The (False?) Promise of Small Modular Reactors

Book Review

The Answer: Why Only Inherently Safe Mini-Nuclear Power Plants Can Save Our World

By Reese Palley

The Babcock and Wilcox MPower  SMR

The nuclear energy debate is framed in what became its fossilized form in the 1970s and 1980s as the global disarmament movement and the anti-nuclear movement had some successes. Even this year, as the Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns dominate the discussion, most of the debate is about the wisdom of building more of the familiar, large-scale gigawatt nuclear power plants that have been with us since the 1960s. The public has the image of the old technologies from forty years ago that failed in Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. Nuclear proponents argue that new designs are going to be “passive safe,” often smaller, and with a less poisonous waste product. Anti-nuclear groups have to focus on how to wind down the old generation of power plants, and also pay attention to this new generation because from now on this is what the debate will be about.

In 2011, American author Reese Palley wrote The Answer: Why Only Inherently Safe Mini-Nuclear Power Plants Can Save Our World, in which he presents a powerful argument that all alternatives except these new SMRs (Small Modular Reactors, or mini nukes) offer false hope as solutions to the energy crisis. The argument for these SMRs has some severe weaknesses, but Palley must be credited with having written some excellent prose that provides a brutally frank description of how bad our energy predicament is.

Reese served in WWII, attended the London School of Economics, and had a successful career in the art business. He then spent two decades sailing the world, pausing in China and the Soviet Union along the way to establish businesses there. And he’s an author of several books who has now turned his attention to the planet’s greatest problem.

Palley agrees with anti-nuclear activists on the point that large gigawatt power plants must be a thing of the past. They were designed to produce plutonium for the build-up of nuclear weapons, while different options for reactor design were pushed aside. They are too expensive and time-consuming to build, and have too many real and perceived dangers for the public and private investors to support.

Anti-nuclear activists, however, hesitate to get on board with his enthusiasm for the new generation of SMRs that are now in the design stage. Palley promotes these reactors as “walk away safe” because they are to be buried in the ground and run for a few decades without human intervention. They are modular and scalable, leaving behind no weapons grade material because they are based on the safer reactor concepts that were passed up in the early days of the Cold War. Some of the designs are said to be capable of using up existing spent fuel, which is sufficient enough, supposedly, to provide the earth’s energy needs for centuries.

Palley’s assessment of alternatives is hard to dispute. He notes that there is no oil, coal or gas shortage. There are enough of these sources to last a few more centuries, but the problem is that ecosystems will collapse from global warming before these resources are gone. We have to stop using them soon, and it is not just a matter of cutting back. We have to get carbon dioxide emissions close to zero to avoid the worst outcome.

Renewable energy sources have severe shortcomings as well. Water behind hydroelectric dams contains rotting vegetation which spews out the greenhouse gas methane. There isn’t enough space to put wind farms in the places where they are needed. The solar energy striking the earth is finite. It has to be used to grow plants, which sequester carbon and feed people, so there is a limit on how much solar energy can be used to produce electricity or biofuels. Geothermal sites contain greenhouse gases and toxins, and there are difficulties in finding sites close to populations that need energy. Finally, sequestering greenhouse gases in underground storage is utterly unrealistic. In short, there is no solution except SMRs, apparently. 

The most fascinating argument that Palley presents is in his discussion of the black swan, civilization-ending massive solar flare which would knock out power grids all over the world. He uses this as an argument for breaking up large, interconnected grids into local isolated grids powered by SMRs. This could save the world from a complete, prolonged blackout. Such a flare actually occurred in 1859 and it caused fires, and destruction of the small telegraph grid that was in place at the time. No one knows for sure how a recurrence would effect electricity grids now. After sufficiently scaring the life out of his readers, he may not have wanted to associate this disaster with its effect on nuclear power plants. He conveniently omits mention of this long blackout leading to hundreds of nuclear power plants running out of fuel for backup cooling systems, after which they would go into meltdowns. Fukushima X 400 (or 400 Chernobyls, as this report explains it).

Palley’s argument becomes suspect when the reader notices that the sharp, critical eye he has for every other energy alternative is not applied to SMRs, or even to conventional nuclear power plants. A few moments of research on the Internet turns up numerous articles that raise safety concerns about these new nuclear power plants, and Palley gives very short shrift to the known extent of radiological contamination from various accidents. The health consequences of Chernobyl are given less than a page, and what is written is just a pat repetition of the big lie that I’ve covered in previous posts. These omissions begin to seem quite disingenuous by the end of the book.

The physicist Michio Kaku voiced criticisms of SMRs in a short interview on CNN. He conceded that these power plants might be used in remote communities, but he felt it was extremely unrealistic to think that they could provide a city like Chicago, let alone the whole world, with all its requirements. As one power plant could supply energy to 20,000 homes, it is inconceivable that Chicago would have dozens of these plants throughout the city. He notes too that even though the spent fuel would not have a potential to be turned into nuclear bombs, it would still be high level nuclear waste that posed a risk of mishandling or sabotage in the form of a dirty bomb.

