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The Energy Spectator
So Happy Together
The New York Times and the anti-nuclear movement.
The New York Times is proving that, when it comes to nuclear power, it isn’t a one-note newspaper. Not every anti-nuclear story has to be written by Matt Wald. The paper has versatility — this time reporters Jo Becker and William J. Broad get into it.
“Doubts Growing About U.S. Plan for Plutonium,” said the page-one, column-one headline yesterday. Whose doubts? Well, it turns out they all belong to Edwin Lyman, resident lamenter at the Union for Concerned Scientists who has nothing but doubts about nuclear. Lyman is a lugubrious presence at every nuclear event in Washington, ruing that the technology was ever invented and predicting gloom and doom to all if it is pursued. Nothing new there.
What’s news is that Lyman — and ipso facto, the Times — are using the revival of anti-nuclear sentiment after Fukushima to set their sites on a grand prize, the weapons reprocessing plant now under construction in South Carolina.
“Eleven years after the government awarded a construction contract, the cost of the project has soared to nearly $5 billion,” moans the Times. “The vast concrete and steel structure is a half-finished hulk, and the government has yet to find a single customer, despite offers of lucrative subsidies. Now, the nuclear crisis in Japan has intensified a long-running conflict over the project’s rationale.… [C]ritics say there is an increasing likelihood that the South Carolina project will fail to go forward and will become what a leading opponent, Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists, calls a ‘plant to nowhere.’ That would leave the United States without a clear path for the disposal of its surplus plutonium.” (Lyman is in fact the only opponent mentioned in the story.)
No such yarn would be complete without a scandal and Lyman has one. It involves former Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham.
“A cheaper alternative, encasing [the plutonium] in glass, was canceled in 2002 by President George W. Bush’s administration,” continues the report. “The energy secretary at the time, Spencer Abraham, is now the non-executive chairman of the American arm of Areva, a French company that is the world’s largest mox producer and is primarily responsible for building the South Carolina plant.” (MOX stands for “mixed oxide fuel,” a blend of plutonium and uranium that can be burned in commercial reactors. For some reason the Times can’t bring itself to capitalize the term.)
So here’s what’s really going on. “Nuclear waste,” i.e., spent fuel rods, can be dealt with in one of three ways: 1) it can be left sitting around at reactor in storage pools or dry casks, the former creating a even greater hazard than the reactor itself, as proved at Fukushima; 2) it can be “vitrified” — encased in glass — and stored underground somewhere, such as Yucca Mountain, or 3) it can be reprocessed into a MOX and used as fuel in other commercial reactors. The MOX alternative is particularly attractive because: a) it creates a useful commodity, b) it reduces volume by 95 percent so the remainder can be easily reposited, and 3) it gets rid of plutonium, once and for all, so it can never be used to make nuclear bombs. Most people in the industry prefer reprocessing.
Unfortunately, back in the 1970s, liberals and Democrats became paranoid about nuclear recycling and convinced themselves that if we isolated plutonium in a reprocessing plant somewhere, someone would steal it to make a bomb. Ted Taylor, the repentant 1950s bomb designer who dreamed up this scenario, predicted that by the 1990s, reprocessing would lead to hundreds of nuclear explosions a year in American cities. President Carter took all this seriously and banned reprocessing. As a result, we have Yucca Mountain. France went right ahead with reprocessing. It sends MOX fuel to Japan and stores all the remaining “waste” beneath the floor of one room at Le Hague. No one has ever stolen any plutonium.
All this made good Cold War melodrama, but the Fall of the Berlin Wall uncovered its glaring flaw. Instead of just spent fuel, Russia and the U.S. now found themselves loaded with huge quantities of bomb material — both highly enriched uranium and plutonium. Rather than let it sit around, both countries decided to do something about it.
In 1992, Senators Richard Lugar and Sam Nunn struck a treaty with the new Russian government whereby Russia would send its highly enriched uranium to France, where it would be “blended down” to reactor grade and shipped off to American power plants. For 19 years the program has provided half our uranium, so that one of every ten light bulbs in America is powered by a former Soviet weapon. It’s one of the most extraordinary swords-into-ploughshares efforts in history, although nobody seems to care very much. (The treaty will end in 2014.)
