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

Chapter Eleven: Nuclear Power 165ground contamination by [cesium].” 171 Today, scenarios for a NATO/WarsawPact conflict on the North German plain curiously overlook the fact that fourlarge reactors have already been build there and could hardly fail to bedestroyed, making widespread fallout likely even if no nuclear weapons wereused. 172Against the sort of catastrophic release considered here, the usual measuresmeant to mitigate the effects of reactor accidents–remote or underground siting,containment venting filters, evacuation, thyroid blocking, 173 sheltering, airfiltration, and the like–would be better than nothing, but still grossly unequalto the task. 174 The Nuclear Regulatory Commission does not seem much interestedeven in these modest measures, 175 and the nuclear industry seems to feelthat mitigation methods are unnecessary or embarrassing. (For example, theSenior Vice President of Philadelphia Electric Company testified in 1980 that“[E]vacuation plans are just the window dressing and the final back-up plan”;that a low population zone some three thousand yards in radius for evacuationplanning around Limerick is “more than adequate”; and that “[E]mergenciesthat will require evacuation will not occur.”) 176 Such neglect of even themost basic precautions means that even smaller and less competent acts ofsabotage against nuclear plants can still be disastrously effective.Logistical and financial impactsDamage to a single nuclear facility can have far-reaching consequences forother, undamaged facilities. Even modest damage to one key plant can bringmuch of the nuclear industry to a halt because the nuclear fuel cycle is so intricatelyinterdependent. It entails many complex operations whose logisticalcoordination has remained an elusive goal for several decades. One failure orbottleneck can have unexpected side effects through the rest of the system. 177And if fuel cycles ever came to depend on reprocessing (as with breeder reactors),about fifty reactors would depend for their fuel on timely deliveries froma single reprocessing plant. At perhaps three to eight billion dollars each, suchplants would be too costly to back up. (Breeders would also depend on a fewfuel fabrication plants.) Such fuel cycle dependencies create a remarkable vulnerability:a single, otherwise minor problem at a single reprocessing plant–thetype of problem that already occurs so often that no reprocessing plant in theworld has run on a reliable commercial basis 178 –could idle more than one hundredbillion dollars’ worth of fast breeders. Ironically, fast breeders have beenpromoted by successive Administrations as a promising means–in some casesthe principal means–of ensuring national energy security.Although the sheer cost of fixing or replacing a major nuclear plant offers a