From Forbes
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Energy I write about energy and the environment
After a tsunami struck the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan eight years ago today, triggering the meltdowns of three reactors, many believed it would result in a public health catastrophe.
“By now close to one million people have died of causes linked to the Chernobyl disaster,” wrote Helen Caldicott, an Australian medical doctor, in The New York Times. Fukushima could “far exceed Chernobyl in terms of the effects on public health.”
Many pro-nuclear people came to believe that the accident was proof that the dominant form of nuclear reactor, which is cooled by water, is fatally flawed. They called for radically different kinds of reactors to make the technology “inherently safe.”
But now, eight years after Fukushima, the best-available science clearly shows that Caldicott’s estimate of the number of people killed by nuclear accidents was off by one million. Radiation from Chernobyl will kill, at most, 200 people, while the radiation from Fukushima and Three Mile Island will kill zero people.
In other words, the main lesson that should be drawn from the worst nuclear accidents is that nuclear energy has always been inherently safe.
The truth about nuclear power’s safety is so shocking that it’s worth taking a closer look at the worst accidents, starting with the worst of the worst: Chernobyl.
The nuclear plant is in Ukraine which, in 1986, the year of the accident, was a Soviet Republic. Operators lost control of an unauthorized experiment that resulted in the reactor catching fire.
There was no containment dome, and the fire spewed out radioactive particulate matter, which went all over the world, leading many to conclude that Chernobyl is not just the worst nuclear accident in history but is also the worst nuclear accident possible.
Twenty-eight firefighters died after putting out the Chernobyl fire. While the death of any firefighter is tragic, it’s worth putting that number in perspective. Eighty-six firefighters died in the U.S. in 2018, and 343 firefighters died during the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
Since the Chernobyl accident, 19 first responders have died, according to the United Nations, for ”various reasons” including tuberculosis, cirrhosis of the liver, heart attacks, and trauma. The U.N. concluded that “the assignment of radiation as the cause of death has become less clear.”
What about cancer? By 2065 there may be 16,000 thyroid cancers; to date there have been 6,000. Since thyroid cancer has a mortality rate of just one percent — it is an easy cancer to treat — expected deaths may be 160.
The World Health Organization claims on its web site that Chernobyl could result in the premature deaths of 4,000 people, but according to Dr. Geraldine Thomas, who started and runs the Chernobyl Tissue Bank, that number is based on a disproven methodology.
“That WHO number is based on LNT,” she explained, using the acronym for the “linear no-threshold” method of extrapolating deaths from radiation.
LNT assumes that there is no threshold below which radiation is safe, but that assumption has been discredited over recent decades by multiple sources of data.
Support for the idea that radiation is harmless at low levels comes from the fact that people who live in places with higher background radiation, like Colorado, do not suffer elevated rates of cancer.
In fact, residents of Colorado, where radiation is higher because of high concentrations of uranium in the ground, enjoy some of the lowest cancer rates in the U.S.
Even relatively high doses of radiation cause far less harm than most people think. Careful, large, and long-term studies of survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki offer compelling demonstration.
Cancer rates were just 10 percent higher among atomic blast survivors, most of whom never got cancer. Even those who received a dose 1,000 times higher than today’s safety limit saw their lives cut short by an average of 16 months.
But didn’t the Japanese government recently award a financial settlement to the family of a Fukushima worker who claimed his cancer was from the accident?
It did, but for reasons that were clearly political, and having to do with the Japanese government’s consensus-based, conflict-averse style, as well as lingering guilt felt by elite policymakers toward Fukushima workers and residents, who felt doubly aggrieved by the tsunami and meltdowns.
The worker’s cancer was highly unlikely to have come from Fukushima because, once again, the level of radiation workers received was far lower than the ones received by the Hiroshima/Nagasaki cohort that saw (modestly) higher cancer rates.
What about Three Mile Island? After the accident in 1979, Time Magazine ran a cover story that superimposed a glowing headline, “Nuclear Nightmare,” over an image of the plant. Nightmare? More like a dream. What other major industrial technology can suffer a catastrophic failure and not kill anyone?
Remember when the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig caught on fire and killed 11 people? Four months later, a Pacific Gas & Electric natural gas pipeline exploded just south of San Francisco and killed eight people sleeping in their beds. And that was just one year, 2010.
The worst energy accident of all time was the 1975 collapse of the Banqiao hydroelectric dam in China. It collapsed and killed between 170,000 and 230,000 people.
Nuclear’s worst accidents show that the technology has always been safe for the same, inherent reason that it has always had such a small environmental impact: the high energy density of its fuel.
Splitting atoms to create heat, rather than than splitting chemical bonds through fire, requires tiny amounts of fuel. A single Coke can of uranium can provide enough energy for an entire high-energy life.
When the worst occurs, and the fuel melts, the amount of particulate matter that escapes from the plant is insignificant in contrast to both the fiery explosions of fossil fuels and the daily emission of particulate matter from fossil- and biomass-burning homes, cars, and power plants, which kill seven million people a year.
Thanks to nuclear’s inherent safety, the best-available science shows that nuclear has saved at least two million lives to date by preventing the burning of biomass and fossil fuels. Replacing, or not building, nuclear plants, thus results in more death.
In that sense, Fukushima did result in a public health catastrophe. Only it wasn’t one created by the tiny amounts of radiation that escaped from the plant.
Anxiety Displacement and Panic
The Japanese government, in the view of Chernobyl expert Geraldine Thomas and other radiation experts, contributed to the widespread view of radiation as a super-potent toxin by failing to return residents to the Fukushima province after the accident, and for reducing radiation in soil and water to unnecessarily low levels.
