“The time has come for those who take the
threat of global warming seriously to
embrace the development and deployment of
safer nuclear power systems.”
- Dr. James Hansen, Climate Scientist
“Nuclear energy is the only
non-greenhouse gas-emitting
power source that can
effectively replace fossil fuels
and satisfy global demand.”
-Patrick Moore, Co-founder, Greenpeace,
Statement to US Senate Committee on Energy
& Natural Resources, April 28, 2005
Nuclear power is
"environmentally
friendly, affordable,
clean, dependable
and safe."
- Christie Whitman, former E.P.A. chief.
NYT, WASHINGTON, April 24 — The nuclear industry
has hired Christine Whitman the former administrator of
the Environmental Protection Agency, and Patrick
Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, the environmental
organization, to lead a public relations campaign for new
reactors.
Bill Gates, the philanthropist
who co-founded Microsoft,
signed a deal with the Chinese
government last year through his
startup Terra Power to build a
sodium-cooled nuclear reactor
that runs on spent uranium.
Is Nuclear Power a green, safe &
affordable solution to Climate Change?
Nuclear PowerIs it Green?
Heavy elements FISSION into lighter elements, releasing energy
in the process by E = mc2, where m is the difference in mass
between the parent and products. About 250 MeV* is released in this
reaction in the form of kinetic energy of the products.
Nuclear Fission
*Energy to break a strand of DNA ~ 1 eV
Other decay products include:
Cs-137, Sr -90, I-131, Pu-239
Radiation Types
Alpha particles (4He++)
Beta particles (e+ and e-)
Gamma-rays (g)
Neutrons (n)
Activity and Half Life
The unit of activity, R, is the curie (Ci)
1 Ci ≡ 3.7 x 1010 decays/s
The SI unit of activity is the becquerel (Bq)
1 Bq ≡ 1 decay/s
Therefore, 1 Ci = 3.7 x 1010 Bq ~10 billion decays / second
Biological Effects of Ionizing
Radiation
Iodine-131
•Half Life of 8 days
•Decay Mode: BETA (0.606 MeV) and Gamma (0.364
MeV)
•Organ most effected: Thyroid
•Iodine-131 is produced by the fission of U-235 during
operation of nuclear reactors and by plutonium (or
uranium) in the detonation of nuclear weapons.
•Pathways: Inhalation, food chain (milk, vegetables)
•Most serious fallout product from nuclear testing.
Average American alive at the time received a thyroid
radiation exposure of 2 – 300 rads.
•Chernobyl released 83 million curies of I-131
Cesium-137
•Half Life of 30 years
•Decay Mode: BETA (0.19 MeV)
•Decay to Barium-137 that radiates gamma (0.6MeV)
•Behaves like Potassium and is taken up by living
organisms as part of fluid electrolytes.
•Both internal and external hazard from cancer
•Ingested, it is absorbed in the intestine, settles in
muscles, excreted after a few months.
•Radioactive cesium is present in soil around the world
largely as a result of fallout from past atmospheric
nuclear weapons test.
Strontium-90
•Half Life of 28 years.
•Does not occur naturally. It is a by product of fission.
•Beta emitter. Decays to Yttrium-90, also a beta emitter.
•Behaves like Calcium and concentrates in bone where it
damages stem cells of the bone marrow critical to
reproduction of cells that mediate immune function.
Causes leukemia and auto-immune illnesses.
•Interferes with neuron communication leading to brain
damage of developing frontal cortex (dyslexia, autism)
•Y-90 concentrates in the glands which controls
hormonal function – interferes with estrogen and
testosterone which contributes to breast and prostrate
cancer, sexual organs.
•Half Life of 24,000 years.
•Does not occur naturally. It is a by product of fission.
•Alpha emitter (5.15 MeV)
•Acts like iron and can cross the placental barrier to
reach fetus.
•Concentrates in testicles and ovaries.
•1 pound, if uniformly distributed, could hypothetically
induce lung cancer in every person on Earth.
•5 metric tons of plutonium are dispersed around the
Earth due to nuclear tests, bombs, satellite burn ups,
fires, accidents, spill and leakages.
Plutonium 239
Uranium U-238
•Half Life of 4.5 billion years.
•Alpha emitter (5 MeV)
•Wherever you find U-238 you will find all the 14
radioactive daughters of U 238 which emit all types of
radiation upt to 100 MeV in energy.
•Concentrates in bone and kidneys.
•Chemically behaves like Calcium.
•A severe exposure (of the order of
one milligram in the kidneys)
causes lesions of the tubular
cells and deterioration of the kidney
function.
Critical Mass: the minimum amount of
fissionable material to produce self-sustained
chain reaction, a condition called criticality.
In a nuclear power plant, the critical chain
reaction must control the neutron flux to avoid
an exponential increase in fissions, going
supercritical.
