Working in Nuclear while Muslim

Working in Nuclear while Muslim

Since the inception of nuclear energy, anti-nuclear critics have been warning about the vulnerability of nuclear power plants to sabotage. Recent events indicate that we are moving closer to a period of global instability in which state governments cannot protect against non-state actors who will deliberately or unintentionally create a nuclear disaster.

This week a group of Tatar radicals attacked electricity transmission lines in Ukraine which deliver power to Crimea. The government of Ukraine has a well-known dispute with Russia over its claim to Crimea, but it likely had no intention of committing such a war crime that would endanger the lives of millions of civilians and create further tensions with Russia. The narrow-minded attackers were apparently unaware of the effect their assault would have on Ukrainian nuclear power plants, but nonetheless two of them were cut off from the electrical grid and had to use backup power. A report in Russia Today quoted a Ukrainian energy company official about the seriousness of the situation:

The apparent act of sabotage in Ukraine’s Kherson region forced an emergency power unloading at several Ukrainian nuclear power plants, which can be extremely dangerous, according to the first deputy director of Ukraine’s energy company Ukrenergo, Yuriy Katich. [1]

It was backup power that was famously lost at Fukushima-Daiichi, leading to the meltdown of three reactor cores and a melting of spent fuel in the Reactor 4 building. Thus these plants in Ukraine are just one step away from meltdown, but it is likely in this case that backup power can be maintained until the transmission towers are repaired. Yet the incident highlights how things will go worse in the future when a similar event occurs in a failing state where fuel for backup generators can't be supplied in time and the main transmission lines can't be repaired.

Social instability is also a factor now in France. The attacks in Paris on November 13, 2015 highlighted the inability of security agencies to identify and break up groups of French citizens who are intent on committing acts of mass violence. If they couldn't be found in the suburbs of Paris, how can we be sure that they will be found among people who work at nuclear power plants? This issue came to light in a report published in Le Journal du Dimanche on November 22, 2015 (translated below). It was reported that French security agencies have been using religious affiliation as a reason to deny access to nuclear power plants.

Everyone would like to keep NPPs safe from deliberate acts of destruction, but there are serious problems involved in trying to eliminate all risks. The security agencies are using affiliations as the basis of exclusion, without any official charge of criminal intent or conspiracy. Thus if an enterprise is so dangerous that large segments of society have to be denied the right to work in it, in the vain hope that doing so will prevent sabotage, it is worth asking whether this enterprise should exist at all. Is there a safer way to boil water or to produce electricity without boiling water?

______________

Nuclear power can't avoid Islamic radicals*

translation of:

Le nucléaire n'échappe pas aux dérives islamistes

Le Journal du Dimanche (Sunday Journal)

by Matthieu Pechberty

November 22, 2015

Radicalization has affected nuclear power plants operated by EDF (Électricité de France). Authorities have already withdrawn access for dozens of employees since the beginning of the year.

Since the attacks [November 13, 2015], state authorities are on the lookout as they face a rise in Islamic radicalization at EDF sites. During a meeting of the High Commission for Transparency and Information on Nuclear Security (HCTISN), the high commissioner for defense of nuclear security, Christophe Quintin, acknowledged, without being more precise, that employees are being refused access to nuclear power plants notably for reasons related to Islamic radicalization. Michel Lallier, representative of the CGT [labor union] (Confédération Général de Travail) confirmed, "He certainly spoke of radicalization, even if his response was evasive. We'll never know exactly what the security concern was."

At this meeting, Mr. Quintin's assistant, Colonel Riac, emphasized the justification for the lack of transparency of the authorities. A Greenpeace representative who was at the meeting, Yannick Rousselet, said, "He clearly said he would not state the reasons for the denial of access to an employee. It could be because he frequented a radical milieu. He even acknowledged that these people have not committed any offense and the judgment process is somewhat arbitrary." The two officials were contacted, but did not return calls.

An employee at Flamanville targeted by DGSI

On November 4th, Christophe Quintin made an important announcement. At a lunch conference devoted to information on nuclear sites, one of the attendees reported that Mr. Quintin told the invited group that he estimated "the services eject one person per week for the phenomenon of radicalization." He explained that this surveillance applied to French workers but less so to foreign workers and workers subcontracted by EDF. Each year, the services of the state make 100,000 administrative inquiries for 73,000 workers (of which 23,000 are contractors)

In Flamanville, an employee of EDF told his story. Clément Reynaud, chemical engineer for ten years, converted to Islam in 2010 and requested site management in 2012 to provide a place for him to pray. After lengthy examination, EDF, which knew of no similar cases, gave its approval. However, the security forces at the site alerted the local offices of information services, which then became involved in the case. Eighteen months later, Mr. Reynaud became the secretary of the association that manages the mosque at Cherbourg. A police officer in Normandy explained, "His file was taken to the national level by the DGSI (Direction générale de la sécurité intérieure). The case was judged to be serious." On December 1st, Clément Reynaud took a one-year leave of absence in order to create his own personal coaching business for Muslims. He explained, "I want to help them organize their lives to make time for the five daily prayers and for reading the Koran."

In August 2014, a Muslim engineer employed by an EDF subcontractor was denied access to the nuclear power plant at Nogent-sur-Seine. There again, the prefecture did not explain its motives for the decision, but religion was at the heart of it. One year ago, Belgian authorities discovered that a person who left to fight in Syria had spent several years working as an engineer at the Doel NPP with access to the reactor. The plant is operated by the French company Engie (formerly GDF Suez).

* The headline in the original article used the term dérives, which has a softer connotation than radicals, but it is difficult to find a similar term that is in common usage in English. Dérive implies one who has gone off the correct path, drifted, or become misguided. These terms perhaps should be used in English to describe those who commit violence in the name of religion, but instead the terms radical and extremist are more common.

Note:

[1] "Ukraine nuclear power plants ‘dangerously’ without power as towers feeding energy to Crimea blown up," Russia Today, November 23, 2015, https://www.rt.com/news/323060-ukraine-nuclear-plants-danger/

Rolling Stewardship for a Tortoise?