The problem started with an over-evacuation. Sixty-thousand people were evacuated but only 30,000 have returned. While some amount of temporary evacuation might have been justified, there was simply never any reason for such a large, and long-term, evacuation.
About 2,000 people died from the evacuation, while others who were displaced suffered from loneliness, depression, suicide, bullying at school, and anxiety.
“With hindsight, we can say the evacuation was a mistake,” said Philip Thomas, a professor of risk management at the University of Bristol and leader of a recent research project on nuclear accidents. “We would have recommended that nobody be evacuated.”
Beyond the evacuation was the government’s massively exaggerated clean-up of the soil. To give you a sense of how exaggerated the clean-up was, consider that the Colorado plateau was and is more (naturally) radioactive than most of Fukushima after the accident.
“There are areas of the world that are more radioactive than Colorado and the inhabitants there do not show increased rates of cancer,” notes Dr. Thomas. And whereas radiation levels at Fukushima decline rapidly, “those areas stay high over a lifetime as the radiation is not the result of contamination but of natural background radiation.”
Even residents living in the areas with the highest levels of soil contamination were unaffected by the radiation, according to a major study of nearly 8,000 residents in the two to three years since the accident.
In 2017, while visiting Fukushima for the second time, I lost my cool over this issue. Jet-lagged and hungry, and witnessing the ridiculous and expensive bull-dozing of the region’s fertile topsoil into green plastic bags, I started grilling a scientist with the ministry of the environment.
Why were they destroying Fukushima’s precious topsoil in order to reduce radiation levels that were already at levels far lower than posed a danger? Why was the government spending billions trying to do the same thing with water near the plant itself? Was nobody in Japan familiar with mainstream radiation health science?
At first the government scientist responded by simply repeating the official line — they were remediating the top soil to remove the radiation from the accident.
I decided to force the issue. I repeated my question. My translator told me that the expert didn’t understand my question. I started arguing with my translator.
Then, at that moment, the government scientist started talking again. I could tell by the tone of his voice that he was saying something different.
“Every scientist and radiation expert in the world who comes here says the same thing,” he said. “We know we don’t need to reduce radiation levels for public health. We’re doing it because the people want us to.”
The truth of the matter had been acknowledged, and the tension that had hung between us had finally broken. “Arigato gozaimasu!” I said, genuinely grateful for the man’s honesty.
The man’s face was sad when he explained the situation, but he was also calmer. The mania behind his insistence that the “contaminated” topsoil had required “cleaning” had evaporated.
And I wasn’t mad anymore either, just relieved. I understood his dilemma. He had only been the repeating official dogma because his job, and the larger culture and politics, required him to.
Such has been the treatment of radiation fears by scientists and government officials, not just in Japan, for over 60 years.
There is no evidence that low levels of radiation hurt people, but rather than be blunt about that, scientists have, in the past, shaded the truth often out of a misguided sense of erring on the side of caution, but thereby allowing widespread misunderstanding of radiation to persist.
We also now know that when societies don’t use nuclear, they mostly use fossil fuels, not renewables. After Fukushima, Japan closed its nuclear plants and saw deadly air pollution skyrocket.
The biggest losers, as per usual, are the most vulnerable: those with respiratory diseases, such as emphysema and asthma, children, the elderly, the sick, and the poor, who tend to live in the most polluted areas of cities.
It’s also clear that people displace anxieties about other things onto nuclear accidents. We know from in-depth qualitative research conducted in the 1970s that young people in the early part of that decade were displacing fears of nuclear bombs onto nuclear plants.
Nuclear plants are viewed as little bombs and nuclear accidents are viewed as little atomic explosions, complete with fall-out and the dread of contamination.
It is impossible to view the Japanese public’s panicked overreaction to Fukushima and not see it as partly motivated by the horror of having seen 15,897 citizens instantly killed, and another 2,533 gone missing, after a tsunami hammered the region.
The sociologist Kyle Cleveland argues persuasively that Fukushima was a “moral panic,” in that the panic was motivated by a desire by the Japanese news media and public for revenge against an industrial and technical elite viewed as uncaring, arrogant, and corrupt.
Michael Shellenberger, President, Environmental Progress. Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment.”
HT/Peter T
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Everything else made sense, but suddenly this unsubstantiated claim, without any further explanation.
You can google it you know. (Johann will be around shortly to give you a google search result link, I’m sure).
While google results show several sources quoting the 2000 figure, I’m not familiar enough with most of them to know how reliable they are. One example:
https://nuclear-news.net/2018/03/07/fleeing-from-fukushima-a-nuclear-evacuation-reality-check/
However here is a link to a MSM source that state 1,600
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/fukushima-evacuation-has-killed-more-earthquake-tsunami-survey-says-flna8C11120007
so, bottom line, yes a large number (1,600 to 2,000) apparently did die in the evacuation.
last line should have ended with: “did die from the evacuation”.
where’s the edit button when you need it?
The future of nuclear must be small modular reactors running liquid crystal systems. They do not require the high pressures of PWRs, so no immense pressure resistant containment vessel required, fission products are non volatile and will not be spread across hundreds of miles in the unlikely event of an escape. In the Moltex design (British, but undergoing licensing in N.B., Canada) the liquid fuel in the rods is “burned” with only 5% residue (as opposed to only 5% of fuel used in conventional solid pellet rods) and the half life of residues is measured in tens and hundreds of years, not millenia. Safety cooling is by natural convection, so a total power outage will not cause meltdown and the worst case scenario is that all the coolant and radioactive material drains into concrete ponds below the reactor. Add the benefits that this technology will consume the stockpiles of uranium and plutonium from conventional nuclear and the small reactors can be built on assembly lines and it seems a no brainer. “But it’s nuclear” they scream, so the 2.5 billions humans without access to cheap electricity will continue to be fobbed off with a solar cell and a one metre windmill. How very Green.