In a nuclear bomb, you want a supercritical
chain reaction.
Thousands of pellets of enriched uranium are sealed inside 12-14 ft metal fuel rods to generate electricity in a nuclear reactor.
Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR)
U-235 absorbs slow neutrons – they are slowed down by water – the
neutrons become ‘thermalized’. Control rods absorb neutrons and
moderate the chain reaction. A meltdown can happen if they fail.
Cooling Towers
Reactor
443 plants world wide (16% energy), 103 in the US (20% energy)
Current Status
Nukes In California
Nukes In CaliforniaThe Diablo Canyon Power Plant is an electricity-generating nuclear power plant near Avila Beach in San Luis Obispo County, California. After the permanent shutdown of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in 2013 it is the only nuclear plant operational in the state.
No green house gases are directly released
in the nuclear fission reaction.
It is True...
But what about during the ENTIRE fuel cycle?
Uranium Mining
Uranium is mined as ore from open pits or deep shaft mines. High grade ores yield 10 kg uranium per tonne
rock.
World Nuclear Power Plants need 67,000 tonnes of natural uranium per year – 67,000,000 tons of rock!
Uranium Miner
"I used to go in and haul the rocks out, and I guess that's where I got hurt, because there was a lot of dust after they did the blasting and we went in right away."
- Bernard BenallyRed Rock Navajo Reservation, Arizona
High Grade Ore is a Limited Resource
Known uranium reserves will last for about fifty years at the
current consumption rate. If the nuclear share is increased to
10% of the current world energy supply by construction of
1000 new nuclear power plants (more than four times the
current world nuclear capacity), the reserves will last for about
fourteen years.
If low grade ores of less than 0.1% are used (1 kg of U per ton
of rock) the energy consumed to extract the one kg of uranium
will surpass the amount of energy which can be generated
from that kilogram in the nuclear system.
In-Situ Leach Mining
At an ISL site, a series of wells are drilled into the orebody. Millions of litres of
strong acid or alkaline solution are then injected directly into the groundwater,
stripping the uranium from the host rock and mixing it into the water. In the center
of a circle of injection wells, a production well sucks most of the uranium bearing
water up to the surface and pipes it into a processing plant where the uranium is
recovered and the wastes are dealt with by either moving them elsewhere or
pumping them back into the ground and thereby polluting the groundwater.
Nuclear Energy InstituteEducational Website for Kids
In-Situ Leach Mining
Uranium Mill TailingsThe rock containing Uranium is crushed into a fine sand. After the uranium is
chemically removed, the sand is stored in huge reservoirs. These left-over piles
of radioactive sand are called "uranium tailings".
Uranium Mill Tailings
By 1989, some 140 million tons of mill tailings have accumulated in the United States alone, with 10 to 15 million tons added each year. Although their radiation is generally less concentrated than other types of waste, some of the isotopes in these tailings are long-lived and can be hazardous for many thousands of years.
Atlas Mines Tailing Pile
10.5 million tons of uranium mill wastes including 426 million gallons of highly-contaminated liquid. An Oak Ridge National Laboratory study shows that the steady rate of uranium tailing contaminant leakage into the Colorado River is estimated at 9,648 gallons per day.
Uranium Tailings at Elliot Lake Ontario
130 million tons radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years
Uranium Mill Sites
Through a series of chemical leaching processes,
crushed ore is transformed into a powdered concentrate
called yellowcake. Most of the ore that goes into the mill
exists as waste, which contains 85% of the ore's original
radioactivity.
Purified Yellow Cake in Aqueous Solution
converted intoUranium Hexafluoride gas UF6
Uranium Refiner, Blind River, Ontario, Canada.
Storing hexafloride (UF6) waste in cylinders requires
constant monitoring because the estimated lifetime of
cylinders is measured in decades, whereas the half-life of U-
238 is 4.5 billion years, and UF6 is highly unstable.
CFC is a GHG
The enrichment of uranium fuel for nuclear power
uses 93 percent of the refrigerant chlorofluorocarbon
(CFC) gas made annually in the United States. CFC
compounds are also potent global warming agents
10,000 to 20,000 times more efficient heat trappers
than carbon dioxide, which itself is responsible for 50
percent of the global warming phenomenon.
Enriching Uranium
Uranium: 238U is >99% in nature 235U is ~0.7% in nature
• Naturally occurring Uranium must be enriched to ~5% 235U for nuclear power plants
• Enrichment methods
– Gas centrifuge (Now in Iran and formerly found in Iraq)
– Gaseous diffusion (used in USA)
– Electromagnetic isotope separation – uses strong magnetic field to deflect ions of lighter isotope farther than heavier isotope
Gaseous diffusion
• Thousands of diffusion filters needed
Filter U-235 from U-238through miles of filters
Portsmouth, Ohio, Gaseous Diffusion Plant operating around the
clock, consuming in 1 day as much electricity as a city of the size of
Sacramento or Memphis, Tennessee.