But that still left the plutonium. So in 1999 the Clinton Administration struck another deal with Russia whereby both countries would each rid themselves of 34 tons of weapons-grade plutonium. The hope was to reprocess it into MOX, but nuclear scientists reported back to the Clinton Administration that nine tons of our plutonium was contaminated and could not be recycled. So instead we agreed to reprocess the good 25 tons and vitrify the other nine. The Russians, however, were wary of vitrification. Their scientists believed the process could be reversed and somebody could eventually recover the plutonium. They had developed reprocessing and decided to recycle all 34 tons. The deal was closed in 1999. Since Areva, the French nuclear giant, was the only Western corporation that knew the technology, it got the contract to build the Savannah plant.
All this happened before Abraham arrived as President Bush’s new Energy Secretary in 2001. (Complete disclosure: I co-authored Abraham’s recent book Lights Out! Everything reported here, however, was told to the New York Times. They just didn’t see fit to print it.) “By the time I got in, the scientists had come back and said they had developed a way of reprocessing the nine tons of contaminated plutonium after all,” Abraham says. “So it became a question of whether to reprocess 25 tons and vitrify the other nine, or reprocess it all. We figured it would be too expensive to do both, since we’d have to build two separate facilities. The Russians were still very set on reprocessing so we decided in order not to jeopardize the agreement, we’d do all reprocessing as well. That’s why we dropped vitrification.”
And that’s the sum and substance of the “scandal” hatched in the brains of the Union of Concerned Scientists. It was enough, however, to make the front page of The New York Times. Abraham did take a job with Areva a year after leaving his Secretary’s job in 2005, but all was done in complete accordance with federal law.
So what are Lyman and the Union of Concerned Scientists concerned about? Do they want to get rid of 68 tons of potential bomb material or would they rather see it sitting around waiting to be pilfered? And if they’re against reprocessing, does that mean they are in favor of vitrification? Once you’ve vitrified, after all, you still have to get rid of the stuff. You can’t just leave it sitting around. Does that mean UCS is in favor of Yucca Mountain? Go ask them.
No, what UCS and other nuclear opponents are really concerned about is that reprocessing might work. That’s the really dangerous part. In fact, we already know it works. France, Canada, Britain, Russia, Japan and India are all doing it to one degree or another. What UCS, Friends of the Earth, the Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Council are afraid of is that Americans might find out. They make a living running around proclaiming, “Reprocessing in France is a failure!” “It only makes things worse!” “You end up with more waste than when you started.” (They arrive at this by refusing to distinguish between high-level and low-level waste, the truly dangerous material and stuff that can be buried in landfills.)
What terrifies anti-nuclear crusaders is that Savannah River might prove successful. And they are right, because if the weapons-recycling program works in South Carolina, it will probably be a prelude to the full-scale reprocessing of spent reactor fuel. And if we start processing spent fuel, then the problem of “What do we do with the waste?” will disappear and there will be almost nothing left with which to scare the public and convince it that nuclear is an impossible technology.
That’s why UCS is using Fukushima to open up a new front against the plant already half-finished at Savannah River. And what better place to start than with a couple of willing reporters at the New York Times?
Letter to the Editor View all comments (21) | Leave a comment
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Dee See| 4.12.11 @ 6:59AM
MEANWHILE, still another blast on an '11'
day over in Fukishima and still the wispiest
of coverage.
Jeff I-Melt-down walks about free and unchallenged.
Not a word of query about WHY it's been
allowed to swell on for weeks when the far
less severe Chernobyl mess was buried within
days.
AND let's not blame it all on the Japanese
themselves. The area is loaded with American,
Chinese and Russian mililtary ops and equipment
in the world's most nuclear tense zone.
If the Global 'Big Boys' wanted it stopped,
like the BP mess, it would have been stopped.
It's clear, there was a decision by the capstone
creeps of that it NOT be taken care
of.
If not actually 'part' of the plan, it 'fits'.
(100 MILLION Americans to be exterminated
by 2100)
Even putting aside the REAL suspicion of
some kind of HAARP technology involved
with this (like the earlier mega-tsunami 5
years ago on MAO's Birthday) ----this mess
is fishy in every sense of the word.
It's almost certainly no coincidence that
one of the eventual side effects of such massive
radiation, beside cancers and luekemias,
is ---STERILITY.
---Listen closely! You really CAN hear those
Yuppie giggles, in Seattle with the soft background hum of a collator.
NOW, look up a new word ---pre-terminate...
Ken (Old Texican)| 4.12.11 @ 7:15AM
Folks,
like most of you, I have learned to scroll past DEe Sees' rants. That's the best strategy I think.
Mr. Tucker,
again, thank you. Please keep banging the drum.
