The many financial-failure tsunamis of nuclear power

by Ace Hoffman

October 7th, 2009

Dear Readers,

Last week, practically the entire Pacific Rim was under several earthquake-generated tsunami warnings and watches. Thousands are confirmed dead in Indonesia, Samoa, and American Samoa; thousands more are still missing. In some places, waters roared a mile or more inland. These events have demonstrated: "that the early-warning systems are not fail-safe and education is as important as technology, seismologists and disaster management experts say." (Kathy Marks, Sydney, ABCNews.go.com, October 3, 2009)

Seismologists, geologists, and other experts say our coastal nuclear reactors are NOT properly protected (and can't be) against reasonably foreseeable -- even expected -- tsunamis. The "sea wall" at San Onofre, for example, is only about 30 to 35 feet tall; waves at high tide already lap the bottom. Some of the waves from the Banda Ache tsunami in 2004 were 50 to 60 feet high! Only dumb luck protects us. Two weeks after the event, an eyewitness to the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami wrote:

"The best way to describe this ¬- because we grew up with the images and we all know what it looked like -¬ is that Banda Ache looks like Hiroshima after the atomic bomb. It's totally destroyed. The buildings have been flattened for miles and entire communities -- probably something like a hundred thousand people -- have been swept out to sea." (Chris Rainier, National Geographic, January 11, 2005.)

Real tsunamis aside, a financial crisis is often called a tsunami as well. The nuclear industry is in the midst of a financial crisis, as are we all. In a brief email exchange with Wall Street Journal journalist Ian Talley (whose article was discussed in my previous report (September 29, 2009)), Talley clarified how the Department of Energy's nuclear loan guarantees could be used:

"$18.5 billion in loan guarantees can leverage loans far in excess of that value."

He added that the maximum amount of "LG" is 80% of the cost of a nuke.

The basic concept is that someone other than the federal government will loan the extra billion (if the lowest of the two ridiculously low industry estimates Talley gave of $5 billion is correct) or the extra $4 billion (if my estimate of $20 billion for a new nuke started today is correct).

Either way, it isn't easy to get loans for a billion dollars these days, even if someone knows a gung-ho pro-nuclear government has provided an additional $4 billion to throw away on the risky venture.

So one question is: By proposing doubling the amount of money available for loan guarantees, is Secretary of Energy Chu expecting to start more than the 4-5 nukes the original $18.5 billion was for? Or is he just upping the ante for those first few, because he realizes they'll actually cost a lot more than he thought? Talley didn't know. Chu didn't say.

From the utilities' standpoint, the biggest stumbling block for new nuclear construction at the moment appears to be spent-fuel-related. With Yucca Mountain not technically on the horizon (though not "killed" altogether, by any means), the government isn't willing to make the dumb deal it made back in the 1980s, when it promised to take all the used reactor cores away and magically make them disappear.

Needless to say, it wasn't a dumb deal for the utilities and they ALL -- every one that is operating today -- signed on. The government would take the highly radioactive -- and pyrophoric -- used nuclear reactor cores and manage their long-term care. That's "long-term" as in: Longer than the United States has existed as a country, times a thousand.

It hasn't worked out that way. The government hasn't taken the waste, and you can blame politics all you want, but the real reason it hasn't worked out is the physics make it impossible for a "safe" repository to exist. Someone will ALWAYS have a legitimate gripe against ANY plan. It's the nature of ionizing radiation that it will break down any container made of any material, as it irradiates the container. Microbes won't "eat" radiation away for us. Each little atomic breakdown has all the strength, per alpha particle, beta particle, or gamma ray, of the alpha particles, beta particles, and gamma rays of a nuclear bomb. A nuclear decay is an unstoppable force. Its direction cannot be predicted or controlled. It has an average energy level within a statistically-definable range of probable values, according to various laws of sub-atomic particle physics. The precise moment of any particular decay is also unpredictable.

No place on earth is safe to hold the waste. No place can be guaranteed not to have ANY of the following, to start a long list: Earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, tsunamis, jet crashes, terrorists, sloppy construction, or poor design. If all else goes well, any location could still be hit by an asteroid. Why doom the whole earth for one small asteroid?

And then there are the transportation problems. The last DOE solution I saw had about 98 wheels and was just a drawing. It looked like a lumbering terrorist's target to me. They don't really know what they are going to do.