Depleted Uranium• After isotope separation, the remaining
238U is said to be “depleted” as it is missing 235U – however, 238U is radioactive
• Uranium is a very dense metal (1.7 x Pb), making it ideal for use in armor and shell casings
DU Used in Recent Wars:
Balkans: 200 TonsAfghanistan: 800 TonsGulf War 1: 350 TonsIraq War: 200 tons???
Decay Series for U-238
Elements with Z 83 are
unstable and
spontaneously decay by
alpha and beta radiation
until they turn into stable
lead with Z = 82.
Note: some elements can
decay by both modes.
Decay Series for U-238
U-235: Converting the Gas into a Green salt and then into Metal
Uranium is shipped to Fernald from the Portsmouth plant as a gel. It is heated into gas in these three autoclave vaporizers. The gas is converted into green salt and then into
metal for fuel fabrication. Feed Materials Production Center, Fernald, Ohio.
Thousands of pellets of enriched uranium are sealed inside 12-14 ft metal fuel rods to generate electricity in a nuclear reactor.
Nuclear Fuel RodsA typical 100 MW reactor contains 50,000 fuel rods containing
more than 100 tons of uranium.
Cooling Towers
Reactor
PWR Nuclear Power Plants Need Water – LOTS of Water.
100,000 gallons per minute are pumped to one or more Cooling Towers, consuming 28-30 million gallons of water per day. An equally huge volume of wastewater is discharged at temperatures up to 25 F hotter than the water into which it flows. Indigenous marine life suited to colder temperatures is eliminated or forced to move, disrupting delicately balanced ecosystems. Nuclear power plants discharge a significant amount of tritium as part of their routine operations; sometimes more is discharged as a result of mishaps and incidents. There have been 10 reported tritium leaks at US nuclear power plants in the last decade.
Nuclear Power Plants Need COOOOL Water! With Global Warming water
temperatures can rise to high….
NUCLEAR GENERATING STATION USESSeawater for cooling: up to 2.4 billion gallons daily
“Once-through cooling is contributing to declining fisheries and the degradation of estuaries, bay and coastal waters. These (power) plants indiscriminately 'fish' the water in these habitats by killing the eggs, larvae and adults when water drawn from the natural environment flows through the plant.” -2005 analysis completed for the CA Energy Commission
Water Vapor is a GHG!
“The most powerful greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is water vapour... Just a rise of 1% of water vapour could raise the global average temperature of Earth's surface more then 4 degrees Celsius.”
-Andrew E. Dessler, Texas A & M University -Vladimir Shaidurov, Russian Academy of SciencesThe Science and Politics of Global Climate Change
After three or four years in a reactor, the pellets will become inefficient for producing electricity and the fuel rods will be removed from the reactor. After removal, the fuel rods (now called spent nuclear fuel) will be highly radioactive, requiring safe long-term disposal.
Present nuclear power plants utilise only 0.7 per cent of uranium and the remaining 99.3 per
cent is the spent fuel Plutonium, which remains highly radioactive for over 10,000 years in
the storage.
Nuclear Waste
250,000 tons of Spent Fuel Rods
10,000 tons made per year in US
Spent Fuel Pools HIGHLY Radioactive
Nuclear Power Requires a Military to Protect it as a terrorist target
The radioactive reactor building must also be
decommissioned after 40-50 years of operation,
taken apart by remote control and similarly
transported long distances and stored.
GHG will be produced in the process.
(The cost is paid by US taxpayers!)
Nuclear Waste DisposalYucca Mountain, Nevada
77,000 Tons of High Level WasteCANCELLED
Yucca Mountain
Reprocessing the Hot Rods
The PROBLEMIran, North Korea, India:
Every Nuclear Power Plant is a source for atomic weapons.
There is no “civilian” nuclear power. Nuclear Power must have military
protection because of the plutonium.
Reprocessing Plutonium
• 239Pu is a waste product in nuclear power reactors, that is intermixed with other spent reactor fuels.
• In order to become weapons grade, it must be separated out (“reprocessed”)
THE RODS ARE FULL OF PLUTONIUM!Plutonium:Nuclear Power By-Product
•Each 1000 megawatt nuclear
power plant produces 500 lbs of
Pu per year.
•Global production due to nuclear
power plants: ~1,200 tons
•Global production due to nuclear
weapons: 250 tons.
•5 kg in an atomic bomb!
Nuclear Power Requires a Military to Protect it from theft and proliferation
Nuclear Processing Plant Accident1999, Tokai, Japan: Uranium Processing Plant converts enriched
uranium hexafluoride (UF6) to uranium dioxide (UO2) (MOX).
