattan? Millions of people trapped as the bridges and the Midtown, Lincoln, and Holland tunnels are totally blocked, hiding in their apartments, hardly daring to breathe.
If everyone took inert potassium iodide tablets as soon as they heard about the meltdown on the radio or TV, peak doses to their thyroids of radioactive iodine—one of the many isotopes in the deadly radioactive plume—could be reduced by 30%. It should therefore be mandatory that every person living within fifty miles of the Indian Point reactors stock potassium iodide in their medicine cabinets available to be taken at a moment’s notice.58
Yet the NRC requires that potassium iodide tablets be available only for the ten-mile-radius population,59 stipulating that “recommended consideration of potassium iodide distribution out to ten miles was adequate for protection of the public health and safety.”60 Compared to adults, children receive three times the thyroid dose from radioactive iodine because they have a higher respiratory rate and their thyroid is relatively small.61 Whereas adult thyroid doses in midtown Manhattan would range from 164 rems to a peak dose of 1,270 rems, the doses for five-year-old children range from 530 rems to an unbelievable 4,240 rems. At these extremely high doses, the thyroid tissue is simply destroyed, so these children would have to take thyroid replacement hormones for the rest of their lives.62 At lower doses that don’t cause ablation of the thyroid, the risk of childhood thyroid cancer in New York would correspond to the incidence in Belarus following Chernobyl. It is clear that the mandatory stocking of potassium iodide should occur throughout Westchester County and Manhattan. However, as previously stated it is important to note that the timely use of potassium iodide will only reduce the thyroid dose by 30% so the cancer risk to children and adults will still be elevated.
And radioactive iodine is just one of many deadly, long-lived isotopes in the radioactive plume, all of which migrate to different and specific organs of the body. Food grown in the area will remain radioactive for tens to hundreds of years.
The economic consequences of a meltdown at Indian Point would be stupendous. The financial capital of the world could be rendered virtually uninhabitable, with a possible $1.17 trillion to $2.12 trillion dollars in damages accruing from attempts at decontamination, the permanent condemnation of irretrievably radioactive property, and a simple lump sum compensatory payment to people forced to relocate temporarily or permanently as a result of the meltdown. Up to 11.1 million people might have to be permanently relocated.63 These financial estimates do not include the extraordinary economic consequences if the world’s financial capital were closed forever.64
This section describes the effects of a meltdown at only one Indian Point reactor, but the two reactors are closely aligned, and if the structural integrity of the second reactor were damaged in the attack or the external electricity supply of both reactors were disrupted, compounded by a failure of the backup power supplies, there could be a meltdown of not one but two reactors, which would compound the tragedy many times. Then of course if the three cooling pools were also ruptured, we would face a tragedy unprecedented in the history of the human race.65
Spent fuel pools, euphemistically called “swimming pools” by the industry, are typically constructed next to reactors to store massive amounts of high level radioactive waste. The United States has 103 commercial nuclear reactors, located at sixty-five sites, based in thirty-one states. Thirty-four of these are boiling water reactors (BWR) and sixty-nine are pressurized water reactors (PWR). An additional fourteen commercial reactors have been shut down and are being decommissioned. In total, there are sixty-five PWR pools and thirty-four BWR pools. Some reactors that are located at the same site, such as the Indian Point reactors, share “swimming pools.”66
Every year at Indian Point, for example, about 30 tons of intensely thermally and radioactively hot fuel is removed from the reactor core because it is so contaminated with fission products that it is no longer efficient. In general, these pools were originally designed to hold only moderate amounts of nuclear waste because it was assumed in the original days of reactor design that this material would be transferred to a reprocessing plant, the fuel rods would be chopped up into small segments, then they would be dissolved in concentrated nitric acid, from which plutonium and uranium would be extracted to be recycled in the manufacture of more electricity.
However, President Carter put a stop to this notion in 1977 because he realized that reprocessing by the United States would encourage other countries to do the same, and extraction of plutonium from radioactive fuel sets a dangerous precedent because it is the fuel for atomic and hydrogen bombs. In response, the Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act in 1982, pledging that the federal government would provide, at its expense, a deep underground storage facility for commercial spent fuel. Transfer of the fuel to this repository was scheduled to commence in 1998.