Imagine, if you will, a tortoise. You are a forty-year-old parent and your ten-year-old daughter brings home a baby tortoise that she wants to keep as a pet. You permit her to keep it, and the creature quickly becomes a most cherished member of the family. After some time goes by, you realize that this is no ordinary turtle. It’s one of the famous Galapagos tortoises that live for 170 years. Suddenly your daughter is very distraught that no one alive in the family now will be around to take care of the tortoise in the last half of her life. Not only is it a little stressful for your daughter to contemplate her own mortality at this young age, but it’s unusual that the whole family has been forced to consider its obligation to care for a living thing into the distant future.

Image by Catriona MacCallum via Wikimedia Commons

In order to put your daughter’s mind at ease, you promise that you are going to make sure that someone will always be there to care for the beloved tortoise. You come up with the concept of rolling stewardship, the ongoing care of a responsibility across generations. Instructions will be written down, grandchildren will be taught, the tortoise will be honored like a sacred creature in family tradition. But still it is not so simple because you realize that when it comes down to it, no one knows what is going to happen. It is impossible to give a 100% guarantee that the tortoise will be protected long after you and your living kin are gone from this earth.

Obviously, I’m using this story as a way to relate the problem of nuclear waste to something mundane that can be grasped as a matter of simple common sense. The tortoise management problem makes it clear that we have no control over what will happen after our death, and that goes without saying how little control we have over our destinies while we are alive. We have no financial incentive to say, “Yes, absolutely, we can guarantee that the tortoise will be cared for. Our tortoise protection culture is infallible.” To say such a thing would be laughable. Yet when a nuclear “safety” bureaucracy utters such inane promises about its ability to control the distant future, the public is expected to accept them as reasonable, and quite often it does.

The problem of the tortoise does not involve a high consequence risk. If she dies an untimely death in her second century, that’s a tragedy for her and the family that loved her, but not for an entire ecosystem. In contrast, when it comes to nuclear waste, we need the 100% guarantee, but it is, of course, impossible. If someone tells you that a plan to bury nuclear waste is safe, just remember this one self-evident truth that can be perceived by anyone with a normally functioning brain: no one knows what is going to happen.

Native American myth called North America Turtle Island

Unfortunately, institutions are like organisms that care only about their own survival. They are programmed to perpetuate their own existence. When simple logic and facts get in the way, they adopt the four-D strategy: divert, deflect, deny and deceive, and that last item on the list includes heavy doses of self-deception as well. This should not be surprising. We should get over being outraged. We should not expect the nuclear industry (which includes its supposed safety regulators) to suddenly understand it has to do the right thing and fold up its operations. We should realize that these organizations are going to do what they do until they are stopped by an opposing force.

If we put aside concerns about accidents and costs, we can see that the unsolvable problem of nuclear waste disposal is enough reason to put an end to nuclear power. Who would continue to use a toilet that doesn’t flush? The public has given its assent to nuclear power and nuclear weapons because it has been told that nuclear waste burial is the solution and it will be achieved soon, always sometime soon. This promise works because it makes intuitive sense that this should be the solution. Throughout human evolution burial has sufficed as a way to deal with unwanted substances. Out of sight was out of mind. The earth could deal with whatever we threw in it because our waste was, until the Industrial Revolution, always organic.

The nuclear industry now seems to be getting nervous that the public is waking up to the fact that the burial solution just doesn’t exist. Projects like the Yucca Mountain project in Nevada have failed partly because of NIMBY political objections, but more importantly because of legitimate technical conclusions that the long-term stability of the waste containers and the geological features of the site could not be guaranteed. When confused, repeat the mantra: no one knows what is going to happen.

But why should you take it from me? Listen to what these highly qualified scientists have to say about the subject:

1. Jean-Pierre Petit, former director of France’s Centre national de la recherche scientifique in an interview broadcast on La Voix de la Russie (my translation) speaking about French plans to bury nuclear waste in Bure, France:

… the storage of wastes with long half-lives poses acute problems. In general, there are two sorts of wastes. There are those that can be called “passive,” like asbestos, and those that can be called “active” that evolve chemically, decompose, and eventually produce flammable gas, and heat. Nuclear wastes obviously belong in the second “active” category. They release heat by their  exo-energetic transmutation. So storage sites require powerful ventilation systems that need to be maintained for centuries. Some wastes that are plastic decompose relatively quickly, releasing hydrogen. When the air reaches 4% hydrogen, it becomes explosive.

In the year 2000, they began to store various types of waste, one of which was mercury, underground at a mine in Alsace. In 2002, a fire broke out. They wanted to get everything out, but they realized it could never be recovered… A fire in a mine is more complicated to manage than a fire above ground. It’s like an oven. The heat has no way out. A small fire can quickly result in elevated temperatures at which the containers begin to melt.

In Bure, a fire would be catastrophic. The wastes are vitrified (in a glass-like state), but glass is not really a solid. It’s a very viscous fluid. At ordinary temperatures, it can do the job for thousands of years. It is not soluble. But the weak point of glass is its low resistance to heat. At 600°C, the glass will flow and liberate its contents. Underground, this temperature could be reached very quickly. In the mine there are also support structures made of metal and reinforced concrete.  Concrete melts above 1100°. The clay in Bure is also saturated with water. It couldn’t withstand being heated above 70°. The creators of the CIGEO project have great faith in a material called bentonite with which they hope to seal the caverns. It’s a particular type of clay that can absorb water and dilate, but it has the same problem as clay in terms of heat resistance.

Fire hazards come not only from the concern about hydrogen explosions. The plan at Bure is to deposit some elements treated with bitumen, but bitumen becomes fluid at 60° and flammable at 300°. Any way you look at it, this project is absurd.

The only thing to do now is to leave everything on the surface, even for centuries if necessary, as a way to make them less toxic by transmutation. There is no hurry. But the government and the barons of nuclear are exerting an enormous pressure to begin burial by 2015. They want to hide all signs of the nuisance that has accumulated for half a century and given nuclear energy such a bad image. If the CIGEO project is realized, this will be a precedent for nucleopaths the world over, and they will all follow suit, saying, “après moi, le déluge!”

(A more complete translation of this interview is here).

2. A similarly persuasive argument was made by Chris Busby in his study of Swedish plans for the burial of nuclear waste. The Wikispooks article on Busby’s career summed up the problem this way:

… Busby calculated that the sealed canisters would explode due to helium released by the decay of alpha emitters within the 100,000 year period required by the Swedish environmental court and indeed probably within 1000 years. This matter is still unresolved. He pointed out that the release of the waste would make the Baltic area uninhabitable since it equated to several thousand Chernobyl accidents worth of radioactivity.”