A more thorough critique was written by Arjun Makhijani and Michele Boyd in a report for The Institute for Energy and Environmental Research and Physicians for Social Responsibility. They point out that the low cost estimates of SMRs may be underestimated, as every proposal for new technology tends to be. Mass production of numerous SMRs could be more expensive than the building and maintenance of fewer large plants. There will be thousands of sites that need to be secured, monitored, staffed, and serviced when recalls are required. The existence of thousands of sites also complicates retrieval of waste and decommissioning.

The makers of SMRs also propose that these reactors could be used in developing countries, but many such places are unstable and they lack an educated workforce that can handle this advanced technology.

Makhijani and Boyd also cover the details of different proposed types of SMRs. The ones based on sodium cooling are particularly worrisome considering the history of accidents and delays with this technology (for background, refer to the Fermi I reactor accident near Detroit, and the expensive, unproductive monster that is the Monju reactor in Japan). They point out that one of the many problems of the pebble bed reactor design (which a German company gave up on a long time ago) is that the uranium it uses is more enriched than what is used now in light water reactors. How is this less of a proliferation risk? Finally, the thorium reactors don’t produce the same bomb making material as light water reactors, but they still produce fissile Uranium 233 isotopes.

Worst of all, the SMRs may be a false promise that deflects attention away from the need to reduce population and consumption, and improve efficiency. Palley himself admitted that endless growth and thirst for more energy is the root of the problem, but he doesn’t acknowledge that the proliferation of thousands of SMRs would only feed this endless desire for more energy and lead to more population growth.

The flaw in the logic may be right in the title of Palley’s book: The Answer. There seems to be a faulty assumption that there has to be an answer. The thinking goes that if it is not a, b, c, d or e, then it must be f. People involved in the energy debate often choose their favorite answer, ignore its flaws and defend it at all costs. Meanwhile, they demolish the arguments for all other alternatives. This process ignores the possibility that there may be no answer. The universe doesn’t care if we go the same way as the dinosaurs. If there is an answer, it remains elusive.

Sources:

The Christian Science Monitor on safety concerns regarding SMRs

A CBC report on the possible use of SMRs in Canada’s north

More on the amazing life and times of Reese Palley

Arjun Makhijani and Michele Boyd. Small Modular Reactors: No solution to the cost, safety and waste problems of nuclear power. A fact sheet produced by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research and Physicians for Social Responsibility, September 2010.
Is Thorium a Magic Bullet for our Energy Problems? NPR. May 2012.

Reese Palley. The Answer: Why Only Inherently Safe Mini-Nuclear Power Plants Can Save Our World. 2011.

John G. Fuller. We Almost Lost Detroit. 1984.

Hiroko Tabuchi. Japan Strains to Fix a Reactor Damaged Before Quake. The New York Times. June 17, 2011.

Japanese state mobilizes its young women to give comfort

I was starting to think that the news of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster was slowing down. Of course, it's all just as horrible as ever, and the government's reaction to it is the same list of shameful failures it has been since March last year, but lately there hasn't been anything new to report.
Then today there were a couple of items that added to or even surpassed the list of outrageous events. 
First, the Ministry of Agriculture has persuaded nine university campus queens to join a promotional campaign in which they will be featured eating food from Fukushima Prefecture. It's bad enough that university student associations still hold beauty pageants and elect a Miss Campus, but somehow someone in government latched onto the idea that these young ladies could be used in the revival of the Fukushima economy. It would be a nice idea if all the food from Fukushima were safe and the government and the producers had done an effective job of food monitoring, but, in fact, these efforts have been riddled with failures. This has shattered public trust in any food from Fukushima, as well as some surrounding areas, even though many of the food products are clear of contamination. As the blog post from ex-skf.blogspot.com makes clear, these women will be asked to eat and promote many types of food that have been found to be contaminated. I can't imagine why they let themselves be used in this way, but I have to keep in mind that it's a tough job market out there. These women probably, sadly, believe in what they are doing, and believe it will lead to a good job offer when they graduate. I take small comfort in knowing that the university I work for was not considered prestigious enough to be invited to participate.
Other news, also reported by ex-skf.blogspot.com, is that a citizen with a consumer grade dosimeter has found a mysterious "black powder" on the streets of Minamisoma, a town just near the boundary of the evacuation zone of where many residents - with children - decided to stay put. This powder was measured at a whopping 295 microsieverts per hour! No official survey noticed this fine, black powder which this citizen found throughout the streets of the town. A sample of the powder was analyzed by a professor at Kobe University and the cesium content was found to be:
Cs-134: 485,252 Bq/kg
Cs-137: 604,360 Bq/kg
TOTAL: 1,089,612 Bq/Kg
This is an astounding level. The soil in the parks near my home in Chiba are reported to have a total of 450 Bq/kg, and a gamma dose rate of 0.12 microsieverts per hour (up from a natural background of 0.06). In the evacuation zone of Fukushima this number is in the range of 2 ~ 8 microsieverts per hour. One can only speculate, until further testing is complete, as to whether this black powder is a very concentrated form of nuclear fuel that must contain high levels of uranium and plutonium. 

