THE REAL COST OF NUCLEAR ENERGY

THE REAL COST OF NUCLEAR ENERGY
WHAT THE GOVERNMENT WON’T TELL YOU

False global warming propaganda leaked to the media for societal manipulation has increased the public’s opposition increasing greenhouse gas emissions. The public seems oblivious to the fact that global warming has been proven to be a myth and that both polar ice caps are building ice and polar bears are not drowning.

They lied about carbon dioxide being greenhouse gas because it amounts to only .033 percent of our atmosphere. It is a trace gas necessary for plant growth. Without it you won’t eat. If humans were some how able to double the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere it would still be a trace gas at .033 percent.

The polar ice caps are building. I don’t have time to put it here but the earth is heating up underneath due to more volcanic activity. Thorium, radium, plutonium and uranium at the core keep the interior of the earth hot. There is something strange going on with interactive gravity waves being transmitted from star to star as we enter the galactic plane where billions of stars line up.

Meanwhile to counter the mythical GW the government has offered up to $8-billion in subsidies and insurance against delays in licensing nuclear facilities. Additionally they have offered another $18-billion in loan guarantees to build new nuclear plants.

Our government spent $8-billion studying the Yucca mountain Nevada storage facility and that figure does not include that actual construction costs. It is still not ready. The projected opening of the Yucca Mountain, Nevada storage facility is projected to open in 2017—two decades behind schedule.

Meanwhile nuclear reactors around the country have been storing spent fuel rods in cooling pool and above ground cement canisters costing $1-million each. Each canister holds 10 tons of waste (20,000 pounds) and the average 1,000 megawatt reactor discharges enough spent fuel to fill two canisters ever year. Total cost two million dollars per year. The US nuclear utilities are suing the federal government, because they would not have incurred such expenses has the U. S. Department of Energy has opened the Yucca Mountain repository in 1998 as originally planned. As a result the government is paying for the cement canisters and associated infrastructure and operations—a bill that is running about $300-million a year.

Under pressure to remove spent fuel off the sites, the Department of Energy has returned to an idea that it abandoned in the 1970’s—to “reprocess” the spent fuel. Up to 70 percent of the plutonium still remains in the spent fuel rods but the process of extracting it is horrible dangerous.

Vast reprocessing plants have been running in France and the U. K. for more than a decade. Japan began to operate its own reprocessing facility in 2006. The idea is not without its merits however it is expensive and dangerous.

Nuclear fuel is the element from Hell. It power reactors generating heat—which makes steam to turn electricity generating turbines maintaining a nuclear chain reaction that splits atoms. As a rule most of the fuel is uranium that is enriched so that 4 to 5 percent is the chain-reacting isotope uranium 235. Virtually all the rest is uranium 238. At an enrichment of only 5 percent stolen reactor fuel cannot be used to construct an illicit atom bomb.

In the reactor, some of the uranium 238 absorbs a neutron and becomes plutonium 239, which is also chain reacting and can in principle be partially “burned” it is extracted and properly prepared. However the process is expensive and costs more than what the fuel is worth.

Recycling the plutonium reduces the waste problem only minimally. Most important, the separated plutonium can readily serve to make nuclear bombs and much effort and money is spent keeping it secure until it is once more a part of spent fuel. A small amount of this highly radioactive—too small to make a nuclear bomb can be used to make a dirty bomb. Simply wrap it with explosives and detonate over a populated area. The resultant microscopic dust particles breathed into the lungs guarantees a slow death from cancer.

France is using reprocessing to move its storage problem of spent fuel from the reactor sites to the reprocessing plant. Japan is following France’s example. The U. K. and Russia is simply storing their separated ‘civilian’ plutonium—about 120 tons between them as of 2005, enough to make 15,000 atoms bombs. For a while the U. S. was shipping all their spent fuel rods to Russia and France.

