These giant concrete structures certainly are not hard to miss. Some of them, especially the water-cooled nuclear reactors, generate a plume of steam that can be seen from miles away. The EPA estimates we generate 19% of our country’s electricity from nuclear power, as compared to 17% for renewable energies. For an industry that has been around for over 60 years, that is not a significant amount compared to the problems it created, especially considering the issue of disposing of nuclear waste, a problem that will haunt the Earth for thousands of years.
The nuclear power industry really started out a few years after the close of the Second World War in the early to mid-1950s. Scientists saw the enormous power of the atom and wanted to figure out how to harness the amazing heat and energy produced from nuclear fission. Researchers realized it could be used to power something directly like a submarine or harnessed and used to produce electricity.
In 1951 the first nuclear reactor to produce electricity started up. The reactor was a small experimental one located at Argonne National Laboratory in Idaho. It was not of commercial size but a functioning small scale unit of larger ones to come.
Looking into the future and seeing the potential of using nuclear energy to produce electricity, President Eisenhower focused significant government resources towards the goal of developing nuclear reactors capable of generating large amounts of electricity. In a way, the nuclear energy industry was born in 1953 with the government pushing private industry to get involved and backing research and development.
The Atomic Energy Act in 1954 was supposed to get private corporations to build nuclear power plants, but many prototypes and designs tested in research labs had partial meltdowns and other failures. Private industry did not want to take on the liability of a nuclear reactor they owned having a massive failure or accident. In 1957 the U.S. government passed the Price-Anderson Act, which essentially was a huge insurance policy issued by the government to take liability from corporations if something happened. It was only after the government was willing to take on the liability and insure nuclear power plants that the private industry really started.
Today, there are 450 operating nuclear reactors around the world, 96 here in the United States. A nuclear reactor is where the actual nuclear reaction occurs. A nuclear power plant is the overall facility that houses the reactor. Some power plants have multiple reactors on one site; several even have three nuclear reactors on one site, such as the Palo Verde nuclear power plant in Arizona. Incidentally, Palo Verde is the largest nuclear power plant in the country. All told there are 58 plant locations with a total of 96 reactors. Two more reactors are currently under construction in Georgia.
The nuclear reactors in the United States are aging, and many are already past the original planned life they were built to last. The cost to build new reactors runs in the billions of dollars, and public resistance to them is higher than ever. According to the power industry, the only solution is to keep the old ones running. That doesn’t solve the problems that they are wearing out and many parts are difficult to replace or repair. The repairs at times are so vast that a plant may close the entire reactor for a year or more just to bring it back up to a safe operating standard.
The Nuclear Regulatory Agency does admit that accidents are possible. They have emergency planning procedures in place with local and state officials in case there is an emergency at one of the country’s reactors. If there ever was an actual emergency and the response plan was triggered, it would start with a specific action plan for each of the two emergency planning zones. The first zone covers a ten mile radius of the nuclear reactor. Basically, that would be ground zero where people in that zone could have direct and immediate harm from exposure to radiation. The second zone is a radius of fifty miles within which all the water, supplies, farmland, and animals could be contaminated from fallout. Those living near nuclear power plants should keep this in mind.
Despite the dangers, nuclear reactors are currently a part of our energy generation. Other than some very basic knowledge that a nuclear reactor makes energy from atoms, most of us know very little about how they operate. We know there is a risk of a large scale accident such as Chernobyl in Russia or Fukushima in Japan, but the odds of that happening are extremely small. What most people are unaware of is that there are ongoing accidents of varying sizes each year that could mushroom into a catastrophe.
There are four main risks and dangers from nuclear reactors.
Venting gases from the reactor into the atmosphere is a regular part of daily operations. Inside the reactor there are many things going on at once. Every now and then something needs to be adjusted to keep the pressure, temperature, radiation levels, and humidity under control. It is similar to the release valve on a pressure cooker. To put it very simply, when it gets too hot inside, a nuclear reactor needs to vent off some steam to prevent overheating. During these normal events when releases of radioactive gases are made to the atmosphere, radioactivity levels are monitored, and the gases may pass through treatment controls before being vented. There is some level of radioactivity allowed in these releases. Also, very importantly, there are releases with higher than allowed levels frequently vented as well. Some of the radioactive elements released into the air according to the NRC include, tritium, iodine, bromine and cobalt.
The way the reactor and system is set up, there simply is no choice when the reactor needs to be vented. It is either vent or risk a blowout.
Routine venting of radioactive gases is a planned and regular part of the operation. Radioactive gases also build up inside the cooling water area, and when they get too high, they too are vented out when the radiation level becomes too hazardous.