Jevons' Paradox

The so called “nuclear revival” that was rolling along nicely before March, 2011 was succeeding without much opposition largely because it was deemed the necessary way to diminish the impact of global warming. Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were distant memories, and the nuclear industry seemed to have learned how to manage this dangerous form of power generation.

This view changed drastically when three reactors in Fukushima melted down after the Japanese nuclear industry had failed to prepare for the easily foreseeable hazard of a tsunami. A skeptical public now doubts that any culture can safely manage the complexity of nuclear power that involves the unwieldy framework of finance, regulation and engineering that is so prone to corruption and error. In other industries, accidents can be dealt with and relatively contained, but a single nuclear accident has enormous potential for widespread ecological and social destruction. There is no room for error.

However, we are being asked to accept the “allowable risk” of nuclear energy because of the insistence that nuclear energy has the potential to save us from global warming. Unfortunately, this is a false hope.

At present, nuclear energy provides about 14% of the world’s electricity, and it is not conceivable that this share could grow significantly. The possibility of growth is constrained by the shrinking supply of uranium, and the hesitations of voters, investors and insurers to back new projects. A gas turbine generator can be built in a short period, but it takes over a decade for a new nuclear plant to go through design, approval and construction, and there is too much uncertainty involved now for anyone to make a bet on continuing down the nuclear path. Even if some projects go ahead in spite of the obstacles, it is hard to see world supply going much above the present 14%.

So the question becomes this: Do we want one problem or two? When the sea levels rise and coastlines are hit with hurricanes of unprecedented strength, do you want the problems to be compounded by your local nuclear power plant having a station blackout followed by a meltdown?

One might argue that we could have a power supply made of 20% nuclear, combined with 20% reductions in carbon dioxide, and additions of alternative energy, and this combination would give us time to save the planet, or invent a way to do fusion energy. However, the nature of human development is such that, even when there are energy efficiency gains, there is an overall  increase in energy use. Carbon dioxide output will continue to climb with or without a nuclear supplement. The paradox was first described by William S. Jevons in 1865:

“It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth. As a rule, new modes of economy will lead to an increase in consumption.”

Jevons was talking about coal consumption, but in modern parlance it means that the invention of the hybrid car leads to more people buying cars, and their owners, delighted by the thought that they are using clean energy, driving them farther.

     The pro-nuclear argument assumes that this growing demand is inevitable and even good for reducing unemployment and other social problems. Christine Todd and Patrick Moore (the latter formerly of Greenpeace), celebrating the licensing of two AP1000 reactors in the U.S., claim, "We need a cost-efficient, low-carbon solution to the nation's increasing electricity demand - projected to rise 24 percent by 2035. Expanding nuclear energy as part of the mix of electricity generation options is necessary to meeting our nation's growing power needs cleanly and cost-effectively." It is significant that increasing demand is defined as inevitable needs rather than controllable desires.

Matt Ridley discusses the Jevons paradox in The Rational Optimist, and notes with his own example that he wanted to think Jevons was wrong, but one day found himself shouting into his cell phone, while making a non-essential call, in order to talk over the noise of a neighbor using a leaf blower.

Ridley writes, "Civilization, like life itself, has always been about capturing energy… human history is a tale of progressively discovering and diverting sources of energy to support human lifestyle."

Steam engines began with 1% efficiency, then efficiency progressed up to 60% in modern gas turbines. Economists study the energy intensity of nations as a calculation of watts used per dollar of GDP. Energy intensity tends to rise as countries go through industrialization, but it then levels off. The US now has an energy intensity that is one half of its 1950 level. This is partly due to gains in efficiency, and also due to the loss of manufacturing that is now done elsewhere. The point is that US GDP is more than double the 1950 level, so total energy consumption in the US, and in the whole world, has increased since 1950, in spite of gains in efficiency. This tendency is forgotten as each new energy technology brings hope that all our energy "needs" will now be fulfilled. When the generators of Niagara were switched on, journalists gushed about the marvelous future ahead. When the first nuclear generators were being developed, American nuclear pioneer Lewis Strauss said electricity would soon be “too cheap to meter.” However, he was referring to the still unrealized potential of fusion energy. Fission reactors at the time still did not have proven cost efficiency, and critics insist they never have.

Bill Gates has invested in a radical new concept in nuclear reactors which he believes is the only hope for getting the world to zero carbon dioxide emissions. This new travelling wave reactor would use spent fuel already in existence, and have passive-safe features that make accidents impossible. He has consulted with the experts and he says that in order to save the world, carbon dioxide emissions can’t be just reduced by some amount. They have to be brought to zero, but he is an optimist who believes that the standard of living of the poorest billions in the world can be brought up to First World levels, and he says energy is essential for delivering the "services" they want. Green alternatives can play a role, according to Gates, but they will never meet the base load demand. According to Gates' plan, if the timing of this energy input comes before ecosystems collapse, the standard of living of the poor will increase, birth rates will level off as a result of development, and world population will stabilize, or even decline.