No country has ever "solved" its nuclear waste problem. France grinds stuff up, releases much of it directly into the North Sea, and stores the rest with no idea of what to do with it. (A tiny fraction is reused, so they call the whole thing "recycling".) Here in American we just let it sit in scores of deadly sites all over the country.

And the dry storage casks are deteriorating as we speak. Shoddy welds, shoddy alloys, unrealistic expectations...

Meanwhile, the government is already being sued by about a dozen nuclear power companies, asking for permission to stop putting money into the used-reactor-core-storage fund, and to get back some of what they've already put in! The rest are watching closely, like a pack of vultures.

New nuclear power plant loan guarantees don't come with promises to take the spent fuel. And THAT's the real financial hang-up for new nuclear construction in America.

But the nuclear industry is working HARD to get around that with help from -- seriously! -- French espionage, infiltration, subversiveness, and other covert and overt actions. That's right: The French intend to get American suckers (that's you and me, folks, the American taxpayer) to pay French-government owned and/or managed firms (EdF and/or AREVA) to build and operate expensive NEW reprocessing plants here in America! And open new (and old) uranium mines, new milling operations, and so on. They use agent-provocateurs, subliminal messages in their advertisements, covert lobbying and funding of politicians... and in other countries where these two "corporations" do business, they behave even more illegally!

Reprocessing would theoretically "solve" the fuel problem for the utilities, including slowly eating into their current backlog of millions of pounds of commercial nuclear power-plant high-level radioactive waste. but "theoretically" is one thing, and realistically is another.

What reprocessing really would do is cost another hundred (or two hundred) billion dollars and pollute the entire planet, killing people and causing health effects as if we are all expendable, as long as no one can prove for certain where any particular cancer, leukemia, heart disease, birth defects, etc. came from. And burn enormous quantities of fossil fuels in the process, causing thousands more deaths.

Reprocessing of nuclear waste is chemical-intensive, too, and it costs a fortune. But it's the only thing that could possibly allow a dying industry to keep going. The current fleet of operating plants is running out of options for waste storage. None of the plant's owners want to have to shut down for lack of storage space, but it might happen. As long as someone will take the waste from you later, operating a nuclear power plant is a "great" way to make money -- like stealing candy from a baby (and giving them cyanide to play with in return).

Aside from the waste problem, new nuclear construction almost suffered from an insurance problem. Instead, the Price-Anderson Act was extended a few years ago in one of the most notorious pieces of midnight legislation to come out of the Bush years (and that's saying a lot). If Price-Anderson had not been extended, that too would have stopped new nuclear construction because the Act prevents citizens from seeking damages against the utility in the event of an accident. No Price-Anderson would have meant no new nukes. And the old ones would have shut down, too. But now, although both Price and Anderson are long gone, the Price-Anderson Act has been renewed and you still can't get insurance for your home against a nuclear accident anywhere in the world. (Some form of Price-Anderson has been copied in every country which has operating nuclear programs.)

In addition to the waste problem and the insurance problem -- the former unsolvable and the latter solved by government fraud -- there are still the costs and delays of construction.

Offshore wind power, solar power, energy conservation and other solutions can be brought online virtually immediately -- by the time a permit for a new nuclear power plant is granted, especially a new design, you could have thousands of megawatts of renewable energy up and running.

And the new nuclear power plant, which may well cost close to -- or more than -- $20 billion dollars if construction started today -- will have faulty parts, faulty welds, faulty pipes, faulty concrete, faulty wiring, faulty instructions, workers sleeping on the job, fire crews not knowing what to do when there's a fire, exploding transformers, leaky steam generators, and thousands of other problems. These are the day-to-day facts of life at ANY large facility (but these examples are taken strictly from Nuclear Regulatory Commission records). Most large industrial facilities won't kill millions of people if and when they fail. Most industries are not running on the edge of a mega-catastrophe 24 hours a day, seven days a week, as nuclear power does.

Every nuclear construction project now involves hundreds of companies in dozens of countries, each with their own level of oversight for worker safety and for quality of their output. Each has different ethics about what "quality" means, and what the punishments are for shipping shoddy work half-way around the world where its shoddiness won't be discovered for decades, until the part fails at a critical moment, causing a meltdown, and all the evidence is destroyed.

Fraud has always been rampant in nuclear construction and operation, and continues with the new international trade agreements, where even so-called "American" companies such as GE and Westinghouse are really just fronts for, in those cases, Japanese corporations, and where both EdF and AREVA , French corporations owned and operated by the French government, claim in America that they are as American as apple pie, just because the heads of the American divisions are American.

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA
www.acehoffman.org