| | | This doesn't address nuclear waste, but it's interesting nonetheless.
How America Lost the Atomic Age
by Benjamin Leopardo
palladiummag.com
Radiation from plant accidents is surprisingly low:
Background radiation dose rates vary from place to place but tend to fall between 1.5 and 3.5 millisieverts (msV) per year. A few localities feature annual background doses of dozens of millisieverts, while some residents of Ramsar, Iran receive as many as 260 msV per year.
For comparison, the most radioactive places in the Chernobyl exclusion zone receive about 2600 millisieverts per year, but most of the exclusion zone is below 6 millisieverts per year. Even at the upper end of the dose spectrum, studies continue to find no convincing link between background radiation and cancer incidence. Meanwhile, while it is plausible, no association between any level of radiation exposure and hereditary defects has been observed in humans.
An astonishing number:
According to the director of the Chernobyl Tissue Bank, Gerry Thomas, the Chernobyl accident is likely to have resulted in no more than 160 deaths once all latent thyroid cancers are accounted for. Same story for Fukushima:
Similarly for Fukushima, the way the incident is discussed quickly begins to look bizarre considering the actual damage inflicted. Only 167 people received doses over 100 millisieverts, and only nine of them received more than 200 mSv. All of them were plant workers or contractors. One worker who received among the highest doses also received a beta burn, which is like a sunburn but caused by electron radiation.
While workers may have had their lifetime risk of cancer increased marginally, the real human impact of the disaster was in the chaotic evacuations of the hospitalized and the elderly, which caused the deaths of around 1600 people. Though high-energy processes like nuclear fission can certainly be dangerous in the right context, the very energy density that creates this danger also makes it easier to confine.
In the 1970s, construction doubled in price and became much slower:
By the late 1960s, overnight (sans interest) construction costs were down to around $1000 per kilowatt (KWe) for the less expensive reactors, which took three to five years to build. This is slightly cheaper than building a combined-cycle natural gas plant today. Moreover, fuel costs for a nuclear plant are only a few percent of its total cost, compared to coal and gas plants where fuel accounts for at least half of total cost.
But in the early 1970s, something strange began to happen. In defiance of all principles of industrial organization, the price of a nuclear power plant began to rise. New plants became 102 percent more expensive in real terms per doubling of total capacity, and construction costs for reactors completed in the last few years before the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979 were closer to $2500/KWe.
Meanwhile, lengthy construction delays became commonplace. Despite the fact that none of the nuclear accidents which we are all familiar with had happened yet, orders for new reactors in the U.S. fell to zero by 1978 [i.e. before the Three Mile Island accident] Activists openly admitted that regulations were a tool to drive up costs:
“Our campaign stressing the hazards of nuclear power will supply a rationale for increasing regulation…and add to the cost of the industry,” declared then-Sierra Club Executive Director, Michael McCloskey in 1974.
In an even more candid admission about the nature of the group’s strategy, another Sierra Club employee named Martin Litton opined “I really didn’t care [about possible nuclear accidents] because there are too many people anyway…I think that playing dirty if you have a noble end is fine.” The anti-nuke crowd cleverly co-opted the nuke developers:
The new regulatory framework still created a very profitable niche into which nuclear power plant developers could step. This consisted of selling equipment and services, generally mandated by new regulations, to utilities operating existing nuclear plants.
Without the prospect of selling new plants, the developers could grow their bottom line only by maximizing the expenditure necessary to maintain existing plants. This cocktail of incentives made it impossible for nuclear power to regain momentum, even once inflation, so important in governing utility behavior, had been tamed.
By the time of the 1978 Three Mile Island accident, there were no serious commercial or political interests defending the expansion of nuclear power—including the industry’s own developers.
Tom |
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