Somehow, this all starts to sound like a pipe dream, and the details Gates provides about the traveling wave reactor raise more questions than they answer. In the same way that he developed Windows software in isolation, in a private enterprise, he seems to not want skeptics to raise questions, or hack or crowd-source the system he proposes. Furthermore, like he did with numerous versions of Windows, he is willing to put this technology into use first, without any regard for the problems that may come after sales. (Reactor makers are infamous for transferring after-sale liability to the buyer. Any future accidents become the responsibility of the plant owners and operators, which they pass on to citizens.) It is one thing to do this with software, but quite another to do it with a nuclear power plant. Bitter experience has shown that operators are loathe to fix mistakes when they are found after the plants have been built. Bill Gates is not even trying to get the reactors approved in the US because he knows he would face regulatory hurdles and the hindrances of the democratic process.

The questions about this technology seem obvious. How many reactors would you need to build to bring global carbon dioxide output to zero? Could you get that much fuel? The reactor uses spent fuel, but what hazards are involved in handling the spent spent fuel? If the vision is to have hundreds or thousands of these reactors spread around the world, some of them small and rather portable, how does this solve the present threat of accidents, storage leaks, theft of nuclear fuel, or deliberate sabotage? We were fooled once before into thinking we could steal the fire of the atom without having to pay a price, so what’s different this time? In light of what has happened in 70 years of nuclear history, it seems extremely ill-advised to hope for anything more from nuclear energy. It was an experiment the human race tried but should now walk away from. Perhaps it bridged a gap and offset carbon emissions, but it is time to recognize the grave hazards and make nuclear energy taboo.

It would be better to recognize the limits to growth and get serious about finding a level of sustainable energy use. Alternative energies will not be able to supply us with everything we want. In fact, the unrestrained growth of renewable energy would have a negative human and environmental impact. The focus will have to shift to using less energy and controlling population growth before the hypothetical time when everyone will be up to the present First World standard of comfort. It is standard development philosophy that people in the Third World need electricity in order to have any hope, but this view may be wrong. Perhaps there are forms of justice and prosperity that don’t require everyone getting hooked up to the grid. The human race lived a long time without it, and may do so again. Finland is building a nuclear storage facility that presupposes that for 100,000 years its design needs to warn away a future race of people who are technologically undeveloped, perhaps illiterate, and speaking a language that does not yet exist. This presumption, arrived at by the engineers designing the Onkalo Waste Repository, is a sharp contrast to Bill Gates’ rosy vision of the future.

Sources:

“Abundant Power from Atom Seen; It will be too cheap for our children to meter, Strauss tells science writers,” New York Times, Sept. 17, 1954, p. 5.

Jevons, S. (1865) The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of our Coal Mines. Macmillan, p. 103.

Madsen, M. (dir.)(2009) Into Eternity.

Moore, P., Todd-Whitman, C. New Reactors Signal U.S. Nuclear Energy Resurgence, February 10, 2012.

Ridley, Matt (2010) The Rational Optimist. Harper Perennial.

Is there a stress test for stress tests?

A report in the Asahi Shimbun today entitled Nuclear Safety Advisers Slam Stress Tests describes the encouraging news that some members of Japan's nuclear village have seen the light and have decided to choose life.

Masashi Goto, a former nuclear power plant designer, and Hiromitsu Ino, emeritus professor at the University of Tokyo, who both served as members of an advisory committee to Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA), have criticized the stress tests being applied to the nation's nuclear reactors. They say the tests don't "… look at complex scenarios, such as system-wide failure due to the aging of the plant, or human error… do not assess aging of plant equipment or other potential causes of accidents, such as fires, plane crashes, tornadoes or lightning."

They note that during the tsunami that hit Fukushima Daiichi there were pieces of rubble and boats flowing in, large amounts of fuel, and fires out at sea. These factors are not considered in the stress tests. They ask, "Is it sufficient that a plant can withstand an earthquake 1.8 times stronger than that it was designed for? What happens if an earthquake twice as strong hits?" They claim that the stress tests are nothing more than an "optimistic desk simulation."

They also doubted the impartiality of the IAEA, saying, "It is highly unlikely that the IAEA can undertake a fair assessment. The agency promotes the nuclear industry and it is only investigating the stress tests for a short time. The last IAEA report was very flimsy, and I fear it'll be the same this time."

There's something happening here. A few months ago I never thought I would be hearing anyone connected to NISA echoing what anti-nuclear activists and bloggers like me have been saying about these problems.

Goto and Ino also slammed an advisory committee for shutting out citizen participation. They announced, "It is inadmissible that the citizens' right to closely observe the review process was inhibited, the minimum requirements of democracy for such a crucial decision-making on whether or not to reopen nuclear power plants after a historic nuclear disaster… In reality what would make nuclear power really safe would be to make entire plants earthquake-proof, everything down to the wiring system. That's the viewpoint of the residents, and if you can't do it for financial reasons then I think they wouldn't want nuclear power at all."

