Nukes now!

Anti-nuclear activists highlight two major dangers that have yet to be resolved: nuclear waste, and the threat of terrorism. After Sept. 11, they've begun to look more entwined.

Waste is an old issue; it's been around since the nuclear energy industry erected its first plant. But despite the changes in other areas of nuclear energy, the process of waste management has remained largely the same. Most of the nation's spent fuel still resides in pools of water on the reactor campus where it was used. New storage casks, a mix of steel and about 2 feet of concrete, have become more popular in the past few years, but they hold only 5 percent of the nation's spent fuel, according to the NEI.

Other countries, such as Japan and France -- which gets about 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear power -- recycle nuclear fuel, but President Ford banned reprocessing in 1974, after India tested a nuclear weapon that had been manufactured using materials exported by the U.S. for peaceful purposes. Some nuclear energy experts have long pushed to see the law changed, arguing that the risk of nuclear proliferation from reprocessed fuels is low, but in the meantime, it would also like to move the waste to a more permanent depository. Yucca Mountain, in Nevada, has long been designated as one such site. But while several experts, Peterson included, have approved the area and the facility's design, the Department of Energy is still trying to decide whether the mountain is safe. Approval may not arrive for years, if ever.

And as far as critics are concerned, no amount of diligent study will be enough. The problem of terrorists getting their hands on the materials to make bombs is reason enough, argue critics, to put a clampdown on all nuclear engineering.

Nuclear scientists can't be trusted, says Larry Rosenthal, president of Concerned Citizens of Louisa County, a watchdog group that's opposed nuclear power since North Anna was first proposed. "Nuclear scientists have said that they could always solve the issues of nuclear power -- the radiation and the storage -- but they have consistently been wrong," he says. Supposedly safe plans to bury it in space, bury it in the ocean, put in salt domes in the Midwest have proven less than safe -- "completely wrong," says Rosenthal.

The system now in use isn't much better. Spent fuel pools reside outside the containment structure, as do the concrete, dry casks. A hijacked plane would have a much easier time compromising the fuel than it would the reactor. Because neither the reactors nor the storage facilities were designed to withstand the attack of a commercial jetliner, there's no way of knowing whether the structure would actually be compromised. But NRC studies on sabotage show that a truck bomb, driven by a suicide bomber, would be enough to crack into many nuclear plants, the contained core included.

"Between 1982 and '91, the NRC conducted dozens of tests -- mock terrorist attacks -- and 27 of 50 reactors failed their tests," says Scott Denman, executive director of the Safe Energy Communication Council, a national energy watchdog coalition. "In 2001, six of the 11 plants that were tested failed."

Another NRC report, issued internally in 1999 by security expert David Orrick, pointed out that "significant weaknesses" in the nuclear security structure could cause an "American Chernobyl" -- core damage and a radiological release. Not even the pro-nuclear NEI denies that a plane could compromise many of the nation's nuclear power plants; when asked, John Vincent, one of the group's security experts, said simply, "We're still trying to figure out what can we say about that. We're researching it now."

The stakes are huge. Chernobyl killed 31 people through immediate exposure to radiation, and possibly thousands more over time. "Using the cancer risk estimates from the National Academy of Sciences, and based on establishment and regulatory material, the number of people who will die from Chernobyl radiation is about 30,000," says Makhijani of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. "That's a massive population."

But just because nuclear advocates can't guarantee complete safety doesn't mean that they're abandoning the cause. They counter "the fear factor," as Waltar puts it, by stressing probability. The likelihood of an attack on a nuclear power plant is slim, they argue. Terrorists wouldn't aim for a reactor because the target is better protected than just about any other structure. It's too hard to successfully strike -- "the plane would have to hit at a certain angle," says Vincent at NEI -- and even if a plane crashed into the reactor, there's a good chance that no radiation would be released.

"It's true that [reactors] weren't designed to tolerate an impact from a 757, but just because it wasn't designed for it doesn't mean that it won't handle it," says Vincent, a former engineer for General Public Utilities. "We over-design in certain areas so we might have ended up covering for this kind of thing too."

Waste issues have also been blown out of proportion, say nuclear scientists. The waste issue still needs to be resolved, they admit, but because nuclear fuel is so energy-intensive -- one marble-sized uranium pellet contains the same amount of energy as 149 gallons of oil -- nuclear waste takes up relatively little space. The entire body of used fuel in the U.S. (about 40,000 metric tons) would cover the size of a football field to the depth of about five yards, according to one NEI analysis.

Plus, scientists ask, was Chernobyl really as much of a tragedy as nuclear critics claimed? They're not joking. While nuclear critics see Chernobyl as a colossal disaster, which sent a cloud of radiation to Europe and killed thousands, nuclear scientists argue that the catastrophe was a worst-case scenario that still killed fewer people than say, a hijacked airliner flown into the ground rather than an office building.

"The degree of death that's been demonstrably shown is much less than what people said at the time," says Hagen at EIA. "There were 31 deaths directly related but the only cancer's proven to have been caused by Chernobyl was thyroid cancer -- and it could have been avoided with iodide."

Makhijani calls such claims "a gross misrepresentation."

"It's true that the number of dead bodies you can count is only 31," he says. "But the number of people who cleaned up Chernobyl was in the hundreds of thousands and many of them have not been followed since the accident." Given the radiation released, it's "false positivism" to believe that these people were not affected, he says.

But Waltar, defending the position that Chernobyl's effects have been overestimated, points out that the cleanup crews did not wear radiation-resistant clothing; that the general population had no idea that they were in danger. When he went to Chernobyl nine years after the accident, he says he discovered that most of the deaths could have been avoided.

"This was horrible, horrible accident, but they had wedding parties in the open air on the day of the tragedy," he says. "They didn't do anything to remediate the situation." The mistakes Russia made wouldn't be repeated here; we're "far more prepared," he says.

But are we prepared enough? Versions of this question will likely dominate the upcoming national debate. Politicians, CEOs and the public have already started asking: Can the U.S. protect nuclear energy? Should it be used as a tool to wean Americans from their dependence on foreign oil? Or is nuclear power simply too dangerous and too expensive to pursue?

Critics like Rosenthal hope that Sept. 11 will teach Louisa County residents around North Anna and the country as a whole "to get off this nuclear bandwagon."

"We've experimented with nuclear power, and it's been proven to be a failure," he says, noting that Germany and Sweden have decided to phase out nuclear energy. "Let's move on."

But for every nuclear critic who appears at a public hearing, there seems to be yet another nuclear apostle nearby. In Washington, on Wall Street and in small towns that are already familiar with nuclear power, new reactors look like viable energy sources or tools for recession relief. And this time, critics aren't the only ones claiming the high moral ground.

"As a scientist and an educator, I have an ethical responsibility to tell this story," Waltar says. "I don't want my grandchildren to come to me -- when the serious effects of global warming occur -- and ask why I didn't do anything. Frankly, I cry sometimes when I think about it."

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