Friends of the Earth: Caution on Nuclear Energy; Health Peril, Unsustainable Costs

The Truth About Nuclear Energy: Health Risks and Economic Hazards

by Sandra Spangler

No new nuclear power plants have been constructed in the last 30 years since the nuclear accident at Three-Mile Island. The facts about Three-Mile Island have been buried by the media until now.

Facing South online magazine published the report Investigation: Revelations about Three Mile Island disaster raise doubts over nuclear plant safety. The article features the recollections of Randall Thompson, who was hired as a health physics technician to go inside the Three Mile Island plant to evaluate the fallout dangers of the nation’s single worst nuclear disaster, monitored radiation release for 28 days. The truth about the meltdown was disclosed to the public for the first time in Facing South. The nuclear power industry wants to build a series of reactors in the American southland.

“The costs of nuclear power, coupled with its irresolvable safety and radioactive waste problems, killed the first generation of reactors, and are going to end this second generation as well. But it would be tragedy if the U.S. wasted any money on new reactors, when resources are so desperately needed to implement the safer, cheaper, faster, and sustainable energy sources needed to address the climate crisis,”

An emerging theme from the accounts of Thompson and other whistleblowers, government sponsored studies and testimony from victims and experts suggests that the accident caused radiation releases “hundreds if not thousands higher than the government and industry have acknowledged,” also that the incidence of cancer is high within a 10 mile radius of the power plant, and that victims did file suit, but the federal courts quashed the case.

But now, the nuclear industry has ramped up a lobbying and PR campaign to persuade Congress and the public that nuclear energy has a proven safety record and is the solution to global warming. Nuclear power plants do not release carbon dioxide, but critics claim that the process of construction and maintenance of power plants pump up carbon dioxide so as to nullify any positive gain.

Emerging questions about safe storage of nuclear waste led the Obama administration to put a hold on building a nuclear waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. See Good Riddance, Yucca Mountain. Yet Energy Secretary Stephen Chu, Nobel prize-winning physics professor, says that nuclear power plants will be part of the Obama alternative energy program to cut down on dependence on foreign oil.

The nuclear industry has successfully promoted nuclear power since President Eisenhower introduced the “Atoms for Peace” program. The industry has relied on government subsidies because nuclear power plants are so expensive to build, operate and maintain.

Three Mile Island should have been a warning to the nuclear industry to discontinue the proliferation of nuclear reactors. Yet the industry is seeking a nuclear renaissance. The powerful nuclear lobby tried to sneak nuclear energy into President Obama's stimulus package. But Friends of the Earth successfully lobbied initially to keep a 50 billion dollar subsidy from the stimulus package calling it a “nuclear pork” bailout. When the nuclear energy lobby failed on its first attempt,in early April without debate, nuclear energy lobbyists slipped in an extra $50 billion for an Energy Department program into the Senate’s budget blueprint to boost the department’s low-carbon energy loan construction guarantee program over 5 years.

The planned for nuclear “renaissance” is already running aground because of escalating costs. That may be one reason the nuclear industry is so intent on targeting Congress for more bailout money.

Two of the projects filed by 17 companies to build 26 reactors have failed, with the recent collapse of the AmerenEU project to build a reactor at Fulton, MO. The company discovered that the law didn’t allow them to bill customers for financing costs before the plant was finished.

Last year Warren Buffet, a major owner of the MidAmerican Nuclear Energy Company cancelled the Payette County Idaho project. The Nuclear Information Resource Service (NIRS) in a press release asked” if Warren Buffett cannot figure out how to make money from a new nuclear reactor, who can?”

NIRS Executive Director Michael Mariotte observed:

"This cancellation is the first of the new nuclear era,” said Michael Mariotte, executive director of Nuclear Information and Resource Service, “but it won’t be the last. Even before any new nuclear construction has begun in the U.S., cost estimates have skyrocketed and are now 300-400% higher than the industry was saying just two or three years ago."

“The extraordinary costs of nuclear power, coupled with its irresolvable safety and radioactive waste problems, killed the first generation of reactors, and are going to end this second generation as well. But it would be tragedy if the U.S. wasted any money on new reactors, when resources are so desperately needed to implement the safer, cheaper, faster, and sustainable energy sources needed to address the climate crisis,” Mariotte added.

Harvey Wasserman's article "Who Will Pay for America's Chernobyl" gives the true picture of what it would mean for America's economy if a nuclear accident on the scale of Chernobyl comes from one of the 40-year-old "rickety" atomic reactors operating in the United States. 23 years ago, the fallout from Chernobyl caused an estimated 300,000 deaths. Wasserman says that a meltdown like Chernobyl in the United States could "dwarf" that number. No private insurance company will write liability policies on nuclear reactors. There is no rainy-day fund or contingency plan for such a disaster. The federal government, the taxpayer-- would have to bear the burden. Wasserman concludes

"Our money and our lives are being wagered in a game that the house -- OUR house -- simply cannot win."

It's time to weigh the true costs and risks of nuclear power. That was the conclusion by a commission of state and federal nuclear regulators in a January 2007 report Why a Future for the Nuclear Industry Is Risky. After reviewing the cost/benefit ratio of nuclear energy the report concluded:

"The genesis of nuclear power was the “Atoms for Peace
Program” which was intended to make the public
more comfortable with the horrifying destruction of the
nuclear bomb. Originally, the promise was that the
technology would provide energy that would be “too cheap
to meter.”

"Nuclear power may still be more expensive and offset much fewer green-
house gas emissions than a portfolio of renewable and energy efficiency options."

Instead of investing in risky reactors that require massive taxpayer subsidies to construct, maintain, operate, and insure, that increase the carbon footprint, we should put our money toward developing safer alternative renewable sources of energy like solar and wind power that don't threaten our national security.