In the same Asahi report, IAEA spokesman, Greg Webb, was reported as saying that the agency's mission is to improve safety regulations among member countries. He stressed, "the IAEA cannot guarantee the safety of any nuclear power plant and does not have the power to shut plants or keep them open…. Nuclear safety is a national responsibility in any country. No country has asked the IAEA to be a safety watchdog. We don’t conduct nuclear safety inspections."

I've been following the news of the IAEA's recent visits to Japan, and this is the first time they’ve gone out of their way to distance themselves from the consequences of Japan’s decisions about nuclear energy. Extremely diplomatic and vague language is the norm. Maybe means no, room for improvement means egregious lapses in safety procedures, it’s difficult means hell will freeze over before that happens, and and when the IAEA says nuclear safety is a national responsibility in any country it means Japan would have to be batshit crazy to continue accumulating nuclear waste and operating nuclear reactors on these seismic fault lines, but it's their choice if they want to kill themselves. I suspect there are many nuclear engineers in other countries with lower risks of earthquakes who are thinking this way. They may be confident about their own safety record, but they have come to the sensible conclusion that nuclear is not a wise energy option for Japan.

Nowhere to Run after TMI

In January 2012 I was interviewed on Corbett Report Radio by independent radio journalist James Corbett (see also his blog Fukushima Update). After the interview, I thought of dozens of ways I could have answered the questions better, and one such question that stuck with me, before this interview and afterward, is: Why do you stay in Japan? I have never felt that I have a satisfactory answer for myself or for others.

President Carter touring the TMI-2 control room, April Fools Day, 1979

This week I came across a series of radio documentaries on nuclear issues aired by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in the 1990s. In part 3 of this series (Counting the Costs – Chalk River to Chernobyl), there was an interview with Jane Lee, a farmer from Etters, Pennsylvania, who became active in various public-awareness groups following the accident at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Station on March 28, 1979. In this short interview (transcribed below), she gives the best answer I can think of to the “why I stay” question:

70% of the core has been compromised, and they are in a process now of grinding up the core to remove it from the reactor [a process which lasted until 1990], and as they do that, of course, they are constantly having emissions coming from the plant.The infant mortality rate in this area doubled. But what is even more alarming than that is the enormous increase in cancer deaths in children in the four counties surrounding Three Mile Island. Compared to the numbers previous to the accident that the health department listed even just on leukemia.

We have done an in-depth report on plant life where we are seeing many mutations… All the birds on the farm disappeared. It looked like winter. And not only did we see complete defoliation, we saw trees that were defoliated at different levels.

Interviewer: Why do you stay here?

I think that most people can understand when you talk about roots. You set down roots in a community. And you are part of that community. That’s one reason, but the main reason that we will not move is because we went to a map and we looked and there’s no place to run. There is no place to run. The United States right now is operating 101 nuclear power plants – that’s commercial plants. We’re also operating university reactors, we’re also operating military reactors, and then you have the processing plants, and the processing plants are the worst violators of all because they are dumping tons, and I say tons, of uranium dust into the atmosphere. So if you move from here – here you know what you’ve got – even if you’re living in danger – you know what’s here. We know what came out of the plant now, and so, why do we want to run some place and start the process all over?

50% of the people in this area left. They sold their properties and they went. And you know what happened? They’re just as close, or almost as close to a reactor as where they left here. So it’s futile to think that you’re going to escape this. You have to stand your ground. You have to do your research and you have to challenge your government and say you cannot continue to do this because you’re going to kill this planet.

This population [in the Three Mile Island area] is very passive and very conservative. Most of the people in this area don’t want to talk about it. They don’t want to read about it. They simply know, and they have a feeling of helplessness about their own government. Now, we’re not talking about Russia. We’re talking about the good old USA.

Whether Jane Lee's answer is sensible depends on the level of contamination one is living with. In heavily contaminated areas it would make no sense to stay, but for people who are in areas of lighter contamination, and for whom the initial blast of iodine 131 and xenon 135 (now decayed away) can't be undone, the decision is not so clear cut. Sometimes it makes more sense to take precautions with food, monitor the health of people around you, and, like she says, "stand your ground."

Further information about the work of Jane Lee appears in various reports about the Three Mile Island accident–-a word which the CBC report suggests should be replaced with something that means "an unfortunate event foreseeable because of previously known hazards."

In the article People Died at Three Mile Island, Harvey Wasserman describes how the TMI operator, and the Pennsylvania and US government downplayed the consequences of the accident and reneged on promises to carry out thorough health studies. He states, "… the most reliable studies were conducted by local residents like Jane Lee and Mary Osborne, who went door-to-door in neighborhoods where the fallout was thought to be worst. Their surveys showed very substantial plagues of cancer, leukemia, birth defects, respiratory problems, hair loss, rashes, lesions and much more."

Such research has been routinely dismissed with pejorative connotations by the word “anecdotal.” If hundreds of people in an area report the sudden onset of health problems after a nuclear accident, but the researcher is deemed to be just an unqualified farmer-activist (not participating in officially sanctioned research), the findings are treated contemptuously with such zingers as "the plural of anecdote is not data." Actually, the plural of anecdote in much academic research is data. If you describe your symptoms to a citizen mobilizing her own research project, you are telling anecdotes. If you describe your symptoms to an approved researcher, you’re giving data.