Some thirty years ago a nuclear scientist friend explained carefully to me that someone living at a modest elevation of around 2 000 meters (6 000 feet) above sea level one would be exposed to higher levels of radiation then living near a nuclear reactor at sea level.
Just check the exposure on a Dublin – NY round flight at 10,000m. Cabin crews are health conscious and do just fine.
I’m starting to think Shellenberger is a shill. The degree to which a former environmentalist overlooks things to embrace the current state of nuclear power isn’t credible. Some Russian experts think 150,000 people died as a result of Chernobyl. Go read about (and look at) the birth deformities that are still happening in places downwind from Chernobyl. Thyroid cancers and abnormalities (along with many other problems) spiked in Japan after Fukushima, but doctors can’t attribute those to the accident due to government pressure.
Quoting the Daily Mail from the time and claiming a Russian source reeks of Novichok.
Same ol, same ol’.
I love how some un-named expert is now more credible than actual, real world data.
I guess when you have a paranoia to defend, any data will suffice.
Pure speculation without a shred of evidence. UFO believers and Bigfoot hunters have more credibility.
The tragic, and preventable, problem at Fukushima, was the completely arbitrary study period designation for the site. A tsunami was known to have inundated the site, but the study period excluded this event. Such failures are possible, and likely, in a culture that places too high a value on consensus and too little on skepticism.
Very good to hear of LNT, Hormesis . Still the particulate matter stats are totally over-the-top (huge open discussion in Germany).
And incredibly no mention of the Chernobyl predecessor, Selafield (Windscale, Cumbria), same design, England 1957. Only declassified in the 1990’s. Of course Britain was the first to ship cleanup equipment – they had stocks!
(Wonder if the special Ukraine relationship was the price?).
France was warned of the polonium cloud.
Say the Entente Cordialle ain’t so, Joe.
And how many people remember SL-1
An American reactor that blew up
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1
killing its three operators who were I believe buried with the wreckage 30 feet under a tombstone in an Idaho cornfield.
https://timeline.com/arco-first-nuclear-accident-f16ec1105b9c
And how many people remember SL-1
Very, very few. That was back in the days before “Earth day”, and environmental agitation groups like Greenpeace. And back when news reports mainly focused on reporting the news rather than focusing on editorializing the news.
If I remember correctly, 3 died in that incident. One of them nailed to the roof by a control rod.
Yes, 3 died (one of the three was initially found alive but died shortly thereafter). Yes one was “nailed to the roof”, but it was via one of the shield plugs from the top of the reactor vessel not a control rod (according to the wiki link Ken provided).
Yes and no.
It may well be true that specific reactor accidents did not cause many or even (in Fukushima or Three Mile Island) any fatalities, but that does not make nuclear power, in the form of light water reactors, inherently “safe” in any rational way. When those meltdown accidents occur, massive amounts of extremely radioactive material is exposed to the internal environment, inside the reactor containment buildings. That material cannot simply be left there – it must be removed and legally disposed as high level radioactive waste, much of it with extremely long half lives. To remove it requires, at least with today’s technology, that human workers enter those highly radioactive environments, with extensive anti-contamination clothing and protected breathing apparatus, and work in very high radiation fields. In such work a radiation worker could be exposed to a fatal dose of radiation in fairly short order – hence workers are carefully timed and in many instances can only work for a few minutes before receiving the maximum legal radiation exposure for a year. They must then leave, and not return again to any known exposures for another year, requiring lots and lots of workers to get the job done over many years of effort.
From a business perspective, if not a human health and mortality perspective, then, reactor meltdown accidents are horrible outcomes that are anything but “safe”. Not to mention the litigation liabilities created, and massive loss of revenue from electrical generation.
The author makes it sound like “no harm, no foul” from reactor meltdown accidents, which is the opposite of the truth.
Now, there are new reactor designs making their way today through the design development and licensing processes that are indeed inherently “fail safe”, and cannot melt down, unlike the common light water reactors in service as power plants across the world today. Molten salt reactors are one such type of reactor .. it simply cannot experience an out of control reactor core meltdown, because the coolant and the fuel are already combined in a liquid form. If all electrical power is lost preventing removal of the heat product from the reactor produces (that in a secondary plant produces steam to run generators), a “frozen” plug in the bottom automatically melts, allowing the contents to drain into a basin that automatically stops the reaction.
There is a very famous saying amongst rural folk: “Don’t piss down my leg and tell me it’s raining”. As the author of this post is effectively attempting to claim.
It is all well and good to point out the “bottom line” that human fatalities are not the principle result of a reactor meltdown, but that no matter how you cut it a reactor meltdown is a massive catastrophe that is an inherent risk in light water reactors … and the good news is that better, safer, more reliable reactors are on the way.
By the way, I was a US Navy nuclear reactor operator, served on fast attack submarines. After my naval service, I spent some time as an operator and a Test Engineer at the Loss Of Fluid Test (LOFT) reactor in Idaho – the only reactor in the world that was intended to suffer a complete loss of flow accident as its final act. My major professor for my master’s program also worked for the same nuclear contractor, and he was the US DOE project manager for the cleanup of the Three Mile Island reactor.
It may well be true that specific reactor accidents did not cause many or even (in Fukushima or Three Mile Island) any fatalities, but that does not make nuclear power, in the form of light water reactors, inherently “safe” in any rational way.
Bzzzt! wrong. Look at the safety records of Nuclear compared to other energy forms (Gas, oil, coal, wind, solar, hydro, etc.)