(More on this topic in this video interview and in Busby’s published report on Forsmark).

   The makers of these nuke waste disposal dreams could always say that these criticisms were merely speculation, but then American plans for burial came to a grinding halt in February 2014 when the WIPP facility in New Mexico experienced an explosion that has shut it down indefinitely. At a recent public hearing in Ontario for plans to create an underground suppository there, Canadian regulators were heard to say that the failure at WIPP occurred because there was a “degraded safety culture.” In a report in local media on the hearings, a critic of the proposal said, “WIPP was once said to be ‘state of the art’ and comparable to the OPG DGR [Ontario Power Generation Deep Geologic Repository], but since the incident, OPG has ‘thrown WIPP under the bus.’”

The Canadian nuclear industry’s response was a bizarre defense because the high likelihood of a degraded safety culture over time is precisely the reason people oppose nuclear energy. The Canadian regulators’ hubris is almost more troubling than the actual disaster at WIPP. Assuming they do have such a great safety culture in the present moment, there is no guarantee it will stay this way 20, 100 or 10,000 years into the future. All it would take is a government keen on budget cuts and hostile to unbiased scientific research, but hey, that would never happen, would it? When in doubt, just repeat: no one knows what is going to happen.

Every time we build and operate a nuclear reactor, we do so with the implicit assumption that we shall forever be able to contain the radioactive poisons we create in the reactor. In doing so, we presume that we can predict the future for centuries and millennia to come, that we can isolate and protect nuclear reactors and nuclear waste from every single catastrophe that nature and man can inflict, including earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, asteroids, human error, terrorism and war. History has already shown us that such assumptions are indeed both foolish and futile. Steven Starr, “Lessons from Fukushima and Chernobyl for US Public Health” Physicians for Social Responsibility, April, 2011, p. 11. http://www.psr.org/assets/pdfs/fukushima-and-chernobyl.pdf

Asteroid Impact, Asteroid Tsunamis and Nuclear Facilities

Tsunamis are waves in the ocean or lakes generated by abrupt vertical movement of the seafloor or lake floor by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides, and, rarely, asteroid impact. 

City of Richmond, British Columbia, Canada

There are things that are important enough that you don't tolerate any risk. You have to have data to work with to generate reliable risk estimates. It just doesn't work for rare but catastrophic events.

- David Schindler

I wrote most of this post (below the line) a few months after the asteroid strike on Russia in February 2013. At the time I thought it might have been a little excessive to worry about such a low-probability event, but recent news makes me feel vindicated. This really is a problem that our society should wake up to because it highlights once again one of the many ways that the nuclear legacy has many shocks and surprises in store for future generations. Benjamin Hart, in The Huffington Post, reported today:

Bad news, earthlings. A former NASA scientist says it's mere happenstance that an Armageddon-style asteroid hasn't hit a densely populated area in the last few years. On Tuesday, the B612 Foundation, which is devoted to preventing the next deep impact, will present data from a nuclear-weapons test warning satellite showing that far more asteroids have hit earth in the past few years than previously thought, the organization announced on its website.

The data, collected from a nuclear missile detection system that picks up large blasts on earth, shows that since 2001, asteroids have caused 26 explosions on the scale of an atomic bomb. 

“This data shows that asteroid impacts are NOT rare, but actually 3-10 times more common than we previously thought,” Ed Lu, one of the astronauts working on the project, said in a statement. "The fact that none of these asteroid impacts shown in the video was detected in advance is proof that the only thing preventing a catastrophe from a 'city-killer' sized asteroid is blind luck."

It is interesting that the scientists tell us that the asteroid would be comparable to a nuclear weapon, but they don't seem to be thinking about the other nuclear implications of an asteroid strike. An asteroid impact on a large city would also be likely to take out nuclear weapons and/or nuclear power plants and spent fuel storage pools. The result would be much more than the destruction of a city. It would likely include an event as severe as, or more severe than Chernobyl and Fukushima.

I wrote the paragraphs below in 2013, contemplating the risk of asteroid impacts and the tsunami waves they could cause on large bodies of water.
_____________________

Maybe I think too much. But I’d worry less if the people who ran the nuclear industry worried a little more. Then again, if they worried more they might come to the logical conclusion that there shouldn't be nuclear plants.

Today I was thinking outside the box, wondering if I could think of a black swan event that no one else is paying attention to. Perhaps I’m doing this just for distraction, to take my mind off the more immediate danger close to home in Japan. Lately the world has been paying attention finally to the potential catastrophe that might unfold after work begins next month on Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Unit 4 Spent Fuel Pool (What’s the abbreviation for this? F1NPP-4SFP?) So for distraction, my thoughts wandered back to my original home by Lake Ontario, and I wondered if there isn’t some risk there that the Canadian nuclear people haven’t taken into account.

I know that nuclear plant operators have considered asteroid impacts before, but they have made no special measures to prepare for them. The thinking seems to be that the risk is too miniscule to think about, but if it happens, the impact will be too huge to worry about. If an asteroid landed near a nuclear plant, everyone in the area would be cooked anyway, so there’s no point in thinking about it.

The risk is miniscule because an asteroid that was big enough to do damage to a plant, but small enough not to cause a catastrophe on its own, would be pretty small. The chance of a small asteroid landing on a reactor building is just too small to worry about. The risk can never be zero, so forget about it. We accept this risk in order to have electricity, right?

But is the risk really that small? Orders of magnitude smaller than the risk of a giant tsunami in Japan? After the light show over Russia in February 2013, asteroid impacts suddenly didn’t seem like a remote possibility.

The question seems to be: Could there be something a little larger than the asteroid that landed on Russia, but small enough not to wipe out civilization, were it not for nuclear facilities that would melt and lay waste to the environment?

At Answers.com someone who was apparently knowledgeable in these matters, posted a good response to the question “What would happen if an asteroid hit the Great Lakes?”

