Introduction: Costs of Secrecy in the Nuclear Fuel Cycle

I think that we must understand that each time we introduce a new bit of technology, we invent, at the same time, a specific accident. The invention of the ship was the invention of the shipwreck. The invention of atomic electricity was the invention of Chernobyl.

—Paul Virilio (Post Modern, French theorist)

Introduction

This introduction presents an update on recent developments in the nuclear fuel cycle so that we can examine the serious consequences inherent in the nuclear electric and weapons options. Nuclear power, for example, can no longer be regarded as "clean" energy, despite the claims of politicians and the utilities.

The Tragedy in Japan

Before this volume was completed, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and related tsunami hit the east coast of Japan. The next day, March 12, 2011, nine Japanese nuclear reactors were placed under states of emergency—three at Fukushima Daiichi, three at Fukushima Daini, and three at Onagawa. All are located north-northeast of Tokyo, and all are the earlier type boiling water reactors. The station was designed to withstand a powerful earthquake and also a tsunami, but not the two occurring together.

Three of the Daiichi reactors were in critical condition immediately after the earthquake when the plants lost normal electric power and backup diesel power needed to cool down the reactors. Mass evacuations followed a hydrogen explosion in a containment building covering one of the three reactors. On March 13, 2011, the Associated Press reported a "probable partial meltdown" at a second Daiichi reactor. On March 14, a nonoperating fourth reactor caught fire and released additional radiation. By March 17, the Los Angeles Times reported that many persons isolated by the tsunami near the Daiichi facility were unable to escape the increasing levels of radiation. Authorities and others were simply afraid to help them. Almost twenty thousand Japanese were reported dead or missing by September 2011.

In all the chaos and panic that followed, much of the official worry centered on Reactor 3 at Daiichi because it was fueled with MOX, a mixed oxide combining uranium and highly toxic plutonium. By early March 28, CNN announced, and the Arizona Republic (2011) confirmed, that plutonium had been discovered in water outside one of the reactors, suggesting a breach of containment. With loss of reactor core containment, nuclear technology would have to be carefully reconsidered. The disaster in Japan has underlined the dangers of nuclear power (Robinson, March 16, 2011).

As we continued writing, the consequences of the Fukushima accident had begun to accumulate. Yukiya Amano, head of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), described the accident as extremely serious. Fires, explosions, three partial meltdowns, and numerous radioactive leaks struck four of the six units at the Daiichi plant. "With its mangled machinery and partly melted reactor cores, bringing the complex under control is a monstrous job," reported the Associated Press on March 22. Radiation from the tsunami-damaged plant caused Tokyo's tap water to exceed safe-drinking standards for infants, and levels of radioactive iodine were more than twice what is considered safe for babies. By March 27, Japan's government admitted a series of mistakes by the Daiichi plant operator. For instance, workers were sent into the plant without protective footwear, resulting in two workers suffering skin burns when they stepped into water that was ten thousand times more radioactive than levels normally found near reactors. On March 28, a Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) spokesperson reported that a new test had found radiation levels hundred thousand times above normal (Associated Press, 2011). Robots were used later to confirm the high radiation levels (Yamaguchi, April 19, 2011).

Further consequences of the Fukushima accident include: the Swiss government imposing an immediate freeze on plans to build and replace nuclear power plants, Germany's decision to stop using nuclear energy because of its inherent risks (Baetz, March 27, 2011), and the sudden realization that property and liability insurance does not cover nuclear calamities (Wiles, March 27, 2011). In the event of a nuclear accident, the potential catastrophe is so large as to be almost immeasurable. Yet Iran began loading fuel rods into its first nuclear power plant, scheduled to be operating soon (Riyadi, 2010: A3).

Thus, the Fukushima Daiichi accident became the worst nuclear crisis Japan had faced since the World War II bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was also the first time that such a serious nuclear threat had been raised since the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion in 1986. Exposure to such high levels of radiation can cause radiation poisoning, resulting in substantial damage to human and animal tissue, premature aging, and possible death. Prolonged exposure to lower radiation levels is also associated with increased risk of ill health, in general (Kotlabai, 2005).

Later, it was discovered that Unit 1 at Fukushima had been damaged more severely than originally thought (Yamaguchi, May 13, 2011). Newer data revealed that the water level in the core of Unit 1 was much lower than earlier suspected, leaving the fuel rods (that were still intact) fully exposed. These findings also indicate a greater than expected radioactive leak in that particular pressure vessel. This hindered the work to bring Unit 1 under control, as the president of TEPCO resigned in disgrace (Kageyama, May 21, 2011).