Here’s a link
https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/
Nuclear is safest of all – deaths per Terrawatt Hour :-
Nuclear 0.04
Hydro 0.1
Wind 0.15
Photovoltaic 0.44
Natural Gas 4.0
Biomass 12
Oil 36
Coal 161
Nuclear has, by far, the best safety record despite those very rare high profile accidents. And each of those very rare high profile accidents have lead to lessons learned that serve to make nuclear even more safe.
Now, there are new reactor designs making their way today through the design development and licensing processes that are indeed inherently “fail safe”,
Which only means Nuclear can only get *safer*, should though design end up proving viable.
Molten salt reactors are one such type of reactor
which currently only exist as vaporware. Would love to see them manifest in the real world and live up to their hype, but until that happens they remain as real as unicorn farts.
should
thoughthose designssilly autocorrect.
Years ago I was responsible for developing a report on the lost time accident rate for the NPP I worked at. The number looked exceedingly low and unbelievable. I checked the Lost time numbers on the BLS web site and was amazed that the number was lower than any on there, and MUCH lower than the number on BLS for “Utilities.” It was lower than accounting firms, Law firms and several other occupations. Checked with other plants and sure enough my plant was in the same ballpark as all the NPPs I contacted. Do not remember the number but it was on the order of 0.0X per 100,000 FTE
Yes but heavy water reactors exist which already have a better safety record than enriched uranium reactors. (Actually molten salt reactors exist they just aren’t economic yet because we don’t yet have a cheap way to separate the different elements. Also, some heavy water reactors can burn thorium – seems we’re almost there).
But even if none of these things are true, we could, probably should and someday will, run the world solely on hydro and nuclear.
Actually, no .. MSRs do NOT need to “separate the elements”. MSRs actually consume nuclear waste, turning very highly radioactive and long lived transuranics into short lived radionuclides easily disposed in today’s existing low level rad waste landfills. Indeed, one of the uses of MSRs is actually to feed them with liquified high level reactor waste as a fuel feedstock.
Actually, no .. MSRs do NOT need to “separate the elements”.
Wrong again Duane. Chemical separation is still required to turn long-lived actinides back into reactor fuel.
Molten Salt Reactors are not unicorn farts and never will be.
“The Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE) was an experimental molten salt reactor at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) researching this technology through the 1960s; constructed by 1964, it went critical in 1965 and was operated until 1969.”[1]
Refer to the following article for your edification:
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/08/global-race-for-transformative-molten-salt-nuclear-includes-bill-gates-and-china.html
Regards
Climate Heretic
[1] Wikipedia
Molten Salt Reactors are not unicorn farts and never will be.
Sorry, but until they making it past the experimental stage an into the commercial operation stage, yes that are unicorn farts and that’s all they’ll be (not everything that makes it to the experimental stage turns out to be viable for commercial operation). You can’t power a city on technology that doesn’t exist in commercial operation. Just like you can’t power a city on unicorn farts. Get back to us when there is *one* (just one, that’s not too much to ask for) in commercial operation. Until then, you are talking unicorn farts.
You did not address my point, which is that reactor safety is NOT just defined as deaths generated. Nuclear reactors that generate power are business enterprises. That means they must generate a return on investment. A reactor design – such as all of those in commercial service today -become total writeoffs and massive liabilities whenever a reactor melts down. As an investment, they are among the least safe any investor would ever face.
A reactor that melts down also melts down its owner, financially speaking, and credibility in the marketplace speaking. It causes massive disruption of life in the nearby areas.
No sane person would call that “safe”.
The good news is that there are actually several totally safe reactor designs now working their way through design development and licensing. The one I mentioned, MSRs, aren’t even a new design – the first one dates back to the 1970s, but it was forgotten in the rush to license LWRs, and then forgotten again when everything nuclear took on toxic qualities in the minds of both the general public and investors.
Relief is on the way.
You did not address my point, which is that reactor safety is NOT just defined as deaths generated.
Bzzt Wrong, Again. The stuff you babble on about has nothing to do with safety. care to try again?
Nuclear reactors that generate power are business enterprises. That means they must generate a return on investment.
Business investments that go bad have nothing to do with whether or not those investments had issues with safety. That’s a completely different topic. duh.
The good news is that there are actually several totally safe reactor designs now working their way through design development and licensing
Great, when they go commercial then and only then can you tout how safe they really are. Real world trumps theoretical every time.
And no, MSRs are certainly not vapor ware. The US DOE designed, built, and operated a MSR successfully at the Idaho National Laboratory back in the 1970s. It simply was not adopted by the commercial power industry at the time. Nothing that has existed and operated successsfully can be dishonestly labeled as “vaporware”.
Until they become commercially available, yes they are. that’s the very definition of vaporware: “a product that is announced to the general public but is never actually manufactured nor officially cancelled”. Again, when you can show just *ONE* in commercial operation, then and only then can you claim it is not vaporware.
Btw, I saw Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, on tv a couple of days ago and he was promoting new-technology nuclear power.
“The worst energy accident of all time was the 1975 collapse of the Banqiao hydroelectric dam in China. It collapsed and killed between 170,000 and 230,000 people.”
Does this accident alone make hydroelectric the most dangerous form of energy, historically?
This is sort of unrelated, but I’ve always thought the price of lung cancer from smoking is overblown. You take a smoker who works until he’s 63 then he gets cancer and dies. Another person doesn’t smoke and lives decades longer, all the while collecting from the government and getting treated for all sorts of non-life threatning illnesses. Who costs the government more? I’m not advocating smoking just pointing out politics in messages from our betters.
Molten saly nuclear reactors are miles ahead of current light water reactors, not only in terms of inherent safety
but especially in terms of cost, siteability, geographic footprint, proliferation resistance, etc. There is no valid reason for choosing light water reactors over molten salt reactors. None.