This person set the variables as:

• 1 mile wide asteroid, solid rock
• Lake Michigan, 50 miles from Chicago
• impact: 12 miles per second
• impact in 800 feet of water 

There is a blinding flash of light, then a magnitude 8 earthquake. Buildings begin to crumble, meteor fragments begin to rain down on the city. A blast wave follows, then a deafening wall of sound. Finally, a 200-foot tsunami hits all shores of the lake and washes inland for 150 miles. But don’t worry, it happens only every few million years, and it probably wouldn’t land in the Great Lakes. 

So fine. But what if we change the variables a little? The Tunguska event of 1908 is believed to have been caused by an air burst of a rock 60–190 meters wide, and that was powerful enough to have had a force of 10-15 megatons and knock down trees over 2,150 square kilometers. If something of this size hits Chicago, Detroit or Toronto, no one will be worrying about radiation from nearby nuclear power plants. The decommissioning and waste disposal problem will be solved.

How about other scenarios? Should we worry? Maybe these things happen only over Russia. But just for fun, let’s consider the surface area of Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, the four Great Lakes that have nuclear power plants situated nearby. How big would an asteroid have to be to cause a tall tsunami on these lakes, a wave bigger than anything power plant operators have planned for? My guess is that it could be much smaller than the one-mile wide rock, smaller than the Tunguska rock, but bigger than what landed on Russia in 2013. It would be a damaging wave, but the big cities on the lakes could recover, if they didn’t have to deal with nuclear fallout in the aftermath. Considering the surface area of the lakes and the frequency of asteroid impacts, this is an event “with probability significantly higher than zero,” as they like to say in the cautious lingo of risk assessment.

Now my mind goes back to something Arnie Gundersen said to Canadian nuclear regulators about the ultimate cause of the problems at Fukushima. We all know that the earthquake damaged the reactors and knocked down the outside transmission lines. We know that the waves flooded the backup power systems. However, what has been overlooked is that even if electrical power had not been cut, there still would have been the damage done to the pumps' cooling systems by the tsunami and earthquake. There is only one factor that leads to meltdown--loss of cooling, which can be caused by loss of power to the cooling system or physical damage to it. Fukushima Daiichi lost power, but the tsunami waves also did physical damage to the cooling system, and this on its own was enough to devastate the plant.* That’s the damage that an unexpectedly tall wave on the Great Lakes could do to a nuclear plant.

*From Peter Melzer's blog: 
Why Fukushima's Reactors Failed. November 4, 2013

... electric power must be available and the residual heat removal system must remain operable for nuclear reactors of the Fukushima type to successfully complete an emergency shutdown. These conditions impose a major constraint on accident recovery, representing a fundamental weakness of the reactor design. The residual heat removal system must remain operable under the conditions of flooding and station blackout.

Thirty reactors of this type currently operate in the United States. A number are sited in flood-prone areas. A moratorium should be imposed on these reactors, until the operators can ascertain that service water pumps are protected against inundation, debris, and loss of power.

Radiation, let me compare thee

We know Japan has heightened levels of radiation, but what about those killer vending machines?

When I entered university, I quickly became aware that there were three types of people on campus: students in the humanities, others in commerce (the blanket term there for studies in economics, management  and finance), and the rest in engineering and sciences. At first, it seemed like a joke, like a contrived distinction on a school sports day when students are divided into red team, blue team and white team. But as time went on, I realized these were very serious and useful distinctions to last through a lifetime, perhaps even a very solid element of a theory of human nature. Thirty years later, the distinctions seem more pronounced than ever.

There are very few people who can live in more than one of these worlds, although the commerce and engineering types seem to move in each other’s world more easily. My university had a requirement that all undergraduates had to pass English 100 and at least one course in the sciences. This led to many strained relationships of convenience between people who couldn’t stand each other’s company. One would ask for help with an English paper in exchange for notes from a science course. Each would be embarrassed by his or her weakness, impatient with the other’s weakness, yet proud of his or her own strengths. And they hated each other’s world view. Usually, the relationships didn’t last long enough to make the study exchange bear any fruit.

These ancient animosities have been on my mind since I started writing about nuclear issues. I’ve encountered many defenses of the nuclear industry that remind me how difficult it is to exchange views with someone with a completely different set of cognitive skills who lives and works among like-minded people with shared interests. When we meet, we seem to each other like alien creatures speaking an unintelligible language. On a few occasions, I’ve come across arguments made by engineers that are pronounced with great confidence because they have been propped up within their insular world. As soon as they are uttered outside that world, the situation is just embarrassing because it is readily apparent that they are based on poor analogies, illogic and obliviousness to the wider questions beyond material utility–questions about morality, philosophy and creative ways to avoid ecological destruction.

One such example is the idea that the nuclear industry is moving toward perfection with each meltdown that provides valuable “lessons learned.” This idea of the perfectibility of the technology is enough to make me wonder if I’m not the one who is being quixotic. The nuclear lobby thinks of themselves as conservative, hard-nosed realists. They say, "You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. This is the reality. Deal with it. Don’t be a quixotic fool dreaming about a nuclear-free world." But when it comes to the record of nuclear disasters, they are suddenly utopian dreamers ready to spout about the perfectibility of man.

It was put to me once that nuclear perfection will be just like the history of boiler accidents. Once, when boiler technology was new, there were many accidents and many deaths, but now there are few because of better regulation and designs. Actually, Wikipedia lists about forty famous boiler accidents, and they seem to still be occurring in recent history. But in any case, the important thing is that we’ve all forgotten about the boiler disasters of the past because they aren’t surrounded by massive sacrifice zones where no one can live or cultivate the land. The broken boilers didn’t leave a molten core of radioactive waste leaking into the groundwater for centuries to come. The ruins of boilers were cleaned up quickly because the site was not too radioactive for humans to work in. Clearing up the site didn’t take four decades and 100 billion dollars. Boiler disasters were not low-consequence events for the people who died in them, but they were low-impact in terms of their broader effects. There is just no basis here for a comparison with the meltdown of a nuclear reactor.

Another strange argument I’ve heard is that the nuclear industry is unfairly targeted for regulation, and provokes too much irrational public anxiety. Risk is everywhere, so another argument suggested that hamburger restaurants should be regulated so that cholesterol consumption is reduced to the lowest possible level that is known to cause no harm. It’s surprising to me that the highly trained scientists and engineers who run the nuclear industry can actually be proud of such arguments. When I was younger, I sort of admired the people who could pass advanced calculus and physics courses, but now I wonder if this talent comes at the expense of other faculties of reasoning.

