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?