A water-cooled reactor uses the cooler water to control the reactor temperature and then vents about 75% of the radioactive water out as steam and discharges the rest as liquid, creating the giant plumes of white we see coming out of the huge cooling towers miles away from the reactor.
The nuclear industry claims these releases are always very small and that they are monitored and reported by the operator according to regulations. They also claim the amounts released are almost always below what is allowed and does not threaten human health or the environment. That may be true with some of the radioactive gases they can filter and measure, but there are materials that there is no effective way to filter or measure for.
An example is xenon-135. This is emitted, but how much is anyone’s guess. Xenon-135 breaks down into cesium-135. This radioactive isotope takes three million years to break down halfway. By their own admission, nuclear power plants do not know how much radioactive cesium-135 they are releasing.
Importantly, many scientists agree that continuous small doses of radioactivity are as bad as one large dose at once. The effects are cumulative, and the doses compound.
Almost daily releases of radioactive particles into the atmosphere are taking place at nuclear reactors across the country. The industry downplays the significance of health risks to the exposure of the emissions and the effects on people living nearby.
However, the cumulative effects of being exposed to these radioactive materials is definitely something to be very concerned about, similar to the insidious way arsenic can affect health. Just a tiny bit of arsenic has little effect on the body, but when dosed over and over with tiny bits long enough, it can lead to serious health effects and even death. When you get an X-ray at the dentist once or twice a year, little effect or damage to cells is done. However, if you were exposed to that every week, week after week, the cumulative effect would be large amounts of cell damage, a highly increased risk of cancer, and possibly death.
According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, leaks of contaminated water in a nuclear reactor are a part of daily operation. Water to cool the reactor is brought inside from a large water source such as a river, lake, or even the ocean, and the water circulates through the cooling system of the reactor. As the levels of radiation in the cooling water in the reactor core become too high, some is removed and mixed with the rest of the water to lower concentrations.
In the same way radioactive isotopes are released into the air, radioactive isotopes in water are released from the plant too. Not all radioactive material present in the water is able to be detected or removed with the old equipment the nuclear plants use. Tritium, for example, is not removed and is released to the environment. This isotope, a radioactive form of hydrogen, is known to cause mutations and tumors in humans. Other dangerous materials that have detectable levels such as cobalt and manganese are usually released at the highest level regulations allow. These levels are not safe levels. There is no safe level for radioactive materials to be released. Nuclear plants generally claim that releasing no radioactive material is not technologically feasible. Older plants, which almost all operating nuclear plants are, do have options to upgrade and use new technology which would significantly reduce the amount of so called “accidental and routine releases”.
The regulatory agency allows the plants in many cases to continue to use the old technology that is insufficient to reduce emissions simply because the industry claims it was the best technology available at the time and newer technology is not economically feasible to install.
According to the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, the nuclear power industry continues to claim there is no technology that is economically feasible to prevent tritium from being vented into the air and released into the water. Because of the industry claim, the NRC does not force the industry to do anything about the continuous releases.
Then, of course, there are leaks. All machines have leaks; it’s inescapable. As a reactor gets older, it leaks more. The fuel rods inside the reactor, the tanks, valves, and pipes all leak.
Unfortunately, leaking pipes and tritium releases are more the norm than the exception. Thousands of feet of pipes are encased under the reactor and unable to be reached to check. Many of the other miles of pipe never get inspected for corrosion even though many reactors have been running for over 20 years.
An investigation done by the Associated Press found 75% of nuclear reactors are leaking tritium. When the AP examined records kept by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, out of 65 sites reviewed, 48 of them were leaking tritium. The report went on to say 37 of the leaking sites contained tritium in concentrations higher than the federal standard for drinking water. Some levels measured were hundreds of times higher.
In addition, tritium leaks have been identified in 33 of the nation’s 104 nuclear power plants and escaped into the groundwater at 27 of them, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the federal agency in charge of power plants.
Exelon, the largest private operator of nuclear reactors, admitted that checking 100% of the pipes to ensure completely none are leaking “is not practical” as they put it. Practicality is directly related to cost. Exelon facilities have had their share of leaks in the past. One facility, known as Dresden Unit 2, is a reactor plant in Morris, Illinois, west of Chicago. Dresden Unit 2 has had leaks in the system supposed to cool the reactor core in case of an emergency. The same plant also has leaked tritium into the ground at levels 450 times the EPA limit.