A Criticality accident involved a self-sustaining chain reaction caused from handling of too large amounts of enriched uranium. The chain reaction continued for around 20 hours, before it could be stopped, releasing large amounts of gamma and neutron radiation. 1 worker died.
A complete life-cycle analysis shows that generating electricity from nuclear power
emits 20-40% of the carbon dioxide of a
gas-fired system when the whole system is taken into account.
Nuclear Power: The Energy Balanceby Jan-Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Smith, Center for Energy Conservation, Netherlands
In sum….Is nuclear power green?
Nuclear PowerIs it Safe?
Nuclear AccidentsIf you set aside Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the safety record of nuclear [power] is really very good.
-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, June 2001
The events at Fukushima are level 5, so far and there has only been one 7 in history: Chernobyl in 1986.
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/mar/14/nuclear-power-plant-accidents-list-rank
Three Mile Island: April 1979Nuclear Power became unpopular after Three Mile Island
when an accident caused the fuel rods to partially melt.
Three Mile Island: April 1979
13–17 million curies of radioactive iodine excaped in air
2.4–13 million cures of Xenon and Krypton (gamma emitters)
Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Disaster, April 26th, 1986
Chernobyl reactor number 4 in
Ukraine was ripped apart by an
explosion on 26 April 1986, and
burned for 10 days. . 10 tons of
the 200 tons of enriched
uranium blasted into the
atmosphere. It released a
massive amount of radioactivity
(1018 becquerels) over Europe
and the rest of the world
•Evacuation of more than a thousand square miles
•400 times more radiation released than Hiroshima Bomb
•350,000 people dislocated
•Exclusion Zone is a permanent Ghost Town.
Local Effects
Chernobyl released 50-80 million curies of radioactivity into the atmosphere
Average Background Radiation in Europe: 0.3 kBq/m2
1 Curie = 10 Billion Bq
Chernobyl Nowand forever
The New Shelter
The new protective covering - 110 meters high, 260 meters wide - costs about 2 billion euros. Financed mainly by the G7 and some European countries, it is being built 300 meters from the nuclear reactor by Bechtel. It should last about 100 years. And then another one will have to be built, forever.
•600,000 exposed to high levels of radiation
•6 million people exposed to low levels
•56 deaths to date
•4,000 cases of thyroid cancer to date
•The official number of disabled Chernobyl
rescue workers today in Ukraine is 106,000.
•2 million officially classified as victims
•Increased rates of birth defects
•Hundreds of Billions of dollars in costs to date
•9,000-90,000 cancer induced deaths will occur
(Depending on who you’re talking to….)
Chernobyl Consequences
30 years later…
Fukushima Daiichi nuclear
disaster: March 13, 2011
The nuclear plant, located about 240 kilometers (150 miles) north of Tokyo,
was swamped by the tsunami that followed Japan's historic March 11
earthquake. The flooding knocked out coolant systems at the plant, leading
to spectacular hydrogen explosions in two reactor buildings, a suspected
explosion inside a third and extensive damage from the spent fuel housed in
a fourth unit that had been shut down before the quake.
The "outer building" surrounding Unit 3 of Fukushima I
explodes due to the ignition of built up hydrogen gas, on
March 13, 2011. This is the reactor which has the
extremely dangerous plutonium-laced MOX fuel.
Radioactive cesium has taken up residence in the exclusion zone,
replacing the human inhabitants.Cesium-137 has a half-life of 30
years, and since it takes about 10 half-lives for any radionuclide to
disappear, it will maintain ownership of the exclusion zone for
centuries. - Physicians for Social Responsibility
Nuclear PowerIs it Cheap?
Depends on who you talk to!
Pro Nuclear graph:
Anti Nuclear graph:
The Energy Policy Act of 2005
Major Incentives for Investment
•$14 billion in tax dollars, taxpayer-backed
loans, and tax credits to build 6 new
nuclear reactors.
•$2 billion line item to compensate nuclear
corporations for any delay
•Price Anderson Act caps the industry’s
liability at $15 billion
Obama Funded Billions for New Nukes:
Cost to Clean up the Mess that
can never be cleaned up?
Research shows that improved efficiency saves as much energy as new nuclear power plants and is
much cheaper and employs more people.
Nuclear PowerIs it Green, Cheap & Safe?
The Sun radiates 4 x 1023 kilowatts of Energy
Solar Constant: 1.4kW/m2 at top of Earth’s Atmosphere
US Average Power Received: 180W/m2
The unleashed power of
the atom has changed
everything save our
modes of thinking and we
thus drift toward
unparalleled catastrophe"
-Albert Einstein
Bronze Buddha at Hiroshima
Nuclear Power