Molten saly nuclear reactors are miles ahead of current light water reactors, not only in terms of inherent safety
Yes, you can’t beat a 100% safety record. Of course the fact that there are none existing in commercial operation couldn’t possibly have anything to do with it. But by all means keep pushing the virtues of your favorite vaporware and wake me when you actually get one into commercial operation so that the reality can be compared to the endless hype.
There is no valid reason for choosing light water reactors over molten salt reactors. None.
Yes there is, and its a very big one: light water reactors actually exist in commercial operation in the real world, molten salt reactors do not. Until you can manage to get one into commercial operations so all your claims about them can be verified, there is no valid reason to choose vaporware over things that actually exist.
And equally no reason to choose significantly more expensive nuclear over cheap gas. The reality is that you still have a waste disposal problem — Yucca is as much vaporware as MSR, and Shellenberger may be sanguine about indefinite dry cask storage, but that isn’t really a long term solution either.
Yucca Mountain is a result of Jimmy Carter’s mandating a “once-through” fuel cycle, with the misguided belief that virtue signalling would induce foreigners to not reprocess power reactor fuel into bombs. As it was as silly as most of Carter’s proposals in general, doing away with that would solve the problem of long-term storage of nuclear waste.
I am repeating and expanding upon an earlier comment that I made on WUWT in January, 2019 concerning the reasons why nuclear projects fail to deliver on their cost & schedule commitments.
It is my opinion that the long-term future of nuclear power in the United States depends upon successfully fielding the Small Modular Reactors (SMR’s). The SMR’s now represent the only hope we have for getting the end-to-end process of designing, constructing, and commissioning a nuclear power plant under complete and effective management control.
—————————————————
Here in the US, including the options of nuclear, wind, solar, and hydro in the power generation mix is strictly a public policy decision. Left to its own devices, the power market in the US would swing decisively towards gas-fired generation given that among all the choices available for the next several decades, gas-fired generation has the least technical, environmental, and financial risks. It also has the highest profit making potential for private investors.
More than a decade ago, in about 2006 when the initial cost estimates for pursuing a 21st century nuclear renaissance were being done, the 6 billion dollar estimate for a pair of new technology AP1000’s was thought by many to be too low. With twenty-five years passing without construction of a clean-sheet reactor design having been initiated, the US nuclear industrial base was in a deeply withered state. It was recognized that the steep learning curve for doing nuclear construction in the US had to be passed through for a second time, and that the cost estimates for initiating new projects had to include the costs of rebuilding the nuclear industrial base and of passing through the nuclear construction learning curve for yet another time.
More realistic estimates for two AP1000’s were developed in 2009 and later in 2012 — 9 billion dollars and 12 billion dollars respectively. It cannot be emphasized enough here that the estimate of 12 billion dollars when onsite construction began in 2012 included the expected costs of full compliance with NRC regulations and of passing through the nuclear learning curve for a second time. These estimates also assumed that all the difficult lessons learned from the nuclear projects of the 1980’s would be diligently applied to the latest projects as they were being initiated and while they were in progress.
How did 2012’s estimate of 12 billion dollars for two AP1000’s grow to 2017’s estimate of 25 billion dollars in just five years?
The answer here is that all the lessons learned from the 1980’s were ignored. Thirty years ago, a raft of studies and reports were published which analyzed the cost growth problems and the severe quality assurance issues the nuclear construction industry was then experiencing, and made a series of recommendations as to how to solve these problems.
Those studies had a number of common threads:
— Complex, First of a Kind Projects: Any large project that is complicated, involves new and/or high technology, has several phases, involves a diversity of technical specialties, involves a number of organizational interfaces, and has significant cost and schedule pressures — any project which has these characteristics is a prime candidate for experiencing significant quality assurance issues, cost control issues, and schedule growth problems.
— Strength of the Industrial Base: Nuclear power requires competent expertise in every facet of design, construction, testing, and operations. This kind of competent expertise existed in the early 1980’s but was not being effectively utilized in many of the power reactor construction projects, the ones that experienced the most serious cost and schedule growth issues.
— A Changing Technical Environment: The large reactor projects, the 1300 megawatt plants, were being built for the first time. They were being built without a prototype, and they were substantially different from previous designs. Those big plants had many new and significantly revised systems inside them, systems that had to be designed, constructed, tested, and subsequently operated.
— A Changing Regulatory Environment: In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, there was a continual increase in the regulatory requirements being placed on power reactors. The Three Mile Island accident, the Brown’s Ferry fire, the Calvert Cliffs environmental decision, all of those events required the power utilities to change the way they were dealing with their projects in the middle of the game. Some power utilities were successful in making the necessary changes, others were not.
— Project Management Effectiveness: Those nuclear projects which had a strong management team and strong management control systems at all levels of the project organization generally succeeded in delivering their projects on cost and on schedule. Those that didn’t were generally incapable of dealing with the changing technical and regulatory environment and became paralyzed in the face of the many QA issues, work productivity issues, and cost control issues they were experiencing.
— Overconfidence Based on Past Project Success: Many of the power utilities which had a record of past success in building non-nuclear projects, and which were constructing nuclear plants for the first time, did not recognize that nuclear is different. These included utilities which did not take their regulatory commitments seriously and which did not do an adequate job of assessing whether or not the management systems and the project methods they had been using successfully for years were up to the task of managing a nuclear project.
— Reliance on Contractor Expertise: The projects which succeeded had substantial nuclear expertise inside the power utility’s own shop. Those utilities who were successful in building nuclear plants were knowledgeable customers for the nuclear construction services they were buying. They paid close and constant attention to the work that was being done on the construction site, in the subcontractor fabrication shops, and in the contractor’s technical support organization. Emerging issues and problems were quickly and proactively identified, and quick action was taken to resolve those problems.