Your work became one of my key sub-plots in my new E-novel www.americaalonesaidno.com
Mike D.| 4.12.11 @ 7:32AM
Yep Ken, DeSee seems to have shit all over the "brevity is the soul of wit" law and you see what happens. Mind numbing witless rambling careening off the guardrails of coherence and across the center line of common sense highway.
Hillel| 4.12.11 @ 7:41AM
While we hope that there are no US disasters, the fact is that spent nuclear fuel is on site at these "vulnerable plants.(Indian Point is one) If the NYT et al really cared, they'd at leasrt INSIST that this waste be shipped to Yucca Flats.
James Aach | 4.12.11 @ 10:02AM
I'd like to comment more generally on the media and coverage of nuclear energy issues:
I've worked in the US nuclear industry over twenty years. One perspective that's absent in the media is an insider's take on how a nuclear power plant really operates day to day. It's a far different world, both good and bad, from what people normally perceive. It is not The Simpsons and not Star Trek. Current media conversations sometimes remind me of casual drivers discussing with great confidence what it's like to compete in the Daytona 500.
My book “Rad Decision: A Novel of Nuclear Power” provides a needed portrait of the industrial nuclear power world. It also happens to culminate in an accident very similar to the Japanese tragedy. (Same reactor type, same initial problem – a station blackout with scram.) Rad Decision is currently available free online at http://RadDecision.blogspot.com . (No adverts, nobody makes money off this site.) Reader reviews are in the homepage comments - there are plenty of them. There is also a paperback version available and a PDF download.
Rad Decision shouldn't convince any reader that nuclear is perfectly safe or horribly unsafe. Instead it provides the reader with some background and perspective so they can make more informed judgements. Unfortunately, my media presence consists of this little-known book and website, so I'm not an acknowledged "expert". Sorry about that. I just happen to do the nuclear stuff for a living.
Bronx Richie| 4.12.11 @ 10:07AM
One can hope that Mr. Tucker's meticulous analysis is being read at the Times. There's also hope that President Obama will weigh in with some common sense, as he has on other nuclear power issues, and revive reprocessing in the US.
Eric Cartman| 4.12.11 @ 10:09AM
What are you talking about, Hillel? Yucca Flats? As everyone knows, Yucca Flats is a vacation destination of millions and is home to old folks homes, Kinder Care schools and sad-eyed puppy ranches! You can't build a nuke depository there! Why, the stripped-ass sand flea lives there! A flea so rare, no one has seen it! Why do you hate old people and sad-eyed puppies, Hillel? You just hate people and sand fleas, Hillel! Why, I bet . . . wait a minute. Yes, honey? What is it? Uh huh . . . in the desert with no one - and I mean no one - around? Really? Yes . . . middle of nowhere with absolute zero chance of ANYBODY going there . . uh huh . . . except maybe a drunk Vegas lounge lizard mistakenly getting out to pee on the wall . . . Well, how endangered is the Vegas Lounge Lizard? Uh huh. . . . place is lousy with 'em, heh? I see . . . Well, I'm sure there is a Democrat Special Interest somewhere you'll upset . . . so no nuke depository at Yucca Flats, Hillel. No matter how it would help our energy problem. Got that?
Eric Cartman| 4.12.11 @ 10:19AM
Dee See . . . huffing paint this early in the morning is a sign you may be addicted. Remember, no huffing til after 5:00 PM. As the saying goes: Don't Be Jive, Huff After Five!
DaveS| 4.12.11 @ 11:40AM
I am a former duPont employee and worked at Savannah River right out of graduate school. We were making lots of nuclear material in those days - but none of our activities (to my knowledge) was in the re-processing domain. Vitrification of non-fuel waste was a large project; though when I'd left is was not operational. By the time I got there, Carter had already decided to close down AGNS - the fuel reprocessing plant in nearby Barnwell's industrial park. Amy Carter (age 12) apparently didn't like the idea.
Since then, with a brief stop at Shoreham, I moved on to Indian Point and have been here almost three decades. I find it delicious that the NYT worries about matters in South Carolina and upriver (Hudson) at my plant.
What the NYT and anti-nukes despise the most is answers - and there are answers to the so-called intractable problems. My plant has safely offset hundreds of millions of barrels of oil to generate electricity for NYT presses, hospitals and iPods.
If you had more Indian Points, you'd have fewer geo-political problems - like the one of having originating country oil profits being used to fund terrorism. With disrespect to the NYT, a fool convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.
