Editor’s note: When you invent nuclear energy (nukes) you invent radioactive waste
Some proponents of nuclear energy refuse to give up on the technology. They blame the decline in nuclear energy and the high costs and long construction periods on the characteristics of older reactor designs, arguing that alternative designs will rescue nuclear energy from its woes. In recent years, the alternatives most often advertised are small modular (nuclear) reactors—SMRs for short. These are designed to generate between 10 and 300 megawatts of power, much less than the 1,000–1,600 megawatts that reactors being built today are designed to produce.
For over a decade now, many of my colleagues and I have consistently explained why these reactors would not be commercially viable and why they would never resolve the undesirable consequences of building nuclear power plants. I first started examining small modular reactors when I worked at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security. Our group largely comprised physicists, and we used a mixture of technical assessments, mathematical techniques, and social-science-based methods to study various problems associated with these technologies. My colleague Alex Glaser, for example, used neutronics models to calculate how much uranium would be required as fuel for SMRs, which we then used to estimate the increased risk of nuclear weapons proliferation from deploying such reactors. Zia Mian, originally from Pakistan, and I showed why the technical characteristics of SMRs would not allow for simultaneously solving the four key problems identified with nuclear power: its high costs, its accident risks, the difficulty of dealing with radioactive waste, and its linkage with the capacity to make nuclear weapons. My colleagues and I also undertook case studies on Jordan, Ghana, and Indonesia, three countries advertised by SMR vendors as potential customers, and showed that despite much talk, none of them were investing in SMRs, because of various country-specific reasons such as public opposition and institutional interests.
By George Tzindaro
The mainstream view of the current climate crisis is that it is mainly caused by greenhouse effect from gases released by burning of fuels such as coal and oil. But there is another theory of man-made climate disaster that is hardly ever mentioned in the mainstream media. That is the theory that much of the anthropogenic change in climate in the last 60 years or so is due to the introduction of nuclear power.
Between 1949, when the atomic bomb testing program began, and 1963, when the atmospheric test ban treaty went into effect, over 1,000 atomic bombs (nukes) were set off above ground. Since 1963, many more have been set off underground, and ever single one of them has resulted in leakage of radioactive gases into the atmosphere. That’s right! They have never yet managed to set off an underground test that did not leak.
Nuclear explosions are one source, but only one, of a radioactive gas called Krypton 85, which is not found naturally in the atmosphere except in insignificant trace amounts. There is now several million times as much in the atmosphere as in 1945 at the start of the Atomic Age.
Kr85 has a half-life of only around 12 years, so much of it would be gone now if bomb tests were the only source for it. But it is also produced by the recycling of nuclear reactor fuel rods. During the recycling process 100% of the Kr85 is released into the atmosphere with no attempt at containment because since it goes up into the upper atmosphere where it cannot contact any living thing, it is considered biologically harmless.
Kr85 is a radioactive gas. Radioactive gases consist of charged particles. When charged particles enter the field of a magnet, they migrate toward the poles of the magnet. The earth is a giant bar magnet. The charged particles of the radioactive gas, Kr85, end up at the North and South Poles.
Tropical storms like hurricanes form along the equator. Such storms are highly-charged systems. How far they travel from their birthplace along the equator toward the pole is determined by how strongly charged they are and how strongly charged the pole of the earth is that attracts them.
As charge from Kr85 builds up at the poles, more and more tropical storms are attracted farther and farther toward the poles, bringing tropical heat with them, causing warming of the temperate and polar regions. At the same time, the temperate zones experience more frequent and more severe tropical-type storms. The storm surges from these storms send high water marks higher, eroding coastlines and giving the impression of rising sea levels.
The build-up of radioactive gas at high altitude in the polar regions interacts with the influx from space that enters the earth at the poles and is known as the Wilson Current. This energetic stream then flows through the crust of the earth in huge surges, and is discharged back into space in the form of upward-striking lightning bolts as a part of the nearly constant belt of thunderstorm activity that circles the earth at the equator. The whole process is known as the Wilson Circuit, and it is the balance of inflow from space at the poles and discharge into space as lightning that maintains the electrostatic balance of the earth.
The ionization of the upper atmosphere at the polar regions, making the atmosphere more conductive, bleeds off a portion of the inflowing Wilson Current and the result is less lightning on a global basis. According to carefully-maintained insurance company statistics, the number of claims for lightning-related damage was steady from the 1830s until about 1950 and has since declined by about 35%, indicating a drastic decrease in lightning all over the earth.
Since lightning is the most important mechanism in nature by which atmospheric nitrogen is “fixed” into nitrogen compounds plants can utilize, and some species of plants are more dependent on lightning for their nitrogen needs than others, this would have a transformative effect on the composition of ecosystems, leading to a decrease in biodiversity as the most lightning-dependent species decline and other species, less dependent on lightning-produced nitrogen, succeed them in the ecosystem.
This subtle effect, changing the ratio of one plant species to another, is not likely to be noticed, and if noticed, is not likely to be ascribed to a cause so remote as a build-up of radioactive gas at the North or South Poles from nuclear plants scattered all over the industrialized regions of the world. But that is a perfect example of how closely connected and interdependent the natural world really is. And this effect is one of the most important consequences of the development of nuclear technology.
These are only some of the effects of nuclear power that are seldom if ever addressed by the mainstream anti-nuclear movement, and which MUST be addressed if the full costs of the nuclear age are to be understood.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Deep Green Resistance, the News Service or its staff.