Wasserman also cites the work of Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer who left the industry in order to pursue anti-nuclear work. He quotes Gundersen as saying, "When I correctly interpreted the containment pressure spike and the doses measured in the environment after the TMI accident, I proved that TMI's releases were about one hundred times higher than the industry and the NRC claim, in part because the containment leaked. This new data supports the epidemiology of Dr. Steve Wing and proves that there really were injuries from the accident.” Dr. Wing’s findings have been rejected by many because they were inconsistent with what was believed to be the possible effects of the known releases from TMI. This inconsistency disappears if Gundersen is correct that the releases were a hundred times higher than previously thought.

America Syndrome

In the 1970s the term “China syndrome” became a well-known term to explain the meltdown of an American nuclear reactor that would, theoretically, continue to melt through the earth all the way to the opposite side of the world. The term implies a focus on the danger of nuclear energy in America, but I've reversed the term here to flip this perspective.

The anti-nuclear movement is full of accusations against the nuclear military and industrial complex of cover up and secrecy, but critics have to reluctantly admit that the information is out there for those who want to look for it. The fact that there is so little awareness of nuclear hazards probably has more to do with the the public’s tendency to want to drive horrifying facts deep into the collective subconscious.

For those who want to learn about the issues, plenty can be discovered with Internet searches or a trip to the local library. The hazards range from minor accidents such as canisters of isotopes found in a garbage dump, accidents at experimental labs and reactors, acts of war, minor incidents at power plants, weapons testing fallout, a bomber crash and plutonium spill in Spain or Greenland, to finally the big disasters of Chernobyl and Fukushima. Many of these accidents and deliberate events are known by the shorthand of the places where they occurred: Alamogordo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Bikini, Marshall Islands, Nevada Test Site, Aleutian Islands, Mururoa, Fangataufa, Three Mile Island, Semipalatinsk and so on.

The curious omission on this list is the absence of a Chinese place name. The Chinese nuclear program has existed since the 1960s in almost complete secrecy, un-cracked by slightest internal dissent and almost impenetrable to external critics. The Wikipedia page entitled “Nuclear Accidents by Country” (as of 2012/01/29) has a completely empty listing for China, while the entries for other major nuclear players are long and well-known.

At the recent Global Conference for a Nuclear Power Free World in Yokohama, there were hibakusha and activistst from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US and French weapons testing programs in South Pacific, and the Chernobyl disaster. As much as these people have suffered great injustices to this day, the governments of France, the United Kingdom, the United States and the former USSR have never had a total lock on information and dissenting interpretations of nuclear history. It is worth something that, for example, an anti-nuclear journalist like Anna Yaroshinskaya was elected to governing bodies in the USSR and Russia, travelled in the Chernobyl zones, and wrote freely about her concerns. No such person could have emerged out of in China.

Of course, the Chinese government would say that there aren’t any accidents to report in the list mentioned above, but it would be hard to believe that the Chinese nuclear program advanced without the long list of minor and major accidents that plagued the other nuclear states. One of the few scientists or journalists to look into this matter is Dr. Takada Jun, a professor at the Sapporo Medical University and a representative of the Japanese Radiation Protection Information Center.

An article about his work appeared in The Epoch Times in March, 2009. In it he describes how the Lop Nur test site in Xinjiang, northwestern China (on the ancient Silk Road) was used for dozens of surface and atmospheric tests between 1964 and 1982, one of which was a 4-megaton bomb in 1976 that was 10 times as big as the largest before that in the USSR (however, other sources contradict this number saying the Tsar Bomba hydrogen device detonated by the USSR in 1961 was 50 megatons. In any case, any megaton bomb is huge). Underground tests continued until 1996.

Takada alleges that these large bombs involved massive fallout that fell on the local population, without there having been any effort to warn or protect. He estimates the fallout of the one largest bomb caused 190,000 deaths and 1,290,000 people suffered from radiation poisoning within an area 136 times the size of Tokyo. In total, he estimates 750,000 died prematurely. He could only estimate fallout by studying soil in the bordering areas of Khazakstan, and by what is known about the size of the blasts. No outside experts have ever visited the area to carry out studies on the soil or the population. If the Chinese government has done it, the studies are top secret.

A British Channel 4 documentary made in 1998, called Death on the Silk Road, found evidence of the suffering described by Dr. Takada. The crew (including a physician) travelled along the Silk Road as tourists, filming clandestinely, and finding a surprisingly large number of birth defects in villages they visited.

A Scientific American article in 2009 covered Dr. Takada’s work and included the perspective of a Uygur refugee, Enver Tohti, who lived in the Lop Nur region during the testing era, then became a doctor, and now works with Dr. Takada in Sapporo on their Lop Nur Project. They hope, of course, to increase international awareness of the issue so that China may one day recognize the need for a proper acknowledgement and research of the problem, not to mention assistance for the victims.

