Brittle Power- PARTS 1-3 (+Notes) - Natural Capitalism Solutions

Chapter Eleven: Nuclear Power 151to the force of two dozen tons of TNT. The water’s heat contains about a hundredtimes more energy than that. All these sources of internal energy, ofwhich the decay heat is the most important, would help, in an accident or sabotage,to release the radioactivity.All the protective devices are vulnerable in various ways. For example, mostof the shutdown, cooling, and control devices cannot work without electricity. 84Few of these devices have adequate battery storage; instead, they rely on offsitepower from the grid, onsite power from the station’s own switchyard, oremergency diesel generators (which are not very reliable). Published accidentanalyses reveal that failure of both offsite and onsite electric power would causesevere and unstoppable meltdowns in which most of the mitigating deviceswould not work. The operators’ instruments, showing what is happeninginside the reactor–whether the valves are open or closed and so forth–wouldnot work either, so even manual intervention could not save the reactor.It is rather easy to cut both offsite and onsite power to a reactor. Low-technologysabotage could disable diesel generators between their periodic tests. Aterrorist could then at leisure, before the back-up is fixed, cut the offsite power,which arrives at the station’s switchyard via conspicuous transmission lines. Oneperson without special skills could do both, either by gaining access to the site or,in most cases, by standoff attack (since the diesels are often badly protected andsometimes housed in light external sheds). The unstable ex-employee of theThree Mile Island reactor complex who in 1976 drove onto the site, scaled asecurity fence, entered a protected area next to the Unit One reactor building,and later drove off without being apprehended 85 would have had plenty of timeto sabotage the diesels or switchyard or both. Operating power reactors havealready experienced accidental failure of all back-up power–fortunately notsimultaneous with a grid outage. 86 Operating reactors have also experiencedpower-grid instability which blacked out the area and shut down the reactor. 87More complex modes of attack can be designed with the aid of detaileddesign information which is publicly available. 88 Attacks can mimic hypotheticalaccident sequences, as most analyses assume is necessary, or can simplifyand shortcut them. One possible approach is to produce a rapid power excursion,beyond the reactor’s ability to cool the fuel (a worrisome class of potentialaccidents, especially in boiling-water reactors). Another approach is simply“interrupting the supply of cooling to a shutdown reactor” 89 so that itsdecay heat melts the fuel. These types of failure can be arranged from eitheronsite or offsite; the latter may involve either the use of standoff weaponsagainst the plant or an attack on targets outside the main area of the plant.Such remote targets include transmission lines, related switchyards and transformersoffsite, and any cooling-water intake that the plant needs as an “ulti-