Starving the nuclear weapons beast
The need to re-imagine nuclear power
This post parallels an article [1] written in 2015 by Didier Sornette , which is required reading for anyone who wishes to have an informed view on the issues concerning nuclear power. It focuses on so-called Generation I - III reactors.
Any doubts concerning the connection between U235/Pu239 nuclear power and nuclear weapons making were laid to rest by French President Emmanuel Macron, who declared in December 2021 [3]: "Without civilian nuclear power, there is no military nuclear power, and without military nuclear power, there is no civilian nuclear power." He was acknowledging the fact that building and maintaining nuclear weapons requires highly enriched Uranium or Plutonium [4], and these in turn rely on U235-based reactors for availability and economic viability. If we are to starve the nuclear weapons beast, this reactor technology must be done away with. Initially, we must shutter all fast breeder reactors, which are used to produce the Plutonium pits at the heart of most high yield nuclear weapons. The pits need periodic replacement, [5] so choking off the supply of Plutonium would eventually [6] lead to the loss of viability of those weapons.
That there is linkage between current reactors and nuclear weapons is but one reason why we must do away with them. An inherent property of current generation reactors is that they are unstable by design. This is because they are required to maintain a critical mass of fissile material, by providing an initial fuel load more than sufficient to produce a runaway chain reaction together with means for regulating the neutron flux so as to keep the reaction just critical. This over-fueling is necessary because over time the reaction rate in an initially just-critical reactor would fall below critical, and the power output of the plant would decline precipitously. Keeping the reactor operating within a narrow margin of criticality requires continuous, active control. Should the control system fail, an accident can result. Visualize the parlor trick of a spinning plate balanced on a stick, as a good analogy.
The fundamental instability of current reactors leads to their being unsafe. How unsafe is a contentious matter, because there are no uniformly applied requirements for accident reporting, and no agency with the universal authority to monitor and regulate reactor safety. The IAEA, being a UN organization, operates with the cooperation of the entities being monitored, and has no power to mandate. Also, the IAEA has a mission to promote nuclear power, which is at odds with its mission of assessing nuclear safety. Partly as a consequence of these, nuclear accidents tend to be severely under reported, as documented in a report by Wheatley, Sovacool and Sornette [7] although per that review there is evidence of a decrease in the accident rate since the 1970s. On the other hand, the severity of the accidents that do occur has increased, the examples being Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi. The nuclear power industry's Probabilistic Safety Analysis (PSA) tool has been demonstrated to poorly predict failure events and to underestimate the incidents that cascade into catastrophes [8].
Even the mechanism for reporting accident severity, the International Nuclear Event Safety (INES) scale [9] is so deeply flawed that it can best be described as a propaganda tool. The Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents, if properly evaluated, would achieve severity scores in excess of 10 points on the INES scale which rates severity from 0 to 7. I say "in excess of 10" in the case of the Fukushima accident because cost is an element of the score, and the Fukushima accident, with a true INES score of 10.6 in 2016, is still accruing costs, though both the plant operator (TEPCO) and the Japanese government have become opaque about accruing costs. An evidence-based estimate [10] indicates a 50% probability of a Fukushima-scale accident within the next 50 years, of a Chernobyl-scale accident within 27 years, and of a Three Mile Island-scale accident within 12 years. There apparently is no prediction concerning acts of terrorism such as a deliberate sabotage of the Zaporizhzhia power plant as threatened on and off since 2013 by the Russians.
Another area of contention regarding nuclear power has to do with the illness and loss of life due to accidents [11]. The American Nuclear Society [12] quotes the IAEA that the total death toll at Chernobyl was 4000, including 57 directly attributable to the accident. This is contradicted not only by WHO [13], Union of Concerned Scientists, and Greenpeace [14] estimates that are at least an order of magnitude greater, but also of the University of Minsk, which had counted over 4000 deaths in Belarus alone by the end of March 2006 [15], and the book [16] by the Scientific Director of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, based on first-hand experience. The true number of deaths will never be known with certainty, due not only to disagreement over the carcinogenicity of low doses of radiation, but also because neither the Russians nor the Ukrainians had a central cancer registry at the time of the accident.
Finally there is the issue of nuclear waste disposal. There are three major reasons why this remains an unsolved problem. First is the issue of finding a suitable site, which itself is really two problems: Opposition of the public to having such incredibly dangerous material stored "in my back yard"; and the geological suitability of a candidate site. Second is the credibility of assessments of geological suitability. Geology has a spotty track record of identifying locations much less predicting evolution of geological faults. Finally, there is the under-discussed issue of how to ensure that future generations are kept aware of long-lived waste repository locations over multiple half lives, i.e., about the next several hundred thousand or so years.
Although the nuclear industry touts the safety of the existing fleet, their claims can be viewed as nothing more than defensive posturing. In 2001 nine countries [17] formed the Generation-IV International Forum [18] to jointly develop a family of reactors for the future. By the time they released their initial development roadmap in 2002, they had reduced a list of 200 reactor design alternatives to six, none of which are representative of existing reactors or their evolution. If the industry itself plans to abandon the current designs, why should the public at large be in any way supportive of them?
Notes
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1504.06985.pdf
[2] Nuclear power is a complex subject, more so due to the proliferation of design types. At least two further posts are in the works to cover other types. However, much of what is written here is equally applicable to most of the so-called Generation IV reactors, including the Small Modular Reactors (SMRs).
[3] https://www.dw.com/en/opinion-the-real-cost-of-nuclear-energy-for-humans-and-the-planet/a-60390384
[4] Plutonium is produced in what are called Fast (Breeder) Reactors by bombarding U238 with fast neutrons. Though the primary fuel is U235, most of the Uranium in any power reactor is U238, because it is overwhelmingly predominant in natural Uranium. Both U235 and Pu239 have been used to build bombs.
[5] https://doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.5215
[6] Unfortunately, "eventually" here means after an intolerably long time - perhaps more than a century.
[7] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629615301067?via%3Dihub
[8] I could write an entire post on the frailty of risk analysis. Basically, it involves imagining all the things that could go wrong and assigning probabilities to them, leading to requirements to mitigate the worst. Its principal flaws are that there are always failure modes that were not thought of, and it is extremely difficult if at all possible to accurately assign probabilities to rare events. Also, sometimes using history fails. A great example of that is the design of Fukushima Daiichi. To guard against tsunamis, they determined from historical records that a 10 meter sea wall would suffice. The TŌhuku earthquake caused a 14 meter tsunami: thirteen feet of water over the sea wall.
[9] https://inis.iaea.org/search/search.aspx?orig_q=RN:33036780
[10] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/risa.12587
[11] Although not related to reactor accidents, the attitude of the nuclear industry toward radiation exposure is illustrated by their response to the Bainberry test accident. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214790X18303289
[12] https://www.ans.org/news/article-3913/a-reactor-physicist-explains-chernobyl/
[13] https://science.time.com/2011/04/22/how-many-did-chernobyl-kill-more-than-4000/
[14] https://hps.org/documents/greenpeace_chernobyl_health_report.pdf
[15] Süddeutsche Zeitung Nr. 82, s.3, 7. April 2006
[16] V.M. Chernousenko, Chernobyl: Insight from the Inside (Berlin, Springer, 1991) ISBN 3-540-53698-1
[17] By 2013 the GIF had grown to 13 countries.
[18] https://www.gen-4.org/gif/
Reposted with formatting changes 3 Feb 2024