— Management Control Systems: The nuclear projects which failed did not have effective management control systems for contractor and subcontractor design interface control; for configuration control and management of design documentation and associated systems and components; and for proper and up-to-date maintenance of contractor and inter-contractor cost and schedule progress information. Inadequate management control systems prevented an accurate assessment of where the project actually stood, and in many cases were themselves an important factor in producing substandard technical work.
— Cost & Schedule Control Systems: For those projects which lacked a properly robust cost & schedule control system, many activities listed on their project schedules were seriously mis-estimated for time, cost, scope, and complexity. Other project activities covering significant portions of the total work scope were missing altogether, making it impossible to accurately assess where the project’s cost and schedule performance currently stood, and where it was headed in the future.
— Quality Assurance: For those nuclear projects which lacked the necessary management commitment to meeting the NRC’s quality assurance expectations, the added cost of meeting new and existing regulatory requirements was multiplied several times over as QA deficiencies were discovered and as significant rework of safety-critical systems and components became necessary. The necessary rework effectively resulted in the same component or system being bought twice, sometimes even three times, before it was QA acceptable.
— Construction Productivity & Progress: For those nuclear projects which lacked a strong management team; and which lacked effective project control systems and a strong management commitment to a ‘do-it-right the first time’ QA philosophy, the combined impacts of these deficiencies had severe impacts on worker productivity at the plant site, on supplier quality and productivity at offsite vendor facilities, and on the overall forward progress of the entire project taken as a whole.
— Project Financing and Completion Schedule: As a result of these emerging QA and site productivity problems, many of the power utilities were forced to extend their construction schedules and to revise their cost estimates upward. Finding the additional money and the necessary project resources to complete these projects proved extremely difficult in the face of competition from other corporate spending priorities and from other revenue consuming activities.
— A Change in Strategy by the Anti-nuclear Activists: In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, the anti-nuclear activists were focusing their arguments on basic issues of nuclear safety. They got nowhere with those arguments. Then they changed their strategic focus and began challenging the nuclear projects on the basis of quality assurance issues, i.e., that many nuclear construction projects were not living up to the quality assurance commitments they had made to the public in their NRC license applications.
— Regulatory Oversight Effectiveness: In the early 1980’s, the NRC was slow to react to emerging problems in the nuclear construction industry. In that period, the NRC was focusing its oversight efforts on the very last phases of the construction process when the plants were going for their operating licenses. Relatively little time and effort was being devoted to the earlier phases of these projects, when emerging QA problems and deficiencies were most easily identified and fixed. Quality assurance deficiencies that had been present for years were left unaddressed until the very last phases of the project, and so were much more difficult, time consuming, and expensive to resolve.
— Working Relationships with Regulators: The successful nuclear projects from the 1970’s and 1980’s, the ones that stayed on cost and on schedule, did not view the NRC as an adversary. The successful projects viewed the NRC as a partner and a technical resource in determining how best to keep their project on track in the face of an increasingly more complex and demanding project environment. On the other hand, for those projects which had significant deficiencies in their QA programs, for those that did not take their QA commitments seriously, the anti-nuclear activists introduced those deficiencies into the NRC licensing process and were often successful in delaying and sometimes even killing a poorly managed nuclear project.
Remarks:
If it’s done with nuclear, it must be done with exceptional dedication to doing a professional job in all phases of project execution from beginning to end.
Once again, it cannot be emphasized enough here that the estimate of 12 billion dollars for two AP1000’s when onsite construction at VC Summer and at Vogtle 3 & 4 began in 2012 included the expected costs of full compliance with NRC regulations and of passing through the nuclear learning curve for a second time. These estimates also assumed that all the difficult lessons learned from the nuclear projects of the 1980’s, as I’ve described them above, would be diligently applied to the latest projects as they were being initiated and while they were in progress.
For those of us who went through the wrenching experiences of the 1980’s in learning how to do nuclear construction right the first time, what we’ve seen with VC Summer and Vogtle 3 & 4 has been deja vu all over again.
The first indications of serious trouble at VC Summer and at Vogtle 3 & 4 came in 2011 when the power utilities chose contractor teams that did not have the depth of talent and experience needed to handle nuclear projects of this level of complexity and with this level of project risk. That the estimated cost for each plant eventually grew to 25 billion dollars in 2017 should be no surprise.
The project owners and managers ignored the hard lessons of the 1980’s. They did not do a professional job in managing their nuclear projects; and they did not meet their commitments to the public as these commitments are outlined in their regulatory permit applications. Just as happened in the 1980’s, the anti-nuclear activists and the government regulatory agencies are now holding these owners and managers to account for failures that were completely avoidable if sound management practices had been followed.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s quality assurance requirements will not be abandoned. The future of nuclear power in the United States, if there is a future, lies with the Small Modular Reactors (SMR’s), assuming they are fully compliant with NRC standards. Given the sad state of the nuclear industrial base in the US, the SMR’s now represent the only hope we have for getting the end-to-end process of designing, constructing, and commissioning a nuclear power plant under complete and effective management control.
NuScale out of Portland, Oregon is now the SMR project which is closest to gaining an NRC license. NuScale views the NRC as a working partner and a valuable technical resource, not as an adversary, in fielding a safe and cost effective SMR design.
The first SMR nuclear power plant will be constructed in eastern Idaho at the US-DOE’s INL site. The plant is being built for the Carbon Free Power Project with Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems and is targeted for completion in 2026. Fluor is backing the project financially and is also the Engineering Procurement & Construction (EPC) contractor. Energy Northwest will be the plant operator.
If the Idaho SMR project stays on track — and there is every reason to believe that it will, given the strength of the team now managing it — a good technical foundation will be in place for a revival of nuclear power in the United States. If that is what we as a nation decide we want.