On June 26, 2011, the Japanese government held a public hearing on whether or not the reactor in Sage Prefecture should be the first of the nation's nuclear plants to be reactivated after the Daiichi disaster (Ozawa, 2012: 7). This was billed as a chance to gauge local opinion about nuclear power. Yet the hearing turned out to be less of a public forum and more of a piece of badly orchestrated political theater. On company orders, employees of Kyushu Electric Power sent in e-mails pretending to be citizens urging restarting of the reactor (Ozawa, 2012: 8). Nuclear secrecy breeds deception.

Subsequently, the Japanese government, power companies, and some of the media cooperated to withhold information and downplay nuclear dangers. For instance, Tokyo officials delayed releasing data from computer models that predicted the spread of radiation from the Fukushima plant. As Yoichi Funabashi, leader of the Independent Investigation Commission on the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident, told the Asahi Shimbun, "The government later decided the public were still children who would panic if given the true information" (Ozawa, 2012: 8).

Meanwhile, Japanese citizens were doing their own research. People posted radiation measures online and learned about the relative dangers of cesium, strontium, and plutonium isotopes, internal and external radiation, and the difference between sieverts and Becquerels (more on these terms later). "It was the beginning of a grassroots movement that has reinvigorated activism in Japan and given birth to new forms of political resistance" (Ozawa, 2012: 8). However, the most powerful protest in Japan might be that of a solitary man, Naoto Matsumura. He is the Fukushima farmer, who has refused to leave his home well within the nuclear exclusion zone, a protest that has meant exposing himself and his farm animals to potentially lethal levels of radiation. Mr. Matsumura sees himself among the hibakusha, the "bombed ones" at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

More recently, an internal audit has confirmed observers' concerns that many of the US Environmental Protection Agency's (USEPA) radiation monitors were out of service at the height of the Fukushima meltdown. This finding raises serious questions about the federal government's ability to respond to nuclear emergencies and to alert the public of their consequences (Global Security Newswire, December 21, 2011). Further, an April 19, 2012, report by the EPA Inspector General's Office (IG) casts doubt on the agency's controversial claims that radiation from Fukushima did not pose any public health threat on US soil, said Daniel Hirsh, a nuclear policy lecturer at the University of California, Santa Cruz (Guarino, April 23, 2012: 1).

The IG's report details problems with the EPA's "Rad Net" monitoring system. This web of detectors is intended to monitor environmental radioactivity in the United States to provide data for assessing public exposure and environmental impacts resulting from nuclear emergencies. The IG report says that at the time of the Fukushima crisis, "this critical infrastructure asset" was impaired because many monitors were broken and others had not undergone necessary filter changes in so long that they could not be used to detect accurately "real-time" radiation levels (Guarino, April 23, 2012: 2). In addition, advocacy groups charged that repeated EPA statements that Fukushima fallout on US soil was far below "any level of concern" were misleading, given that the agency data showed it had detected radiation levels in the US milk and rainwater well above its own regulatory limits for drinking water.

Despite our reservations regarding the quality of USEPA monitoring processes, radioactive isotopes I-131, Cs-134, or Cs-137, products of uranium fission, were measured at approximately 20 percent of 167 sampled National Atmospheric Deposition Program monitoring sites in North America after the Fukushima accident on March 12, 2011. Technically speaking, samples were analyzed for the period of March 8 through April 5 and calculated 1- or 2-week radionuclide deposition fluxes at thirty-five sites from Alaska to Vermont ranged from 0.47 to 5,100 Bq per square meter during the sampling period of March 15 through April 15, 2011. Yet no fission-product isotopes were measured in National Atmospheric Deposition samples obtained during March 8-15, 2011, prior to the arrival of contaminated air in North America (Wetherbee, Debey, Nilles, Lehemann, and Gay, 2012).

Dr. Kiyoshi Kurokawa, MD, chair of the Health and Global Policy Institute, received the 2012 Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Dr. Kurokawa was honored in February 2013 "for his contribution to remarkable stewardship of an independent investigation into the causes of the Fukushima catastrophe" and "for his courage in challenging some of the most ingrained conventions of Japanese government and society" (AAAS, 2012). The AAAS (2012) said that the investigation "was frank in its condemnation of the negligence leading to the accident, the many errors committed following the first signs of trouble at the plants, and the failure to take a range of protective steps at a nuclear facility with known risk factors." The report identified failures resulting from decisions made by the power plant operator (TEPCO), the government, the regulators, and even Japanese society itself.

