Getting Off Our Nuclear Power Fixation

My favorite internet date site posits a question: "What is the best/worst lie you've told?"

• "I've never seen that man before in my life."
• "I've had a vasectomy."
• "I know what I'm doing."
• "I'm not married."
• "Nuclear power is clean and safe."

I made that last one up. But if the power industry and the federal government had their profiles up on that website, that would be their answer.

Despite Vice President Dick Cheney's contention that nuclear power is "carbon-free," nukes contribute to the greenhouse effect. The government is betting billions of dollars of our money, and could simply give it away to developers to build new nuclear plants. And, our country's aging nuke fleet is getting plastic surgery while its innards decay and get ever closer to fatal accidents.

Let's start with the greenhouse lie. Instead of coal or natural gas, nukes run on uranium. Like coal, uranium has to be mined. It also has to be converted, enriched and transported. Add that up and you get more greenhouse gas emissions than a natural gas-fired power plant, according to one of the few studies done on the complicated issue by the scientists at the German Oko-Institut. Meanwhile, the nuclear industry would have you believe that solar and wind power create more greenhouse gases than nuclear.

Not only does nuclear power contribute to the greenhouse effect, and so, indirectly affecting the planet's health and your well-being, it very well could affect your health and the planet's health directly -- by killing everything in sight in an accident.

This is how nuclear energy works on a basic physics level. When atom of a special type of element, uranium 235, is bombarded by neutrons, the uranium releases more neutrons that split more uranium atoms in a chain reaction. This is fission. Nuclear power plants use the heat given off from that process to boil water. The steam from that water turns the same basic turbines that you find in other power plants fueled by natural gas or coal to make the heat. It's a huge, scary engineering problem just meant to boil water. As antinuclear guru Amory Lovins quipped, it's like using a chainsaw to cut butter.

The difference is the radioactivity is contained -- at least we hope it remains contained -- within the reactor where the fission is constantly exploding at a molecular level. If that radioactivity escapes the reactor (that happens on occasion) or is released through contaminated water spills (that happens with great regularity), then it's a health and safety problem.

The thing about deadly radioactivity is that you can't see it coming. You can't smell it. You can't feel it until it's too late.

On a basic physiology level, when radioactivity is absorbed by a body, it wreaks havoc on DNA molecules. Studies show ingested and inhaled uranium emissions may affect babies in the womb and increase risk of cancers such as leukemia. It may damage chromosomes. In high concentrations, it kills immediately.

That's not a problem, according to the government, because no matter how complicated it gets to boil water to make electricity, there won't be any accidents. The chief federal nuclear regulator, Nils Diaz, chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said in April that the agency is "ensuring safety in the civilian uses of nuclear materials."

The government/industry's plan is to contain all that nasty, deadly fission by building a huge box around it. The boxes, the reactor vessels, are made of thick carbon steel, lined with stainless steel. "That oughta keep 'er," some engineer figured. After decades of operation, though, it doesn't. The lesson happened in 2002 when the Davis-Besse nuclear plant's reactor head was found to have been worn away -- from a two-feet-thick exterior to a 3/8-inch layer of stainless steel. Even that last bit had bubbled outwards from the pressure of keeping radioactive action on the inside. The plant, near Toledo, Ohio, had a hole in its reactor head wide enough and deep enough to put a fist into, according to former Nuclear Regulatory Commission member Victor Gilinsky. Corrosion on that part reduced the head by 70 pounds of steel. Workers found the problem inadvertantly, leaving the reactor perilously close to unleashing a jet of radioactive steam from the pressurized vessel.