It seems to me that it shouldn’t be necessary to explain to a nuclear engineer the difference between cholesterol and anthropogenic radionuclides. The former is an organic molecule that has been part of the human diet since before we evolved into humans. It has benefits in itself, and delivers more benefits because of the protein and other nutrients that come with it in many foods. We have ways of sensing when we’ve had too much, we know when we are eating it, and we can freely choose to have more or less of it. None of these things is true of anthropogenic radionuclides. They’ve been in our food and water for only a few decades, and the decision to put them there came without the consent of the victim. They have no role in organic chemistry, and no benefits to offer in living organisms. They are poisons. We have no way to sense when we have been exposed to them, and thus no way to avoid them. To protect ourselves from them, we must rely on experts whose function it is to promote the nuclear industry, not to protect individual health. When a nuclear expert argues that the nuclear industry is unfairly targeted and regulated, he is showing that he doesn’t understand what it is about the field he works in that makes it uniquely hazardous and fully deserving of public oversight and skepticism.

I encountered the first two examples in private conversations. The next one comes from the book The Highway of the Atom, by Peter Van Wyck. He critiqued the Government of Canada study that whitewashed the radioactive contamination of the Dene people on Great Bear Lake (which is another story covered in more detail here). The lead fact-finder of the study, Walter Keyes, is vocally pro-nuclear and generally opposed to regulation. He worked for the firm Intertec Management Limited which was contracted to conduct the study. He was also a former deputy minister in the Saskatchewan government (which promotes uranium mining in the province) and he belongs to the lobby group Canadian Nuclear Association. Van Wyck discovered a publication in which Keyes seems to be seriously complaining that vending machines deserve to be more regulated and publicly feared than the nuclear industry because they have caused several deaths over the years (because once in a while angry customers shake them until they topple over), whereas nuclear power plants caused none. Van Wyck cites these words that Keyes spoke to the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency:

Although there have been no recorded deaths in North America from radiation exposures at either uranium mines or nuclear power facilities during the past 30 years, there have been enormous sums of money spent on regulation, inspection and enforcement. Yet, in contrast there have been 30 reported deaths in North America from vending machines during the past 20 years–and that’s from the machines themselves, without looking at what may be the hazardous contents of the machines such as cigarettes, food products and other items. Does this mean that government is over-regulating the nuclear industry or under-regulating the vending industry? Is this a case where the cumulative impact on the environment and public safety of vending machines has been overlooked because each incremental item is seen as being so very small without fully understanding the overall impacts? (1)(2)

We can leave aside the fact that Keyes sets the parameters narrowly as deaths by radiation on site. There is plenty of evidence suggesting that the nuclear industry has slowly killed many people offsite. Of more concern is that a lead investigator in a study on the health effects of radiation disingenuously tries here to deny the potential of the nuclear industry to cause disasters of wide-scale consequence. He pretends not to understand what it is about nuclear technology that makes the public want to have it more strictly controlled than vending machine technology.

The three arguments discussed here are just some examples of how the nuclear lobby develop these non sequiturs among themselves and become laughably over-confident in their ability to present convincing arguments to the public. One would think that people so well trained in the sciences would be more skilled in logical rhetoric. In fact, I think they would be capable of better rhetoric if there were indeed any good arguments to be made. Lacking them, all they can do is make very weak analogies to boilers, hamburgers and vending machines.

So let me offer a suggestion. Forget the analogies. There is nothing else like nuclear physics, even though it does provide some powerful metaphors for many abstract phenomena. I would give the same advice to anti-nuclear people. You can compare radioactive contamination to assault on the integrity of the body, but the analogy only goes so far. Direct violence (person on person) is illegal, but the same cannot be said of the activities of the nuclear industry. Its activities are licensed and its accidents do not result in criminal prosecution.

Strangely enough, radiation can be the source of a metaphor, but not the target. Meaning is very effectively conveyed when we talk about a policy that is too radioactive for the president to mention, or when we warn about a financial meltdown, but it’s senseless to say, “Stay away from that nuclear reactor. It’ll get you like a vending machine.” As a rhetorical device, this is cheap sarcasm, I know. But seriously, there is nothing else like radiation. I suspect that the reason is that metaphors are drawn from the natural world, what the human mind understands instinctively from its long evolution. We can easily conceive of birth as arrival and death as departure, but what is beta decay? Until the 20th century, radiation was irrelevant to life, and it is still outside of sensory experience, so there is no way to make it the target of an insightful, interesting metaphor.

(1)

Walter Keyes and Dennis Lawson. Presentation to Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency. Saskatoon, February 29, 2000, on behalf of the Risk Assessment Society. Cited in: Peter C. Van Wyck. The Highway of the Atom (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010). Pages 186-187.

(2)

United States Consumer Product Safety Commission. CPSC, Soda Vending Machine Industry Labeling Campaign Warns Of Deaths And Injuries. November 2, 1995.

http://www.cpsc.gov/en/newsroom/news-releases/1996/cpsc-soda-vending-machine-industry-labeling-campaign-warns-of-deaths-and-injuries/. 

If 100 mSv per year is safe, could a radiological weapon be harmless?

This is a good question to put out to the world before anyone has to seriously confront it for real, and I hope no one ever does. It would be interesting to know how the IAEA and various national nuclear regulators would answer it. Since the UN concluded its Chernobyl studies, and more so since the Fukushima catastrophe, these agencies that govern “nuclear safety” have been trying to get the world to calm down and accept the notion that people have nothing to fear from living in places that are up to 20 times above normal background levels of radiation.*

The public is told from time to time that another nuclear accident, dirty bomb terror attack, or nuclear bombing (accidental or intentional) could occur at some time in the future, and that it’s going to be important to stay calm and understand that we will be alright even in areas of elevated radiation. But here’s the problem. What are governments going to tell their people if a terrorist’s device spreads radioactive substances around a populated area? The attack will immediately be defined as an act of cowardly aggression that requires swift retribution, but if the device didn’t hurt anyone, and contamination levels are equal to or less than what the citizens of Fukushima City are being told to accept by global authorities on "nuclear safety," the attack would amount to no more than an annoying prank – by the standards of the United Nations. How could governments claim that they had been attacked by evil-doers when the contamination level was the same as what they excuse in a nuclear power plant accident?

