[Mb-civic] The Nuclear Option

[Michael Butler]

The New York Times
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April 26, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
The Nuclear Option
By WILLIAM SWEET

TWENTY years ago, a huge plume of radiation spread west from the Chernobyl
nuclear plant. Dozens of emergency workers were killed at the scene, while
vast tracts of land were evacuated and still lie fallow. Rates of thyroid
cancer soared among children in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, and sustained
exposure to low levels of radiation in the area has killed or will yet kill
thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of adults. The exact number of
casualties will never be known.

For decades before Chernobyl, the public had been assured that nuclear
reactors could not explode like bombs and that the association of reactors
with nuclear weapons was essentially false. By calling those claims into
question, the accident, together with the disappointing performance of
atomic power plants during the 1970's and 1980's, pretty much guaranteed
that no reactor projects would be initiated for the remainder of the
century.

And yet, though it went unnoticed at the time and has been inadequately
appreciated since, Chernobyl also cast into relief the positive features of
the reactors used in the United States and most other advanced industrial
countries.

The reactor at Chernobyl belonged to a class that was especially vulnerable
to runaway reactions. When operating at low power, if such reactors lost
water, their reactivity could suddenly take off and very rapidly reach a
threshold beyond which they could only explode. Making matters worse,
surprisingly little more pressure than normal in the machine's water
channels would lift its lid, snapping the vital control rods and fuel
channels that entered the reactor's core.

On the night of April 25, 1986, poorly trained and supervised plant
operators conducted an ill-conceived experiment, putting the machine into
the very state in which reactivity was most likely to spike. Within a
fraction of a second, the reactor went from being barely on to power levels
many times higher than the maximum intended.

This kind of accident cannot happen in the so-called light water reactors
used in the United States and most of Western Europe and Asia. In these
reactors, the water functions not only as a coolant but as a "moderator":
self-sustaining nuclear chain reactions cannot take place in its absence.
This is a very useful passive safety feature. If coolant runs low, there is
still a danger of a core meltdown, because the fuel retains heat; but the
reactor will have automatically and immediately turned itself off.

Still, critics and opponents of nuclear energy have wondered whether utility
companies are competent enough to manage anything so complex as a reactor.
The question is a reasonable one. In the 1980's, some anti-nuclear groups
joined with free-marketeers to promote electricity deregulation. They
reasoned that if utilities were no longer guaranteed cost-plus returns on
investments ‹ the cushy sort of regulation that had prevailed for a century
in the utility industry ‹ they would stop investing in expensive nuclear
power plants that were difficult to run.

The utility industry has responded to deregulation by reorganizing itself.
And as it happens, companies have emerged that specialize in managing
nuclear power plants. Although their record is somewhat mixed (Exelon, for
example, stands accused of having carelessly let tritium, a radioactive
isotope, leak from three Illinois reactors), on the whole the performance of
nuclear power plants has improved substantially.

In 1986, the average American nuclear plant produced electricity barely 57
percent of the time. In 2004, the average plant was running productively
more than 90 percent of the time.

This improvement has come just in time. The effects of global warming are
disturbingly obvious, and yet the United States has fallen dangerously far
behind its response. If we're to get into step with the world effort to
reduce greenhouse gases, we are going to need to rely more, not less, on
carbon-free nuclear energy.

William Sweet is the author of "Kicking the Carbon Habit: Global Warming and
The Case for Renewable and Nuclear Energy."

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