As recently as a few months ago, a particularly radiation phobic commenter here told me that the fact that so many people were evacuated, and the fact that the government was spending so much money to clean up after Fukushima was proof positive that nuclear power was too dangerous to continue using.
What would you have them do? Not clean the mess up? It took them 3.5 years to remove over 1500 spent fuel rods from atop damaged reactor building 4. There are still about 1500 rods atop buildings 1, 2 and 3. If those buildings collapse in an earthquake before the rods are removed, that will create a very bad situation with lots of air-borne radio-nucleotides. Highly radioactive groundwater was flowing into the sea, so they have spent a lot of time and money trying to re-mediate that. Is poisoning the environment forever your solution?
There was no mess to clean up.
There is no highly radioactive water flowing into the sea.
Is there any lie you won’t eagerly accept and repeat?
Good God you’re ignorant.
MarkW March 13, 2019 at 10:42 am
There was no mess to clean up.
There is no highly radioactive water flowing into the sea.
—————————-
just as an example:
Fukushima’s Other Big Problem: A Million Tons of Radioactive Water
https://www.wired.com/story/fukushimas-other-big-problem-a-million-tons-of-radioactive-water/
The tsunami-driven seawater that engulfed Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has long since receded. But plant officials are still struggling to cope with another dangerous flood: the enormous amounts of radioactive water the crippled facility generates each day. More than 1 million tons of radiation-laced water is already being kept on-site in an ever-expanding forest of hundreds of hulking steel tanks—and so far, there’s no plan to deal with them.
AND
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/03/29/national/seven-years-radioactive-water-fukushima-plant-still-flowing-ocean-study-finds/#.XIpOeXd2uUk
Seven years on, radioactive water at Fukushima plant still flowing into ocean, study finds
Kyodo
Mar 29, 2018
More than seven years after the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear crisis, radioactive water is continuing to flow into the Pacific Ocean from the crippled No. 1 plant at a rate of around 2 billion becquerels a day, a study has found.
The amount of leaking cesium 137 has decreased from some 30 billion becquerels in 2013, Michio Aoyama, a professor at the Institute of Environmental Radioactivity at Fukushima University, said in his study, which was presented Wednesday at an academic conference in Osaka.
The study said the concentration of radiation — 0.02 becquerel per liter of seawater found in samples collected near a coastal town 8 km south of the No. 1 plant — is at a level that does not affect the local fishing industry.
My largest nuclear fears involve the continued maintenance and the end-of-life procedures which may require expertise from personnel who haven’t even been born yet and may also require a backup power source that will last for longer than two weeks.
I have to question the WHO number of 7,000,000 people dying annually from fossil fuel and biomass particulate pollution. There are two scenarios I can think of:
1) WHO is talking about estimates of “premature deaths”, which are a known hogwash. It’s just a projection without verification, even one second is considered “premature”, etc.
2) The primary component is open burning of dung for indoor heating and cooking, which has nothing to do with electricity generation. The number is somewhat plausible in this case, however.
Projection without verification or foundation.
It’s about the money. Not radiation.
With solar at 5c/Kwh
And real costs of nuclear including waste and the occasional accident around 17ç (don’t be does by quotes of 2c – thats only the generation cost …
And battery arrays making money right now buying cheap electricity and selling back at expensive times
… There’s no future for nuclear.
New plants take 10 years to get through approval and planning stage, then 25 to pay back the costs.
Whose going to invest in an expensive new plant that will only be paid back in 35 years.
2 years ago solar costs dropped 22%
Last year dropped 17%
It’s about the money. Not radiation.
With solar at 5c/Kwh
And real costs of nuclear including waste and the occasional accident around 17ç (don’t be does by quotes of 2c – thats only the generation cost …
Bullshit numbers. Still the “sunny day” problem! And massive subsidies to get those low numbers! And nuclear’s 15c is the regulatory premium!
“And battery arrays making money right now buying cheap electricity and selling back at expensive times….”
More bullshit. The only battery plants to have a chance are the Arizona (planned) storage plants, which get paid by the idiot Californiacs to take their sunny-day surplus! The only engineering-reasonable storage system is pumped hydro. We’ll see how popular that is in Calif!
In fact, a major attraction in closing Diablo Canyon, CA’s last operating nuke, is to get hold of their big pumped-storage plant in the Sierras. With any luck, some sensible utility will buy Diablo Canyon for $1 + assumed liabilities out of the bankruptcy. Local antis are already hand-wringing about just the possibility. OMG, OMG! We’d have to picket it for another 50 years!
What a state!
While serving aboard a nuclear submarine in the 70’s, I had many conversations friends and acquaintances on this subject. They could not get their minds around the truth. Totally braindyed (green) even then. It was even argued the Navy was lying to us and giving instrumentation that understated the radiation. And they certainly lied bout the dangers of low level radiation. Surely if a large amount will kill, a little bit will also, just slower.
“…a tsunami struck the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan eight years ago today, triggering the meltdowns of three reactors….”
Actually, the first meltdown occurred before the arrival of the tsunami, a detail Tepco only revealed three months after the event. Evidently this fact has since been erased from the public record…. It took many decades before the 1957 nuclear fallout event in the Urals was officially acknowledged, after repeated vehement denials by nuclear “experts” around the world that any such event ever happened. It’s a bit early to expect the truth about Fukushima.