The economic reality of the situation took a while to sink in, but it has now convinced almost all nations that bought foreign reprocessing services that they might as well store their spent fuel and save the reprocessing fee of about $1 million per ton (10 times the cost of dry storage containers).

So France, Russia and the U. K. have lost virtually all their foreign customers. One result is the U. K. plans to shut down it reprocessing plants within the next few years, a move that comes with a $92-billion price tag for cleaning up the site of these facilities.

In 2000 France considered the option of ending reprocessing in 2010 and concluded that doing so would reduce the cost of nuclear electricity. (France gets 70 percent of it energy from nuclear power plants.) Making such a change, though, might also engender acrimonious debates about nuclear waste—the last thing the French nuclear establishment wants in a country that has seen relatively little antinuclear activism.

Japan is even more politically locked into reprocessing its nuclear waste. Unlike the U. S. Japan has been unable to obtain permission to expand their on-site storage. Russia today has just one single processing plant with the ability to handle only 15 percent of it total production. The Soviets wanted to expand their processing capability but had to abandon those plans when their economy collapsed in the 1980s.

During the Cold War the U. S. operated reprocessing plants in Washington State and South Carolina to recover plutonium for nuclear weapons. More than half the 100 tons of plutonium that was separated in those efforts has been declared to be in excess of our national needs, and the DOE currently projects that disposing of it will cost more than $15-billion.

The people who were working on the sites where this reprocessing took place are now primarily occupied with cleaning up the resulting mess, which is expected to cost around $100 billion. In a situation where the county is threatened be it real or imaginary the attitude is, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.” Obviously our government has little or no foresight when it comes to nuclear waste or caring for the welfare of its citizens future.

With all the problems reprocessing involves one might ask why it was pursued at all. Part of the answer is that fore years after civilian nuclear power plants were first introduced, the U. S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) promoted reprocessing both domestically and abroad as essential to the future of nuclear power, because the industry was worried about running out of uranium. This concern has since abated.

In 1974 India, one of the countries that the U. S. assisted in acquiring reprocessing capabilities (How many countries?) used its first separated plutonium to build a nuclear weapon. About this time Theodore B. Taylor, a former U. S. nuclear weapons designer, was raising an alarm about the possibility that the panned separation and recycling of thousands of tons of plutonium every year would allow terrorists to steal enough to make one or more atomic bombs. Since that time concerns about a much simpler device using the poisonous waste material in the form of a “dirty bomb.”

The U. S. National Academy of Science panel concluded that recycling the transuranics in the first 62.000 tons of spent fuel, (the amount that otherwise would have been stored in Yucca Mountain) would require, “no less than $50-billion and easily could be over $100 billion”—in other words, it could well cost something like $500 for every person in the U. S. These numbers would have to be doubled to deal with the entire amount of spent fuel that existing U. S. reactors are expected to discharge during their lifetimes.” –May 2008 Scientific American page 91.

Now that we know a little about the history of the nuclear power fiasco we can get a glimpse into the bureaucratic mindset that put us in this situation.

Our government big plan was to ship all its nuclear waste to reprocessing facilities in India and other third-world nations that the AEC had secretly bankrolled and constructed at a cost of several billion each. This was done so they wouldn’t have to deal with the political opposition and Congressional oversight problem in this country. Sound familiar? Ship all the jobs overseas to put Americans out of work because life and labor is cheaper in third-world nations. Who cares if a few lowly-paid, dark-skinned people die from radiation poisoning? Their big plan backfired when India detonated their first underground nuclear explosion.

The Scientific American article goes on to say: “Before this danger was fully realized, the U. S. shared technology for reprocessing spent nuclear fuel with other countries but ceased doing so after India detonated a nuclear bomb...” It is clear that our government’s intentions from the onset has been to spread as much of this nuclear material as possible all over the globe thereby increase the threat of nuclear war and giving them the excuse to take more of our tax money. To learn more read my book, The Frog is Cooked
www.AlaskaPublishing.com and www.GuardDogBooks.com