*This may sound outrageous, but it is actually what is claimed by many "health physicists." The remarks quoted below come from the article Japan's Cut-Price Nuclear Cleanup:

“These workers may show a tiny increased risk of cancer over their lifetimes,” says Gerry Thomas, professor of molecular pathology at Imperial College, London University.

“100 millisieverts [about 20X above normal background radiation in Japan] is the dose we use as a cut-off to say we can see a significant effect on cancer rate in very large epidemiology studies. The numbers have to be large because the individual increase is minuscule. But, she added: “I would be far more worried about these workers smoking or feeling under stress due to the fear of what radiation might do to them. That is much more likely to have an effect on any one person's health.”

But Ian Fairlie, a London-based independent consultant on radioactivity in the environment is among those who have challenged the view of 100 mSv as a reliable threshold. Citing studies of tens of thousands of Japanese A-Bomb survivors, Fairlie concluded in a blog post last year that “very good evidence exists showing radiation effects well below 100 mSv”.

Justin McCurry and David McNeill. "Japan's Cut-Price Nuclear Cleanup." Truth-out.org. October 28, 2013.

Superphénix (Part 3)

This post is the final of three parts on the history of France’s fast breeder Superphenix reactor, now in the fifteenth year of its decommissioning phase (see Part 1 & Part 2). What follows is a translation of a blog post at GEN4 - Les 4 Vérités du Nucléaire.

This post goes into some detail about the ongoing problems with decommissioning of this reactor that had its life cut short in 1998 after numerous technical problems, dangerous incidents, and political conflict over national energy policy.

The story of the Superphenix is relevant today because the promise of fast breeder reactors and the closed fuel cycle is always being reborn, like a mythical, amnesiac Phoenix itself. Promoters hope the present generation has missed the lessons of all the dangerous mishaps, wasted national treasure, and ongoing decommissioning dilemmas related to fast breeder reactors.

The Union of Concerned Scientists has pointed out that the main flaw with fast breeder technology is that it makes an unreasonable bet that future generations will be able to manage the waste products, which are still substantial, regardless of what is said about the reactors’ ability to “burn them up.” For the UCS, the problem is that this technology does… “not satisfy the fundamental ethical principle for the disposal of nuclear waste: intergenerational equity.”

If a nation one hundred years from now could not or did not want to maintain its fast breeder reactors, the promised closed fuel cycle would no longer exist. The country would suddenly have a massive waste and decommissioning problem to deal with. This could be horrific enough for a future society ravaged by war, environmental damage or economic decline, but the story of the Superphenix illustrates that it’s enough of a nightmare when it happens just a few years after the reactor goes on line, and the society that manages the decommissioning is the same relatively competent and prosperous society that built it.

Translation of a blog post at GEN4 - Les 4 Vérités du Nucléaire,

August 2013

Superphenix : 15 years after its “shutdown,” has the risk posed by sodium really been eliminated?

The fire reported last night in the former Superphenix reactor occurred in heating ducts meant, according to l’ASN, to recover 5,000 tons of sodium which was used to cool the core of the fast breeder reactor that was shut down in 1998. You may wonder what is going on with this damn sodium at Creys-Malville, 15 years later? Here are some  answers.

August 8, 2013, fire breaks out in the facility for recovering sodium.

Last night around 19:00, the ASN (1) Rhone-Alps division announced that a fire had affected the installation holding sodium at the site of the decommissioning of the Superphenix fast breeder reactor (2). The primary circuit of the reactor was slowed in 1998 after numerous technical and financial problems led to its closure.

The fire would have been delicate to handle because sodium fires are particularly devious, corrosive and toxic, so much so that a specialized sodium fire response course was created at Cadarache in the 1970s, requiring 250 hours of training for firefighters. 

The important question: solid or liquid sodium?

We already discussed this question in relation to a fire at the Monju (Japan) fast breeder reactor in May 2013. In that case also it was very difficult to have a precise idea of the gravity of the fire because the information available about such fires, regardless of the country providing it, is always fragmentary and incomplete (3).

It is necessary to keep in mind that sodium, in order to circulate in the pipes, must be kept heated to its melting point of 100° C. If the sodium solidifies or gels, it stops circulating (4) and makes it very difficult to restart circulation. It is impossible to drain the sodium if it is not in a liquid state, and so it must be constantly heated to its melting point (5).

In 2006, EDF (Electricité de France) (6) announced that the drainage of the sodium cooling circuit would be complete in 2013 and all risk from it would be eliminated. Today this doesn’t seem to be the case. The fire seems to have been limited to a piece of equipment designed to heat and reheat the sodium so that it can be isolated in small quantities, deactivated and placed in thousands of concrete blocks (7). However, Le Monde Diplomatique reports that the operations are not going well – obviously not, according to the plan of 2006.

Sodium still stored in liquid state 15 years after the supposed “shutdown” of the installation?

In this article that deserves a more detailed analysis, the journalist points out notably that sodium is still stored in liquid form in its primary containment which has a temperature of 180° C. In order deactivate it without causing a fire, EDF collects it in small amounts (150 kg?). An article appeared in Le Canard enchaîné in August 2011 stating that 5,000 tons of sodium were still being heated at that time. The article noted the irony that the operation consumes vast quantities of electricity.

Sodium, a doubly dangerous metal

Beyond the non-negligible chemical risks that it presents, the sodium that is stored now in ad hoc containment is radioactive after having flowed some eleven years in the primary circuit of the reactor. Why? Simply because of the same phenomenon of neutron activation that creates new isotopes and new elements in the presence of nuclear fission. It is thus that the stable isotope Fe-54 gains a neutron and becomes radioactive Fe-55. Likewise for Cobalt, Chrome, Silver, Nickel, and Manganese which are used in various parts which come into contact with the reactor core. Some of the cooling water used in light water reactors becomes Carbon-14 (8) and Tritium (H-3) (9).

Radioactive sodium is formed by the activation of the stable isotope Na-23 + neutron = Na-24, an isotope which decays quickly (half life: 5 hours) to Mg-24, a stable element. Thus the radioactivity of sodium is almost completely gone in two or three days. But it’s not so simple. Actually, during the cooling process, other elements, highly radioactive ones, are created and mixed into the liquid sodium (10).