I also read that. Caused by a broken coolant pipe or something.
fyi
https://www.rt.com/news/fukushima-doomed-reactor-plant/
Fukushima in meltdown before tsunami hit
Published time: 17 Aug, 2011 13:40
Edited time: 17 Aug, 2011 22:42
Fake news. Yeah, there could’ve been alittle steam release, but NO, nothing was in “melt-down” before the tsunami. As long as cooling water was being pumped into the reactor (cooling water was working until the tsunami took out the back-up engine/pump), it wouldn’t “melt-down”. AND, if the back-up engine/pump had just been located alittle higher, it would NOT have been taken out.
Thanks for the link. I’ve saved the report I read but would have to dig for it, as I’ve changed computers a few times since then. However, if this was fake news, as the next reply suggests, I got it a lot earlier. I was following Fukushima news quite intently from the tip of the Shandong peninsula, and left China in June. I remember being taken aback by the pronouncement, some weeks or months later, by the chair of the American investigative commission that there was no need to worry about such a disaster happening to GE reactors still in use in the USA because “we don’t have tsunamis”.
otropogo,
I hate the phrase “fake news” since it’s been bastardized to the point that it’s mostly meaningless. But…in this case…
Saying that Fukishima began meltdown prior to the tsunami is just absurd. Pointing out that Tepco and the Japanese regulator had allowed the plant to degrade to a point where it was highly vulnerable is not even remotely the same thing as meltdown. Sheesh.
With regards to the safety of US BWR’s, the industry spent immense amounts of time and resources reevaluating safety in light of what we learned from the Japanese accident. Specifically, the industry began evaluating “stacked events” (e.g. earthquake + tsunami) and considering the vulnerabilities of systems that could cascade into a loss of coolant accident (loca) like Fukishima Daichii.
To give one example, the Japanese accident highlighted the vulnerability associated with the loss of diesel fuel tanks for the back-up generators, which as I recall, was the real reason for the loss of cooling. Contingency plans have been reevaluated and strengthened here in the US as a result of these analyses. Heck, the industry even coined a new term to describe the costs associated with this: Post-Fukishima. Post-Fukishima costs included considerable engineering analyses, capital investments, and procedural changes.
The offhand suggestion implicit in your post that the US industry casually waved away the accident in Japan is blatantly false and reflects a complete lack of knowledge about what actually occurred here.
rip
I remember being taken aback by the pronouncement, some weeks or months later, by the chair of the American investigative commission that there was no need to worry about such a disaster happening to GE reactors still in use in the USA because “we don’t have tsunamis”.
As ripshin points out your comment is greatly offbase. As for “we don’t have tsunamis” specifically, you have to remember that different geography means different challenges. A house on the top of a mountain doesn’t have to worry about flooding the way a house that’s 100 feet below sea level in the middle of a flood plain does. A nuclear plant in Kansas or Nebraska, for example, isn’t going to have to worry about tsunamis (if they get hit by a tsunami in Kansas, the world clearly has bigger problems than what happens to that nuclear plant). So pointing out that Fuskishima’s situation is different than what would be faced by a US nuclear plant (IE “we don’t have tsunamis”) and thus we don’t have to worry about the exact circumstance that happened there happening here isn’t the same thing as dismissing the possibility of damage from extreme weather events. as ripshin pointed out, the US nuclear industry has being reevaluating their processes, procedures, & plans in light of the Fukishima disaster.
Radioactivity is basic for evolution:
https://www.google.com/search?client=ms-android-samsung&ei=XqKKXILsFaf6sAf58q-YDQ&q=natural+radioactivity+life+evolution&oq=natural+radioactivity+life+evolution&gs_l=mobile-gws-wiz-serp.
“But now, eight years after Fukushima,”
___________________________________________________
I’ve already said, while Fukushima was hasting through all tv channels,
just pack that contaminated stuff into containers and deposit them in the ( sic! ) NEARBY SUBDUCTION ZONE.
But Japan reacted like shock frosted and the green belivers had their coming out for centuries.
Still in 2016 the german greens mourned “why can’t we have the fukushima effect in times of ‘populist’ politics!”
exemplaric example:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/mar/27/german-green-victory-fukushima
This article is severely flawed.
It attempts a whitewash.
As my father worked in nuclear research, and his best friend was the head of the UK nuclear industry safety and accident remediation board, you can only say a lot of the article above was written by people who have never been involved in radiation protection and are not aware of the risks of being bombarded with high energy particles.
Additionally, Radon as a risk is well known world wide particularly when in the ex-USSR is allied with high levels of smoking.
Here in this article however you appear to be claiming the large presence of such radioisotopes based on Uranium and Thorium are harmless much like Areva does by spreading depleted uranium ore all over the roads of France, by using is as crushed rock for road foundation.
It’s nonsense, we even have to protect cabin crews today from the high & rising dose rates which aircraft crews are exposed to daily.
To claim that evacuation as a strategy from nuclear accident theatres, and by the same mistaken token to claim that nuclear power is somehow safer despite (or because) we have little really accurate data from a USSR which disintegrated, is as good as saying Stalin was a hero because they didn’t keep accurate records of the millions who died in his 1000s of diverse Gulags.
This article is reckless in the extreme and the headlines does great harm to the very basis of radiation protection, which countries like the UK have been very effective in.
It is indeed valid to compare the number of deaths and injuries in say coal mining in China and India, but in those places there has never been any mitigation strategy.
You actually add fuel to the fire of people opposing nuclear power per se
It’s the law of unintended consequences caused by such an amateur, ill informed article on WUWT.
Discrepo de la benignidad de la energía nuclear. Fukushima demostró que incluso el país tecnológicamente más avanzado comete errores y decenas de miles de personas se vieron afectadas.
Lean “Voces de Chernobyl” y ya me dicen
Chernobyl was not an accident. They deliberately disabled safeties, and then started “experimenting”. Less than 100 dies from radiation, and most were first responders.
Fukushima killed exactly zero people. The evacuation killed many.
“Fear is the mind killer”