The Department of Energy then identified a so-called suitable mountain in Nevada called Yucca Mountain, which has subsequently been drilled and excavated to receive the waste. Apart from the fact that the people of Nevada are adamantly opposed to the notion of a radioactive Yucca Mountain, so many technical and scientific problems have plagued the project that the site may never be ready to accept the waste. The most recent estimate for a start date is 2015. (Problems with Yucca Mountain are addressed in the next chapter.)
As the reactors continue manufacturing ever more nuclear waste, and the swimming pools become overloaded, the NRC has licensed reactor owners to re-rack and over-pack the fuel, approaching densities similar to those in the reactor itself. This is potentially a very dangerous situation, because there is a chance that the densely packed fuel could reach critical mass, triggering a meltdown in the cooling pool. In order to prevent a criticality, this “dense-packed” fuel is now maintained in a subcritical state by enclosing each fuel assembly in a metal box made of the neutron-absorbing material boron. But in the event of a loss-of-coolant accident, convective air-cooling, which is very effective in open-spaced pools, would be ineffective in a dense-packed pool. Even without going critical, the spent fuel can overheat and melt if the cooling water is lost rapidly enough. Indian Point is about to begin implementing dry cask storage. Its cooling pools have been re-racked and re-racked, and are overloaded.67
These spent fuel pools house enormous amounts of radiation. There is almost twice as much cesium 137 in a ton of spent fuel as in a ton of reactor fuel. (Reactor cores each contain about 5 million curies of cesium in 80 tons of uranium, whereas spent fuel pools contain 35 million curies of cesium incorporated in 400 tons of spent fuel.) A meltdown in a spent fuel pool could be catastrophic—much worse than a meltdown at a nuclear reactor. Of all the radioactive elements in a spent fuel pool, cesium 137 is the most worrisome because it accounts for 50% of the radioactive inventory in fuel that is ten years old.68 As we know, cesium is a volatile isotope. Readily dispersible, with a thirty-year half-life, it is radioactive for 600 years. But other nasty isotopes would be released as well, including plutonium and all its alpha-emitting relatives, plus cerium, technetium, tritium, strontium 90, and many others. The studies below of casualties caused by a pool melt refer to the medical effects of cesium 137 only, so they are actually gross underestimates over the long term.
The NRC performed a study in 1997, which calculated that a fire at a spent fuel pool could produce between 54,000 to 143,000 cancer deaths and would render 2,000 to 70,000 square kilometres of agricultural land uninhabitable. In addition, $117 billion to $566 billion would need to be spent evacuating hundreds of thousands of people from contaminated areas. The study, by Alveraz and others, determined that if just 10% of the cooling pool cesium 137 were released by fire, the area contaminated would be five to nine times larger than the area affected to a similar degree by Chernobyl. If 100% were released, the contamination would affect an area about seventy times larger than that of Chernobyl.
Amazingly, many spent fuel pools at boiling water reactors are built atop the reactor building or above ground level, making them very vulnerable to plane crashes and other terrorist attacks. A turbine shaft of a high-speed jet fighter or a large passenger jet could easily penetrate the wall of the cooling pool, destabilize the pool supports, or even overturn the pool, allowing the cooling water to drain away. A fuel-air explosion from aerosolized jet fuel could create a fireball that would collapse the building above the pool, destroying the pool. A very hot fireball alone could also evaporate some of the cooling pool water.
Other unpredictable events hover menacingly over these radioactive Pandora’s boxes. Earthquakes threaten to disrupt the fuel assembly geometry, and one of the spent fuel casks that are routinely passed across the top of the pool could accidentally be dropped, severely damaging the pool. These pools are also extremely vulnerable to being punctured by a shaped-charge antitank missile.
Once the water in the pool drops below the top of the fuel, the gamma radiation would be so intense—10,000 rems at the edge of the pool and hundreds of rems in certain other areas—that lethal doses would be incurred in less than one hour. This would prevent any efforts by staff to intervene or to contain the situation. Amazingly, the NRC has virtually ignored the dangers that these cooling pools present. It does not require reactor operators to prepare for any of these emergencies, either with redundant safety systems or emergency backup water-cooling systems.