Photo by https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NTS_-_Low-level_radioactive_waste_storage_pit.jpg
I was talking to my mother once, on a hot summer day, and a thunderstorm came up. I mentioned that when I was growing up there in New England, there were thunderstorms all summer long, every few days, but now they seem rare. We still get plenty of rain, but we now get only one or two thunderstorms in the course of a summer, and even those have very little thunder and lightning in them compared to those I remembered.
My mother confirmed my childhood memory, and went on to say that when she was a child, there were even more of them, and that led me to start asking other people. I found that the older a person was, the more they were certain there is less thunder and lightning now than many years ago. So I asked a leading atmospheric physicist about it. He told me he knew of only one project counting lightning strikes, and that was only a few years old, so there was no baseline of data from years ago to compare it with.
He then made a mistake: He went on to say, “It is impossible to find out if there is less lightning now than there used to be”. Now, when a highly respected scientist tells me something is “impossible” , my usual reaction is to go out and do it anyway. So I did.
I went home and made a phone call to an insurance company. I asked to speak to the head of their actuarial department. Insurance compainies keep very careful records because they set their rates accordingly. The actuary found my question interesting and said he would get back to me.
He phoned me back that same afternoon. He told me he had checked their records back to the 1830s when the company was founded. From the 1830s until about 1950, the number of claims for lightning-related damage remained about the same, and since 1950 it has decreased by about 35%.
I asked two questions: Has there been an improvement in lightning rod technology since the 1940s? He said, No, they are still the same as when Ben Franklin invented them. And I asked, do more building have lightning rods now? and the answer was that they have always been required for insurance coverage.
Bingo! There is less lightning now than there used to be, no matter if the scientists know it or not. My next step was to try to find out why. I could find very little in the scientific literature on the subject, but quite by accident, I came across an abstract of an article published in a Soviet scientific journal in 1988, just before the implosion of the Soviet Union. The abstract was all I could find in English, but it was enough to cause me to pay a visit to the author when I happened to be in Vilnius, Lithuania, where he was located.
He did not speak English, and the conversation in a mixture of my bad German and worse French was far from fluent, but I did manage to discover that he had not been able to obtain funding for any more work on the subject since the end of the Soviet Union. Lithuania does not have a very big budget for scientific research. I also asked if he knew of anyone else doing anything along the same lines, and he said no. I take that as definitive since I would expect him to know if anything was being done anywhere in the world in a field in which he is the only published author.
What he had written about that got me so interested was the changes in the electrostatic balance of the earth as a result of the release of a radioactive gas, Krypton 85, into the atmosphere since the start of the Atomic Age. Kr85 is not found naturally in the atmosphere except in insignificant trace amounts, and there is now several million times as much as before humans started splitting the atom in 1945.
Kr85 is an ionizing gas. Ionizing gases make the atmosphere more conductive of electricity, so small charges bleed off continuously, instead of building up to the point of a sudden sharp discharge as a lightning bolt. The decrease in lightning reflected in the insurance company statistics is consistant with the amount of Kr85 known to have been released over the past 60-odd years.
A decline in lightning is a very serious environmental threat. According to research done by Pud Franzblou, at the New Mexico School of Mines, lightning is the most important source of bio-avalable nitrogen compounds needed by plant life, providing up to 99% of the nitrate compounds required by plant life to make the protein animals that live on them need. Plants cannot use nitrogen in the free form in which it is found in the atmosphere. They need it in the form of compounds known as “fixed” nitrogen. Some types of plants have a symbiotic relationship with nitrogen-fixing bacteria on their roots,but other plants do not and are dependent on lightning. It is estimated that only about 1% of the biosphere requirement of nitrogen is provided by nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil. The rest comes from lightning.
Experiments done in sealed greenhouses with extra CO2 pumped in show the plants thrive and grow larger and faster from the extra carbon. But without added nitrogen to balance the added carbon, they are less norishing for animal life feeding on them. This is known as “nitrogen dilution”, and at some point animals will no longer be able to obtain enough nourishment from the plants to survive, even thought the plants will be larger and will look perfectly healthy.
And that is another one of the most important hazards of the Nuclear Age.
Nuclear anything does great harm to the environment in many ways. We should focus on uranium mining, which is hideously destructive and polluting. That’s reason enough to eliminate nukes of any kind. Uranium should be left in the ground, just like petroleum.
I agree. But the U.S. military does not. Nuclear reactors are not for producing electricity. That is a cover story to get the public to allow them. The real reason for building them is to produce radioactive material for military purposes. Look up ”depleated uranium”. Artilery shells are made from recycled reactor fuel rods. These shells pulverize into microsopic dust particles upon impact. More than 150,000 of them were shot off in Iraq alone and more in Afganistan. Both those countries, plus Bosnia, Syria, and others, have been permanently poisoned by radioactive dust.
Iraqi doctors are seeing thousands of cases a year more than before the American ivasion of miscariages, stillbirths, serious birth defects, childhood cancers, and leukemia than before the invasion.
It is called an ”area interdiction weapon” The intention is to make it impossible for any future people who live there to ever challenge the USA again. Uranium has a half-life of 4.5,000,000,000 years so if anyone is alive in those countries thousands of years from now, long after the very name of the United States of America has been forgotten, they will still have to spend most of their energy caring for the sick.
That is the real motive for the Pentagon trying to convince the public to build nuclear reactors. Power generation is only a side-effect, not the actual goal, but it can be used to win the political support needed for the program if the public can be convinced of the ”danger” of coal and oil.