Another aspect of nuclear issues in China is the concern about the safety of its nuclear reactor fleet. Thanks to Wikileaks, the world now knows that diplomatic cables from the US embassy in Beijing stated that China has a "vastly increased" the risk of a nuclear accident because it opted for cheap technology that will be 100 years old by the time dozens of its reactors reach the end of their lifespans. China passed up the opportunity to go with more advanced “passive” reactor designs that are much safer than older reactors. The US cables also raise concerns about the “secrecy of the bidding process for power plant contracts, the influence of government lobbying, and potential weaknesses in the management and regulatory oversight of China's fast-expanding nuclear sector.”

Just imagine it as Japan without the democracy (such as it is) and without the forty-year-old anti-nuclear citizens’ movement, which in any case couldn’t stop the Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns. Or consider how long (not very) China’s brand new shinkansen train lines existed without a major accident. Some people take heart that China regularly metes out severe justice to a few officials after disasters, but China’s record of disastrous accidents, botched fireworks displays, and tainted food scandals provides no evidence that such punishment is a deterrent or an effective solution to a systemic problem.

This month The Telegraph reported that China’s Experimental Fast Reactor (CEFR) stopped generating electricity in October following an accident. Ironically, it was Japan's Atomic Energy Agency raising the alarm about a nuclear hazard outside Japan. Perhaps they were in the mood to deflect attention away from their own problems at home. China did not report the accident that necessitated the shutdown. The director of the Chinese Institute of Atomic Energy (which houses the CEFR) denied there had been an accident and stated that the CEFR had been shut down since July, so no accident in October was possible.

Regardless of what has happened in this case, the scale of China’s nuclear program and its history of secrecy in its weapons testing suggest that it’s time for the world to pay closer attention. Historians and scientists need to record what happened on the Silk Road in the late 20th century, and the Chinese nuclear industry should be open to independent domestic and international monitors. It doesn’t bode well that China is repeating the policy of Japan in the 1970s - making a massive, rushed investment in nuclear energy, built upon a questionable regulatory system, just to supply a small percentage (6% in China’s case) of the nation’s electricity needs.

Further reading:

Cooke, Stephanie. (2010) In Mortal Hands: A Cautionary History of the Nuclear Age. Bloomsbury.
Takada, Jun. (2005) Nuclear Hazards in the World: Field Studies on Affected Populations and Environments. Springer.

Amateur Food Testing and Evidence of Post-Decontamination Recontamination

My Terra-P dosimeter is capable of giving estimations of "surface contamination" of beta emitting radionuclides, in addition to taking readings of gamma radiation. This means that it can give a consumer some assurance about the level of cesium 137 contamination in food. The beta particles are measured as "beta flux density." The unit of measurement is particles/square centimeter.minute, and the manufacturer's recommended limit for food consumption is 0.020.

Bananas are famous for being a common food that everyone eats without concern, but which also contain a measurable amount of naturally occurring radioactive potassium. I took this as a standard of comparison. Bananas are also good for comparison because they are imported. The reading on the latest batch of bananas was 0.003 - about 7 times lower than the recommended limit of 0.020. The bananas we had last week measured 0.007.

mikan 0.001

Next I measured some other food from our kitchen, all of it purchased in Chiba, Japan. All of the levels were very close to that found in the banana.

yogurt 0.001

domestic pork - 0.001

imported pork (if you can trust the label) - 0.002

dog food - 0.002

backyard soil - 0.004

For other comparison, I measured the soil and the concrete patio in our small backyard. It was just slightly higher than the food.

backyard patio - 0.004

the scene in August 2011

The really interesting comparison was with the hotspot I found near our house last summer. This is on a pedestrian path, in place where rain washes sand down from higher ground and collects it at the curb side. Last summer I found the collected sand was giving off a gamma dose of 0.50~0.60 microsieverts / hour, while the common readings on open ground were about 0.14 microsieverts/hour (pre-disaster background radiation used to be 0.05~0.07). I "volunteered" to clean this up (chronicled in an earlier post), partly as a good deed for the community, but also for selfish reasons of just wanting this stuff to not blow in the wind near our house. We complained to city hall, and some parks and recreation workers reluctantly came around to haul away what I had put in bags, even though at the time officials told us they had not yet worked out a plan for where to store such waste. 

gamma dose rate of the hotspot 0.62 microsieverts/hour,
January 26, 2012

beta flux density of the hotspot 0.107

At the time, I had naively thought that this solution would last, but recently I found that sand and soil have collected in the same spot again, and it is just as contaminated as before. Last summer I didn't measure beta flux density, but this time I did, just to compare this soil with the food in our kitchen. The soil gave a reading of 0.107, 35 times as high as the banana, five times above the safety limit. The gamma dose rate on the soil today was 0.62 microsieverts/hour. The only good thing about this finding is knowing that this is soil in a mini hotspot at a curbside. No one is going to grow food in this. The same cannot be said of the highly contaminated rice paddies 200 hundred kilometers north of here, where farmers, lacking government compensation or restrictions, intend to plant rice for the coming season.