Stuart Kaufman| 4.12.11 @ 11:40AM
I cannot wait until the NY Times devolves into a Pennysaver, and "Pinch" Sulzberger assumes room temperature. On that magic day, the world will be made safe!
Mel Torme| 4.12.11 @ 11:51AM
Mr. Tucker: Great article. What you ascribe (?) to politics on the part of the NY Times writers could possibly be ascribed to stupidity, at least regarding science. Reporters are the most innumerate and scientifically stupid people* you will ever run into, this side of Washington, FS. Yeah, you figure the NY Times ones should be the cream of the crop, but what does that get you, like the chocolate-covered froth that rises to the top at the sewer plant?
BTW, one very, very minor correction: You wrote "Savannah River" most times, except for " ...Since Areva, the French nuclear giant, was the only Western corporation that knew the technology, it got the contract to build the Savannah plant." The plant is indeed near the Savannah River, but not anywhere near Savannah, GA (at the mouth of it). It is a large area, the size of half a county, and it sits much closer to Augusta, GA, and Barnwell, SC., but way (>100 miles) upstream from the city of Savannah.
(Yes, I know it's called the "Savannah River" plant - that's correct).
BTW, it's not like all the infrastructure had to be built - the place has been around since it's time as one of the main 3 locations of work on the Manhattan project.
* present company excepted, of course.
Ray| 4.12.11 @ 12:06PM
"So Happy Together"
Great, now that song will be stuck in my head for the rest of the day. Thanks Will!
Anthony| 4.12.11 @ 12:59PM
Sniff, sniff, I so miss Frankie boy Rich and Bob Hebert over at the new and improved walled and barricaded NYT.
Yes Paul and Maureen, the barbarians are indeed at the gate!! It's true, even paranoid schozos such as you two, do indeed have enemies.
And yes, I'm so depressed that the mean ole filthy rich leftists owners of the Times now require that I pay to read Dowd and Krugman. Yeah right!!
Enjoy your new cloistered life gang, it's just as well you two remain in your la la land.
So, to answer the age old question; if Dowd and Krugman write at the NYT, will anybody know, or care?
Reality is coming Mo and Paul, try and get that stupid look off your faces before we arrive.
DaveS| 4.12.11 @ 2:31PM
SRP (Savannah River Plant) was built in the 1950s by duPont. But we who worked there and the industry poeple who didn't refer to it as Savannah River, as in, "I used to work at Savannah River."
Dee See| 4.13.11 @ 12:45AM
----Astounded to see the Huffington Post
of all places, usually a ho-hum
cover op for Globalism,
actually gave the Fukishima disaster the
crisis billing it urgently needs.
The EUGENCS agendas of the tax free NGO's and capstones of shadow world government
have to be called out and ----warmly, unflinchingly prosecuted to the MAX.
THERE IS NO MORE TIME
Atomikrabbit| 4.13.11 @ 10:55PM
I think Dee See’s writing free-verse New-World-Order-Paranoiac poetry here, if only the philistines could understand.
He is prophetically howling to us of black helicopters in the night, spreading the radioactive viruses of globalism – truly the Allen Ginsberg of our age.
Someone get him an agent and a submission form for the New Yorker.
Rod Adams | 4.15.11 @ 5:24AM
The people who have the most to lose when nuclear fuel recycling works are people who sell competitive energy supply systems. Recycling removes one of the last bulwarks of the antinuclear movement - it answers the question they have been using with great effect since the meeting of the Critical Mass Energy Project in 1974. At that gathering, people who really dislike the idea of abundant, clean, cheap energy - because it makes their own products less valuable, agreed on a tactic of making sure that "waste" was an intractable issue.
When Carter agreed to make recycling illegal, he was able to portray that choice in warm and fuzzy political terms that made it seem like he was playing to a "liberal" base, but the people who gained the most were the coal mine owners who saw a great shift in utility plans from building enough nukes to put them out of business by 2000 to a series of new coal plans that increased their annual sales from about 500 million tons per year to our present rate of about a billion tons per year in the US.
The patina of "environmentalist" opposition to nuclear energy is mostly just a cover for the market protection actions of very rich and powerful fossil fuel suppliers.
Rod Adams
Publisher Atomic Insights
NukeRealist| 4.15.11 @ 2:30PM
I certainly agree that nothing coming from the Union of Confused Scientists adds much to our understanding of nuclear power, much less the sequelia of the Fukushima accident. Before criticizing the biases and ignorance of others, however, I would point to a few facts Mr. Tucker overlooks or misstates.