The fuel, 15 tons of Plutonium-239, still stored in proximity to the sodium hazard

We must remember that 15 tons of Plutonium-239, placed in the SPX reactor in 1984 are still kept in close proximity to the turbine building where the “de-sodiumization” process is carried out. Knowing that this quantity of Pu-239 could, in the case of a fire or explosion, spread a billion lethal doses (11), we can say this is like storing explosives and matches side by side.

Notes:

(1)        Rhône-Alpes regional office of the French regulatory agency Autorité de Sureté Nucléaire.

(2)        Decommissioning is an unfortunate neologism. Demolition would have been sufficient, but the connotations might be critically important.

(3)        Since the 1950s there have been nine nuclear installations of this type and they have all had accidents or fires.

(4)        That is, if the temperature goes below 97° C.

(5)        The enormous thermal constraints linked to the phase change would break a part of the sodium circuits.

(6)        As operator of the site, EDF was found to be responsible for the decommissioning.

(7)        There are to be 38,000 containers holding 5,500 tons of sodium, so 150 kg of sodium per container.

(8)        O-13 gains 1 neutron to become N-14 (stable) which gains a neutron (cool double effect!) to become C-14, emitting one proton.

(9)        Lithium-6 + Neutron => Lithium-7 => Helium-4 + Helium-3 or again by ternary fission of boric acid used often in reactors.

(10)     The metal coolant strains the metal circuits and ends up incorporating their active elements: Fe-56, Co-60...

(11) Lethal dose of  Pu-239: 50 micrograms.

Superphénix (Part 2)

Part 2 of the postings about the Superhpenix reactor focuses on the protests against it during its construction (Links to Part 1 and Part 3). Relative to antinuclear movements in other countries, the opposition was massive. No other country before or after this time ever experienced 60,000 protesters coming out to occupy the proposed site of a nuclear reactor.

The opposition was remarkable also because it sparked a low-grade insurgency against the machinery and installations involved in construction. This campaign culminated in a rocket attack against the reactor vessel--before it was loaded with fuel. The translations below tell the story of Chaïm Nissim, the man who confessed to the crime twenty-one years later after the statute of limitations had expired.

For a short time this news shocked French and Swiss society. The French electrical utility and the nuclear establishment wanted to pursue all possible options for making him pay for the crime. Nissim had been an elected member of Swiss parliament for the Green Party, and suddenly they and the antinuclear movement wanted nothing to do with him. No one could afford to be associated with illegal methods of protest, regardless of the fact that the rocket attacks had been carefully planned to avoid harm to people.

Curiously, this worst ever attack against a nuclear installation was quickly forgotten. The electrical utilities and the nuclear industry in general must have realized there was nothing to gain in bringing more attention to the fact that someone had once successfully launched a bazooka attack against a nuclear plant. The less said the better. Nor would they want to give him a platform for raising questions about when one might be justified in destroying property that one believes poses a catastrophic threat to the environment nature. The Greens and The Left wanted to forget about him too. He published a memoir but it seems to have not sold well.

After 30 years, an homage to a killed protester

Le Nouvel Observateur, July 31, 2007

by Robert Marmoz

Vital Michalon, a 31-year-old doctor, died on July 31, 1977 while protesting the construction of the Superphenix nuclear power plant in Creys-Malville. His family and the organization Sortir du nucléaire held a gathering in his memory.

The family of Vital Michalon and the group Sortir du nucléaire organized a gathering at Faverges (Isere) on Wednesday July 31, 3 PM, at the very location where the young antinuclear protester lost his life. He died thirty years ago while protesting the construction of the Superphenix nuclear power plant in Creys-Malville. One hundred people attended.

On July 31, 1977, in a misty rain and fog, some 60,000 protesters attempted to converge on the site where the state intended to construct this nuclear power plant. Severely repressed, the protest was terminated by the death of Vital Michelon, a 31-year-old physician in training. His lungs were destroyed by the deflagration of one of the offensive grenades which the security forces had made liberal use of. Another protester lost a leg, while a security officer was injured when a grenade exploded in his hand.

One of the final gasps of May 1968

The outcome of this protest, the most important against a nuclear installation, had severely traumatized a generation of militants who had lived through it as one of the last gasps of the protests of May 1968. The number of protesters, and the magnitude of their mobilization did nothing to slow down government plans, as the Superphenix was constructed and connected to the grid in 1986. However, this prototype fast-neutron reactor, which had for a long time crystallized antinuclear opposition, never functioned properly. Over nine years, it was in service only for ten months. In 1997, the government of Lionel Jospin, of which Dominique Voynet was the minister of the environment, terminated the Superphenix experience. Since then the dismantling of the reactor has progressed, but it won’t be complete until 2023.

Translation by WISE-Paris

of an article in Swissinfo, May 8, 2003

In 1982, Chaïm Nissim shot with a bazooka at the nuclear power station of Creys-Malville, France, then under construction. As the statute of limitations has passed, the former representative of the Green party in the Geneva cantonal government (until 2001) confessed to the attack in the mass media.

Aged 32 at the time, the environmental activist fired two missiles at the nuclear power station, missing his goal, the center of the plant, only by a hair’s breadth. Thus, there would have been a delay in construction work of two years, said Nissim in interviews with the western Swiss papers Le Courrier and Le Temps.

According to Nissim, it was a small group of opponents of the fast breeder Superphenix, who had the idea of the attack in 1977. Nissim was a member of this group.

The largest difficulty for the anti-nuclear activists consisted of the acquisition of the weapon, said Nissim. At first, the group approached Swiss radical left-wing groups. This led to contacts with German terrorists, Chaïm Nissim explained in a manuscript.

It had been a problem to convince the terrorists to give them the bazooka “without having to give them anything in return, which they could have used for a purpose we could not support,” the former local councilor said to Le Courrier. The common aim to weaken the “military and industrial complex to which Malville also belonged” eventually convinced the terrorists to grant assistance “free of charge.”

Thanks to the Germans’ goodwill, Chaïm Nissim had been able to get hold of a Soviet bazooka and several missiles in Brussels in September 1981. A few months later, on 18th January 1982, from the ruins of an old castle, the radical activist fired at the plant.