What is better than my small-scale amateur measurements is the monitoring done by Greenpeace Japan. Such independent, non-government monitoring is an essential part of establishing food safety. The large supermarket chain AEON has eagerly got on board with Greenpeace, seeking its stamp of approval for adopting high standards of monitoring the food sold in its stores. 

New research revises the conventional wisdom about potassium iodide?

A recent article in Archives of Internal Medicine would seem to have some serious implications for the long-held wisdom about using potassium iodide to protect humans against accidental releases of the radioactive isotopes of iodine. The findings suggest that this prophylactic treatment is itself likely to cause almost as much damage as it is supposed to prevent.

The research was not concerned at all with nuclear accidents. It focused instead on the use of iodide contrasts used in some medical imaging tests. A New York Times report on the research paper states that worldwide, annually, 80 million iodide contrast doses are administered for CT scans. The typical dose of the contrast agent contains between 90 and hundreds of times the daily dose that people get through a normal diet. The researchers found that among people who developed thyroid diseases over a 20-year period, they were 2 to 3 times more likely than others to have had an iodide contrast agent administered in the past.

The relevance to the nuclear energy debate seems obvious to me, but the authors of both reports mentioned here don’t make the connection. They are more concerned with the millions of CT scans that are being done, many of them non-essential, considering the trade-off presented by these new-found risks.

In the nuclear accidents that happened in Chernobyl and Fukushima, local residents were exposed to doses of radioactive iodine far above the typical dietary intake of stable iodine. Because radioactive iodine behaves chemically in the same way as stable iodine, a large dose of it would have the same effect as the large dose of iodide given for CT scans. This would be in addition to the harmful effects caused by radioactive decay of these isotopes.

The negative health impact would also occur even if the population received potassium iodide in a timely manner. The doses given are, like those given for CT scans, hundreds of times the daily dietary intake, so these too would have the negative impact of iodide given for CT scans. I suspect this downside was known long ago because in history’s two big nuclear accidents, authorities hesitated to distribute potassium iodide. Once they had data on releases and wind direction, they had to make decisions, knowing that what might be seen later as an over-reaction would cause many future cases of thyroid dysfunction. The new research shows that there is some wisdom in delaying, in telling people not to take potassium iodide unless they know it is absolutely necessary, but this knowledge of the effects of massive doses of iodine, stable or radioactive, is a severe blow to the nuclear industry that has always said that potassium iodide was a sure way to protect people during an nuclear emergency. Obviously, it is has its downside.

The victims and liquidators of the Chernobyl disaster have always claimed that they suffered severely from non-cancerous diseases of the thyroid, but for decades their governments and the United Nations have denied that metabolic diseases are related to the disaster. This new research on the effects of high doses of iodide contrast indicate that it is time to admit that exposure to large amounts of any isotope of iodine involves serious risk to future health.

Hyperthyroidism can cause:

Hypothyroidism can cause:

Difficulty concentrating Fatigue Frequent bowel movements Goiter (visibly enlarged thyroid gland) or thyroid nodules Heat intolerance Increased appetite Increased sweating Irregular menstrual periods in women Nervousness Restlessness Weight loss (rarely, weight gain) Other symptoms that can occur with this disease: Breast development in men Clammy skin Diarrhea Hair loss Hand tremor Weakness High blood pressure Itching - overall Lack of menstrual periods in women Nausea and vomiting Pounding, rapid, or irregular pulse Protruding eyes (exophthalmos) Rapid, forceful, or irregular heartbeat (palpitations) Skin blushing or flushing Sleeping difficulty

Being more sensitive to cold Constipation Depression Fatigue or feeling slowed down Heavier menstrual periods Joint or muscle pain Paleness or dry skin Thin, brittle hair or fingernails Weakness Weight gain (unintentional) Late symptoms, if left untreated: Decreased taste and smell Hoarseness Puffy face, hands, and feet Slow speech Thickening of the skin Thinning of eyebrows

Sources:

Connie M. Rhee, MD; Ishir Bhan, MD, MPH; Erik K. Alexander, MD; Steven M. Brunelli, MD, MSCE. “Association Between Iodinated Contrast Media Exposure and Incident Hyperthyroidism and Hypothyroidism.” Archives of Internal Medicine. 2012;172(2):153-159. http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/short/172/2/153

doi:10.1001/archinternmed.2011.677

O’Connor, Anahad. “Iodide Heart Scans Linked to Thyroid Disease.” The New York Times. January 23, 2012. http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/23/iodide-heart-scans-linked-to-thyroid-disease/

Critique of the PBS documentary Nuclear Aftershocks

The recent PBS documentary Nuclear Aftershocks had the appearance of being an in-depth report on the energy crisis, but it failed in many ways to address the concerns of nuclear accident victims who are living with the risks of future health effects, and it also left viewers with no hopeful message that conservation and new technologies might offer a way out of the grim choice between carbon and nuclear or freezing in the dark. There was a lot I wanted to write about this, but someone else has already done an excellent job of it: Aftershocking: Frontline’s Fukushima Documentary a Lazy Apologia for the Nuclear Industry. Thanks to Gregg Levine, at the blog Capitoilette.