For example, he states that high-enriched uranium from Russia is downblended to reactor grade in France. Not so. It is downblended in Russia.
He also states that the HEU deal with Russia was negotiated by Senators Nunn and Lugar. News flash: Senators don't negotiate international treaties. The deal in question was negotiated by Presidents Bush and Gorbachev and their deputies. Nunn and Lugar have been very effective advocates of non-proliferation activities with the Russians, but they simply can not be given credit for that particular deal.
It is true that President Carter put an end to the US reprocessing program permanently, but the politics was not as partisan as Tucker makes out. In point of fact, President Ford had imposed a moratorium on these programs as part of the broader effort to curtail federal spending on wasteful government programs, given that commercial prospects for this technology had dimmed to the vanishing point. Thus, Carter was finishing what Ford had started, hardly a "liberal" or "Democratic" initiative.
Mr. Tucker is also less than clear and accurate when he says that Japan, Canada, Russia, Britiain and France have reprocessing programs, yet France was the only country that was able to supply the US with a MOX plant.
Japan has poured billions into its reprocessing program over 30 years and has little to show for it. I am not aware that Canada has anything beyond lab scale--and certainly no plans for commercial scale reprocessing or MOX-making. The British reprocessing program has been a financial black hole, marred by scandal. The Russian program is limited in scope and there are no credible plans to expand it. The French program works, but again, only on a limited scale. Its MOX fuel facilities run at about two-thirds capacity, producing enough for about 8 annual re-loads for its 50-odd reactors. Again, there are no plausible plans for expansion due to high costs of operation.
Mr. Tucker also implies that reprocessssing spent fuel into MOX makes the underlying plutonium and uranium disappear. The plutonium portion (6% of a MOX load is a good guess) does indeed fission to a considerable degree, but that's just a fraction of the fuel load. Besides, what it fissions into isn't exactly a bouquet of sweet petunias. As to the underlying uranium (the other 94%), a portion will be turned into more reactor grade plutonium, while the uranium will be contaminated by accumulating isotopes of Uranium-234, a neutron poison. The presence of U-234 ensures that reclaimed uranium can be used no more than once before it is unsuitable for further use. Bottom line: Using MOX is not an alternative to burying spent fuel in deep geological repositories, which seems to be the only practical solution that is also politically acceptable.
The idea of reducing waste by "95%" is also a bit misleading. Presumably what Mr. Tucker is referring to is the fact that 95% of spent fuel is uranium. True enough. What is left over, however, has just as much heat-generating activity with or without the accommpanying uranium, which means that it will need just as much space in a subsurface repository. Consequently, reducing the volume of material to be buried does not necessarily mean that your repository can be any smaller or cheaper. And once you get into the business of ripping up the spent fuel, putting it through a remote-controlled chemical plant, generating and managing separate waste streams--and doing it all at public expense and under government control--I guaranty it will be more costly.
I had hoped that with all managerial missteps and cost-overruns that have plagued government-sponsored nuclear programs over the years that the Savannah River Site MOX plant would be an exception. It isn't. If I recall, the original estimate was $960 million to build the plant (which just makes MOX from mil spec plutonium, and does not entail reprocessing spent fuel). We're now up to $5 billion, and it's not done. Yet the fuel one can make from 34 tons of plutonium would be worth no more than $2 billion--hardly a deal made in heaven. And that's just the estimated capex. Opex would make it even more uneconomic. Then there's eventual decommissioning....
Let's get real. If reprocessing spent fuel made commercial sense, industry would be clamoring for it. The fact that industry walked away many, many moons ago should tell you something.
AtomicZombie| 4.19.11 @ 7:01PM
I too am wondering how the UCS manages to wrangle its way into the hearts and minds of policy makers. One thing is for certain, the technology of reprocessing and whether it will succeed will be on the hands of engineers, not scientists. Scientists like to be academics, but we are reminded that engineers solve problems. Personally, I too have been in the nuclear industry for 30 years and it troubles me to find that reprocessing in the USA hasnt had its day. Clinton killed the IFR - why? Because it worked. In fact it worked so good that they had to label it as "proliferant" (which it wasn't) inorder to get Congress to defund it. The cancelling of the IFR will go down as one of the greatest short sighted political blunders of all time. It answered both safety and waste in one fell swoop. Are we as a nation really that obtuse? South Korea will soon have IFR technology.
http://www.arirang.co.kr/News/.....category=1
Creative Recreation | 8.10.11 @ 10:26PM
is good
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