After twenty years of silence, a former member of parliament confesses to the rocket attack against Creys-Malville 

Le Temps, Geneva, May 8, 2003 by Sylvain Besson

The former Green member of parliament Chaïm Nissim reveals the mystery behind the attempt, in 1982, to strike the French Superphenix nuclear power plant.

The most difficult time in the life of Chaïm Nissim was perhaps the hours passed one evening in 1981 in a sordid Turkish café in Brussels. The young thirty-year-old had driven alone from Switzerland, and he wondered if the journey would end in prison. That evening he planned to take delivery of a Russian rocket launcher, furnished by Belgian members of Cellules Communistes Combattantes (CCC). He planned to use it to attack the nuclear complex under construction in Creys-Malville, 50 kilometers from Geneva.

Today, Chaïm Nissim is 53, and he was a member of the Swiss parliament for the Green party for 14 years. The memory of the meeting in the café haunts him still. In fact, it became so hard to carry that this pater familias, resembling a rustic version of Woody Allen, decided to confess to Le Temps his biggest secret: it was he who, on January 18, 1982, fired five shape-charged rockets at the Creys-Malville reactor. Swiss and French investigators tried for twenty years to solve the mystery surrounding this attack, the most spectacular ever staged against a nuclear reactor in Europe.

Snatches of the truth about the attack started to emerge in 1994: a document removed from the archives of the Hungarian secret service indicated that the operation was led by the terrorist group of Illitch Ramirez Sanchez, alias Carlos [the Jackal], one of the most infamous terrorists ever known. Shortly thereafter, in Switzerland, the Public Ministry led by Carla Del Ponte arrested three people, one of which was Olivier de Marcellus, today an organizer of the anti-G8 protest set for June 1st. Five years later, the inquiry into the “friends of Carlos” was classified, without revealing anything further about the rocket attack, nor about the activities of the Carlos group in Switzerland.

In the unpublished manuscript which Le Temps was able to read, Chaïm Nissim tells this story, revealing that the Carlos group was merely an auxiliary in the operation. The other participants in the operation are not identified. Chaïm Nissim is the first to speak, and his avowal makes him visibly nervous. He fears the reactions of his friends. He hesitates and fears, as he did in 1982, that he would be seen as a “pathetic clown, a ridiculous fool.” But he no longer wants to live in silence about his clandestine life as a militant who “carries out attacks by night, and protests in front of parliament in the evening.”

Instructions for saboteurs behind enemy lines

In his tranquil house in Versoix, the former Green member of parliament brought out a box full of old antinuclear journals, dating mostly from 1976. That year, he participated in a militant cell that organized rallies aimed at disrupting the construction of the nuclear power plant. The ambiance, in the beginning amicable, degenerated in July 1977. A protester was killed by the police, while two others lost limbs.

A clandestine group formed around Chaïm Nissim, alias “Manolo,” and around ten other militants who have been identified only by their pseudonyms: “Max,” the mechanic, “Chloe,” the mother of the family, “Antonio,” the anarchist-burglar. Aided by a Swiss Army manual entitled Instructions for Saboteurs Behind Enemy Lines, they dynamited electrical pylons, blew up machinery, and torched an office used by engineers.

The low intensity conflict around Creys-Manville was conceived to harm no one but cause maximum damage to property. Mr. Nissim explains in his manuscript, “We wanted to commit to action, register our rejection of the plant, and stop it if we could. And yet there was also the romanticism of clandestine action, a magnificent dream. How could a small group save the world?  Comparing the violence we had avoided with that of Malville [the fast breeder Superphenix reactor site] which could have killed a million citizens in the Rhône-Alpes region, our action could be called non-violent.”

The group passed long hours in a ruined building with a view of the Superphenix reactor. This was where the idea took hold to put an explosive in the heart of the power plant to damage the most vital component [the reactor vessel] and delay the project by two years.

The small band, viewed itself as the armed branch of Gaia, or Earth Mother, fighting against the cold monster of technology. It wanted to “with love, delicately place a tiny grain of salt in the weak spot of nuclear power.” This would give birth to a “mild and organic counter-power.”

The realization of the project took time: the first trials carrying explosives by radio-controlled planes ended in failure. But the group had contacts. They met with an “autonomous” person from Zurich with radical leanings named “le Chef.” He had a more moderate friend, Olivier de Marcellus, who would serve as intermediary for several months between the ecological dreamers from Geneva and the Carlos group.

Chaïm Nissim said, “We knew only fifteen years later whom we were dealing with. We received typewritten letters, with no distinctive marks, but peppered with Leninist terminology. They asked us about our commitment to serve the international proletariat. Our concern was that we needed to receive the rocket launchers without having to return the favor, without being obliged to help them later.”

J Day

At the time of these dealings, Chaïm Nissim met a well-dressed man who always wore gloves in order to leave no fingerprints. It was Johannes Weinrich, or “Steve,” a close lieutenant of Carlos… Finally, the rocket launchers and munitions were brought to Brussells by an intermediary of the CCC, a Belgian terrorist group accompanied for the occasion by a consultant with a Slavic accent – perhaps a Russian soldier – who explained the workings of the hardware to the ecologist from Geneva. The attack took place the night of January 18, 1982. Chaïm Nissim, alone the whole time, fired five rockets, two of which fell inside the still open dome of the power plant. One of the projectiles came very close to hitting the reactor [under construction at the time and not loaded with fuel]. The Superphenix reactor was completed, but it was closed in 1998 after having functioned for only 174 days during ten years of operation.

From his era, Chaïm Nissim, who is participating now in the preparation for the anti-G8 protests of June 1st, draws lessons for the “alterglobalists” of the present day. First, “revolutionary violence,” that which kills, benefits no one, as he witnessed in the failures of groups like CCC and Carlos. But he says mild sabotage should be done, with measure. The ecologist detects among certain anti-globalization militants the same ferment of hatred and exclusion that he saw among certain “autonomous” radicals in his era. For the G8, he advocates the use of sit-ins, to the exclusion of all other direct action. This is without a doubt what is called learning lessons from history.

Other sources:

An industry incapable of adapting to the post-9/11 world

Retour sur Malville, Chaïm Nissim à Cœur Ouvert

Chaïm Nissim. L’Amour et le Monstre Roquettes Contre Creys-Malville. Favre, 2004.

Interview with Chaïm Nissim on this TV broadcast (French)

Noé 21