The cooling pool problem is further potentiated because many utilities now disgorge all their fuel into the cooling pool every twelve to eighteen months in order to inspect the reactor and its parts in a short space of time. This new operation is expedient and is performed in the name of “efficiency” or saving money. But it makes the situation at the cooling pools more tenuous because the fuel is intensely hot, and a loss-of-coolant accident at this time would be catastrophic. Before this new “efficiency” model arrived on the scene, only 30% of the highly radioactive spent fuel from the reactor core was ever placed into the cooling pool at a given time.
If loss of coolant water occurs at a cooling pool, the boron boxes that house the densely packed spent fuel block the free circulation of air among the fuel rods. In such an event, a freshly discharged reactor core in the pool would generate so much heat within one hour that the zircaloy cladding would rupture as the fuel elements expanded. When it reached 900 degrees centigrade, the zircaloy would burst into flame.
Because these events are so potentially catastrophic in nature, it is imperative that the Congress, the nuclear industry, and the NRC decide immediately to remedy the situation. Alveraz and his colleagues have arrived at a temporary solution that would mitigate an enormous radioactive release from a spent fuel pool in the event of an accident or terrorist attack. Their plan directs that fuel five years old or older be removed from the pool and placed in dry cask storage at the reactor site, removing the risk of an attack or accident to a huge collection of volatile radioactivity in a single site. A transfer of all spent fuel older than five years would reduce the cesium inventory in the pool to a quarter its current size, or two (rather than eight) times that in the reactor core. On average, thirty-five casks would be necessary at each reactor.
Currently, thirty-three reactors have resorted to dry cask storage and twenty-one are in the process of setting this up. This would then allow the utilities to return to open-rack storage of their fuel rods, thus allowing air to circulate freely between the fuel rods, affording some degree of safety and cooling factor in the event of an accident or attack. The dry casks, which are passively cooled by the natural convection of air powered by the innate heat of the rods, are stored on concrete pads in the open. As such, they too are vulnerable to terrorist attack, but the release of cesium from a single cask would be very small compared with a fuel pool melt. However, should a powerful bomb explode over a fleet of dry casks, many of them could be ruptured.
At the moment 200 casks a year are being fabricated, which could store 2,000 tons of spent fuel. Spent fuel that is less than five years of age is unsuitable to be stored in dry casks because it is still so hot that it could spontaneously melt. If all but the last five years of the discharges were to be dry stored, 300 dry casks per year would be needed to unload 35,000 tons of high-level waste over the next ten years. If this does not take place, the total radioactive inventory in the fuel pools is predicted to be a huge 60,000 tons by 2010, of which about 45,000 tons will be in the dense-packed cooling pools. The danger with densely-packed pools is that if they lose their cooling water, the fuel could catch fire, whereas the fuel in dry casks is less concentrated and therefore less likely to burn.
Nuclear power plant owners will obviously not want to cover the extra expense of dry cask storage because in a deregulated market they will be unable to pass this cost onto the consumers without fear of being undersold by competing fossil-fuelled plants. In order to prevent delay in the implementation of these guidelines, the federal government should offer to underwrite the expenses for these storage casks and to pay for the necessary security upgrades. Once again, the nuclear industry will be leaning upon the federal government to cover its expenses.
Such disaster scenarios are not limited to the United States, of course. In England soon after the 9/11 attacks in New York, Greenpeace commissioned a series of three reports that examined the results of an aerial terrorist attack on the nuclear complex at Sellafield. (The Sellafield complex comprises nuclear reactors, reprocessing plants, and high-level waste storage tanks containing 1550 cubic meters of liquid waste plus tens of tons of separated plutonium.) To their horror, they discovered that three-and-a-half-million people could be killed. Greenpeace was so shocked by these results that they sat on the data for over a year, unsure what to do about them, before they decided to release it. Dr. Frank Barnaby, a former scientist at the British nuclear establishment at Aldermaston, concluded that an attack by a jumbo jet onto the Sellafield plant could cause a radioactive fireball over a mile high. It would only take four minutes for a plane to be diverted from its regular flight path to the Sellafield nuclear complex in Cumbria and, in the event of an attack, twenty-five times as much radiation as that emitted from Chernobyl would likely be released.69