Power Reactors

In the United States, power reactors are entirely of the PWR (pressurized water reactor) or the BWR (boiling water reactor) types. In both cases, water is used as the coolant and the moderator, which provides a very interesting advantage that probably no one has bothered to mention to you: If the coolant is lost, the chain reaction stops. Depending on the length of time the fuel has been producing power, the fuel rods may or may not be thermally and radioactively "hot" from the daughters of the fissioning process. Even in the worst case, the heat generated is no more than 1% or 2% of that during normal operation. This is why the "disaster" at Three Mile Island didn't really happen - except in the minds of the uninformed.

While the Japanese installed the first Advanced Boiling Water Reactor (ABWR) in 1996, none of the new, modular designs have seen the light of day in this country. Not only have we been blinded by the non-threat of low-level radiation, but the cost of building a nuclear plant has escalated by a factor of seventeen, after considering inflation - mostly from construction delays caused by environmentalist lawsuits. (The above-mentioned Japanese ABSR plant took fifty-two months to build - compared with more than eleven years for the most recent plant in the United States.) I would say the new designs are even safer than the old - but how do you get safer than no deaths, no injuries, and no negative effects to the public from several thousand reactor years of operation with thousands of gigawatt-hours of life-enhancing electrical energy having been generated? [Some of the media scream "disaster" when ten gallons of water with 1/80 the radioactivity of salad oil leak out in the process of heating and otherwise providing life-giving energy to an entire city. Why doesn't it make front-page news when some one falls off the roof to his death trying to clean the solar collector - which provides a few puny kilowatts of solar energy for warming the hot water... when the sun is shining?]

Nonetheless, neither the PWR or BWR has much promise for miniaturization and "local" use as - by nature - they operate with high-power densities, which have the potential to cause a messy and expensive loss-of-coolant accident. They also require pumps, back-up pumps, and relatively elaborate controls.

All of these U.S. power reactors use enriched uranium as a fuel, as do reactors in France (where 80% of the electrical power comes from nuclear energy), Japan, England, and most other countries. The enrichment process starts with natural uranium, which is dissolved in acid to produce uranium hexafluoride gas. This ultra-corrosive gas is then pumped thousands of times through membranes where the lighter U235 passes through just a little bit easier than the U238. For power reactors, the U235 is enriched from 0.7% to about 3.5%, which takes not only lots of time but considerable energy. ["Bomb grade" U235 must be enriched to 90% - an extremely difficult process. Thank goodness, or any crackpot might be able to do it.)]

Chernobyl - Symbol of Unconcerned Totalitarianism

One can hardly compare the Chernobyl fire in the Ukraine to the alleged "Three Mile Island disaster" in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Thirty-one firement and plant workers were killed in the former, while the only victims at TMI were from media-caused anxiety. Volumes have been written by analysts on the mistakes made a both power plants. But Chernobyl, with its graphite reactor designed to produce weapons-grade plutonium as well as electricity - and with no containment building - cannot even be compared with the pressurized water reactor (PWR) at TMI in which the nuclear reaction is stopped by the laws of physics when there is a loss of coolant water. Of course that hasn't stopped the anti-nuclear, anti-technologists from trying. But perhaps the strangest story out of Chernobyl was that the Soviet hierarchy, who had strongly supported the anti-nuclear activists in the United States, were apparently led to believe their own propaganda about radiation dangers.

The accident at Chernobyl provided both good and bad news for anti-nuclear activists. For decades, they had been attempting to come up with some reasonable way that radioactive products from nuclear power plants could be spread over the countryside. The best they'd been able to come up with for U.S. power plants went like this:

(a) A loss-of-coolant accident occurs, and the emergency core cooling systems fail to operate, leading to a meltdown of the fuel assemblies inside the reactor.

(b) Although the nuclear reaction stops when the coolant is lost (the water acts as a moderator to slow down the neutrons so they can be captured and allow the reaction to continue), there is still heat generated from the decay of the "daughters" of the reaction. This is supposedly so intense that it melts through six inches of steel in the reactor vessel, and continues through many feet of high-strength, reinforced concrete.

(c) But it can't stop there. The molten mass must then continue to melt through perhaps a few hundred feet of earth until reaching an aquifer. There the steam generated causes "blow holes" to develop, and the steam carries the radioactive products back to the surface. (Hold on, we're almost there.)

(d) The weather must cooperate with a gentle breeze blowing toward a populated area. (Too much wind and our "cloud" dissipates; under calm conditions, the product settles to the earth at the facility and is taken care of there.)

But the graphite fire at Chernobyl provided an actual way that about 90 million curies of radioactive material could be efficiently spread around the countryside. Yes, the anti-nukes got their dream of a large scale nuclear disaster - which had been becoming more and more difficult to conjure up, given the fact that Three Mile Island showed that the uncovered fuel elements couldn't even melt through the reactor vessel.

But there was bad news for them also. There weren't any bodies on the streets. Aside from those who died on-site, mostly firemen who expired from burns with possibly complications from radiation, there is no sign of a cancer epidemic or any other chronic problems.

Oh, sorry, there's one. The governments involved are going broke (broker?) from the payments they are making to victims. Victims? Didn't I just say there weren't any victims? Yes, but I meant from the radiation. The victims as defined by the governments involved are those who were traumatized by fear of radiation or from the trauma of being evicted from their homes and forced into refugee camps.

Of the radionuclides escaping from the burning graphite reactor at Chernobyl, the one of most concern was cesium 137. A gamma emitter with a half-life of thirty years, this reactor product settled to Earth over much of Europe. Yes sir, it did. But nobody seemed to notice it settled right on top of soil that already contained naturally occurring radioisotopes such as U238, Th232, and K40. In a mistaken spirit of humanitarianism, the Soviet Army evacuated its citizens when the dose from the Earth exceeded 0.5 cGy (500 mrad) per year. [One of the purposes of this book is to show how some authorities - even nuclear officials - have no connection with reality and, indeed, make recommendations and rules that cause great harm. This example shows nationality is no barrier.]

They apparently didn't notice they were already sitting on "highly radioactive" dirt. Figure 5 shows the Chernobyl contamination relative to naturally occurring radiation. Is it any wonder that the "Project Team's Main Recommendations" included the following?

"Measures with less impact on traditional agriculture should be investigated; better public information is needed, particularly on doses and risks, and studies of the acceptability to people of living in contaminated areas." [Emphasis added.]

Table 11 – Chernobyl Cs 137 Burden in Various Areas vs. Natural Background
Location	Range (Bq/m^2)
European Cs 137 contamination outside former USSR	20,000 to 23,000
Cs 137 contamination inside former USSR	40,000 to 5,000,000
Natural radionuclides in soil of above areas	177,000 to 6,500,000
Source: Table 2 in 1997 statement by U.N. Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) member Zbigniew Jaworowski

Table 11 gives another look at the Cs 137 "fallout" and the natural radionuclides in the top 10 cm (about four inches) of soil in several locations around Chernobyl. Note the range of natural soil radiation. Wouldn't you think that someone would have noticed a variation in the detrimental effects of natural radiation when some areas had thirty-six times the soil radioisotopes of others - if indeed there were any detrimental effects? Would you think one area would be known as Cancervania - because of regular affliction of the populace from radiation, while another area would go by Vitalia, because of superior health derived from a dearth of radiation exposure? But we don't see Europe having such disparities in cancer or other immune disorders on the basis of location, do we?

Well, actually we do: the health resorts are almost always located on springs with a high radon content.