Questioning Nuclear Technology

Professor Mark Reader, a political theorist, published a highly prescient op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, March 27, 1989. He said,

"The prime difficulty with nuclear power today is the same as it was before the Three Mile Island reactor accident ... A radiation-producing energy source is simply ungovernable by any ordinary human measure. This is true whether one thinks about fission-produced electricity or bombs."

Dr. Reader went on to say that several challenges arise for any society dependent on the fissioned atom. In summary:

1. We must find a way to protect more of the Earth's limited freshwater supplies and arable land from radioactive contamination.

2. We must insulate ever-changing social and ecological systems from unwanted interactions with dangerous and accumulating radioactive wastes.

3. We must find a way to offset the many physical and mental health problems that emerge in the aftermath of "unscheduled" releases of radioactive materials anywhere along the overlapping nuclear fuel and arms networks.

4. We need to ask if there is a way to justify to an increasingly skeptical public the morality of randomly passing on cancer deaths, cancer incidence, and radiation-related birth defects to innocent persons over the generations.

5. We must reduce the often disastrous consequences of human error within the nuclear weapons and fuel systems without passing on life or death decisions to equally fallible, and often less flexible, computers.

6. We need to halt the proliferation of thermonuclear and biochemical weapons, as well as the antidemocratic imperatives they engender, by severing atomic weapons production from the commercial nuclear power industries.

Professor Reader further argued that even if we manage to accomplish all these goals, we still need to shield nonnuclear critics from economic, social, and political reprisals so that their warnings can be used to forestall predictable disasters in the future.

Respected environmental groups, such as the Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Worldwatch Institute, caution that the world may be awash in plutonium in the very near future as nuclear nations reprocess highly toxic spent reactor fuel to either extend their energy supplies and/or make atomic bombs.

Thus, nuclear accidents, such as those at Fernald, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, tell citizens that in return for the Faustian promise of an infinite supply of energy, wealth, and military security, they must saddle their children with the silent killer—radiation. And so, decades after what might have been the beginning of the end of the nuclear age (see Reader's Atom's Eve, 1980), we may slip deeper into its nuclear nightmares, humiliated into accepting the rule of a nuclear elite that we alternately worship and dread.

Taking Einstein's injunction seriously—that we need to change our mode of thinking in order to survive the Atomic Age—probably requires us to abandon the nuclear "game" entirely and to link the quest for nuclear disarmament to the delivery of safe, local, and ecologically sound energy systems.

Fukushima tells us that the lessons of Fernald and Chernobyl remain as important as they always were. That is, we should (1) think about the nuclear fuel cycle in making energy choices and (2) stop demonizing critical thinking as it may prove essential for our common survival. Further, nonnuclear experts and whistle-blowers should be included in the nuclear regulatory process globally. Considering the many prior warnings the Japanese authorities had about the instability of the Fukushima reactors from nuclear critics, it is clear that electric company executives and government officials have used their near-monopoly control of information about reactor performance to override the public good whenever critics have raised questions about reactor and fuel cycle safety (Glionna and Hall, 2011).

We hope that reading this book will help a post-Fukushima world more clearly understand why a nuclear-free civilization is imperative for the continuance of human health and happiness.

Health Effects

Regarding health effects associated with the nuclear fuel cycle, recent research results are informative. In 2007, the German Register of Child Cancer gathered data from regions near twenty-one of their reactors or former reactors. These scientists discovered that children under the age of five, living near nuclear power (electric) stations, contracted leukemia at a rate 60 percent higher than the German national average (see Appendix A, pp. 159-163). Given similar findings at all twenty-one German power stations, a radiation-linked cause is highly likely in every case.

In Russia, the recent health effects research is even more startling. Alexey Yablokov et al. (2010) found that nearly 1 million people globally have died from radiation exposure released by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear (reactor) disaster. These authors examined more than five thousand published articles, mostly written in Slavic language and never before available in English.

Yablokov et al. explain that the two explosions at Chernobyl reactor number four tore the top from the reactor and its containment building and exposed the reactor core. The resulting fire sent a plume of radioactive fallout over large parts of the Western Soviet Union, Europe, and the Northern Hemisphere. Large areas of the Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia had to be evacuated. Further, nations outside the Former Soviet Union received large doses of radioactive fallout, especially Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Austria, Romania, Greece, and parts of the United Kingdom and Germany. Radioactive fallout from Chernobyl reached the United States and Canada 9 days after the disaster.