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

Chapter Eleven: Nuclear Power 157tion for generations. Another formulation is that such a plant would in ten yearsaccumulate as much strontium-90 and cesium-137 as would be “released byabout eight thousand megatons of fission explosions, of the same order as thetotal fission yield of all the nuclear weapons in the U.S. and Soviet stockpiles.” 115To make such a release easier to arrange, the reprocessing plant itself, likea reactor, contributes substantial internal energies. 116 Within an operatingreprocessing plant are large amounts of flammable solvents, ton inventories offissionable materials that must be carefully protected from accidental chainreactions, hot reactive acids, thermally and radioactively hot spent fuel andwastes, and such possible accident initiators as “red oil”–a substance, producedby radiation damage to organic solvents, which is not well characterizedbut is empirically known to be an easily detonated high explosive.Such a plant separates annually in pure, readily handled form some ten tofifteen tons of plutonium–thousands of bombs’ worth. In the course of fiveyears, the plant would separate more fissile material than is present in theentire U.S. nuclear arsenal. The precision with which the plutonium could beaccounted for would probably not be much better than one percent, makingit impossible to be sure whether tens of bombs’ worth per year were presentor missing. (For example, the military reprocessing plant at Savannah River,Georgia cannot be sure it is not already missing some three hundred-oddpounds of plutonium.) 117 The presence of such a bomb material and of certainother materials within the plant would permit a saboteur to assemble in theplutonium loading or storage areas, in only a few minutes, a crude nuclearbomb with a yield of the order of tens to hundreds of tons of TNT. Such abomb would be more than sufficient to disperse virtually the whole plutoniuminventory and probably a good deal of the fission-product inventory too.No reprocessing plant’s security plan has considered this possibility.Accidents at the Savannah River reprocessing plant have already releasedin five days about ten times as much radioiodine as the officially recordedrelease in the Three Mile Island accident, 118 and nearly half a million curies oftritium–radioactive hydrogen–in a single day. 119 But those releases, howeversignificant, 120 are trivial compared with what a serious accident could do. 121Such an accident may have been narrowly averted at the Cap de la Haguereprocessing plant in France on 15 April 1980, when a supposedly impossiblefailure of all power supplies briefly disabled vital cooling and safety equipment.Had the power stayed out longer, a sequence of events could havebegun which would have made it impossible for workers to stay at the plantand prevent successively more serious failures and releases.The potential for widespread harm from facilities that deal with largeamounts of radioactive materials was also obliquely illustrated by three accidents