According to records from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, on the national level, there have been over 400 accidental leaks that have been reported. Some of the leaks involved millions of gallons of contaminated water. The scary part is some of these leaks were ongoing for years before they were finally detected. Despite all these leaks, the groundwater under the plant remains unchecked.
Ten miles away from Dresden is the Braidwood reactor site. The Braidwood facility is also an Exelon plant, and it too has leaked over six million gallons of tritium-contaminated water. No authorities were informed, and it was not made public until 2005, years after the multiple leaks occurred. A drinking water well offsite near Braidwood was found contaminated with tritium. While Exelon claims the contamination is harmless, the company bought out nine properties in the area.
In New Jersey, home of the oldest nuclear reactor in service, tritium-contaminated water has been found leaking from a pipe into two aquifers that supply water to over one million New Jersey residents. It was estimated that over 180,000 gallons of the tritium water already leaked at the time of the discovery. Exelon, the plan operator, said the contamination does not present any hazards to people using the water in spite of monitoring wells measuring tritium at 300 times the level the EPA sets as safe for drinking water. The plant solution is to pump contaminated water up from the aquifer, blend it with water used to cool the reactor, and discharge the diluted water into a canal leading out to Barnegat Bay.
At a different nuclear reactor in New Jersey run by the same company, there was another spill of tritium in 2002. At that time, the spill was measured at 15 million picocuries, which set a record for the highest radiation level recorded from any tritium spill in the United States. Exlon’s proposed solution to clean up the spill was to dilute the water and pipe it back out into the environment. A much better and real solution would have been to remove the radioactive tritium from the contaminated water entirely. Simply diluting it only reduces the concentration, not the total amount still remaining in the water being piped back out to Barnegat Bay.
River Bend nuclear reactor near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, released over 25,600 gallons of radioactive waste water. A leak was first detected at the plant in October, 2012, but apparently nobody did anything about it for five months. Diluted or not, tritium was released into the environment surrounding the plant.
On the southwest shore of Lake Michigan, the Palisade Nuclear Reactor released what was called “very slightly radioactive water” into Lake Michigan. The lake supplies drinking water for 40 million people downstream from the plant. Entergy, the operator, was forced to shut down the plant while the event was investigated. This was the same nuclear reactor where in 2012, a leak from a 300,000 gallon storage tank directly above the control room flowed through the ceiling into the safety critical control room and into buckets placed to catch the leaks from short circuiting the electronics. Employees who feared the worst could happen as a result of the leak turned into whistleblowers and alerted authorities this was being done. In spite of this, the Nuclear Regulatory Agency gave Entergy an exemption to continue operating the plant even with the degraded storage tank.
Accidents at our country’s aging nuclear reactors happen much more frequently than the public probably realizes. The public never hears about most of these even though the potential is there for a catastrophe to happen. Except for Three Mile Island back in 1979, there may not be another nuclear plant accident anyone may remember happening within the United States. Sadly, though, accidents do not need to be of this magnitude to have an effect on humans and the environment.
Accidents occur at our nuclear plants every year. Usually, the situation is downplayed by the plant operator and the Nuclear Regulatory Agency. With many billions invested in nuclear power, the industry does not need bad publicity and an outcry to shut down.
Since the nuclear power industry began in the 1950s, accidents have been a part of it. The severity of these accidents ranges from an internal failure of systems in the nuclear reactor to the partial meltdown of a core in the reactor. The numbers of accidents also vary depending on the source and the definition of “accident” used, from as few as 25 to over 100. Most plants, instead, use the term “incident.”
Many of these accidents had the potential to be catastrophes but were controlled. A perfect example is Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. This is the worst nuclear accident ever in this country. The partial meltdown of the reactor core could have turned into a disaster, contaminating hundreds of square miles and tens of thousands of people if the full meltdown had occurred. Luckily, it did not, but roughly one billion dollars was spent cleaning it up over 12-14 years. The plant is still not fully cleaned but was put into storage instead, leaving it for a future generation to deal with.
Spills of radioactive materials during transfers, accidental releases of radioactive gases during routine maintenance, and leaks of radioactive water totaling thousands of gallons occur. With the age of the operating nuclear plants approaching an average of 39, the industry has successfully lobbied the government and the nuclear industry watchdog agencies to loosen regulations and allow more contamination to be released using the justification that doing so could prevent future accidents. Ironically, a gradual weakening of safeguards is making nuclear reactors even less safe and closer to a large failure than ever before.
Accidents also can happen after the nuclear reactor is closed. The radioactive waste remains on site, and unused radioactive material stays in the reactor until it is dealt with. Closing a plant in no way takes away all of the dangers.
In California at the San Onofre nuclear reactor, live radioactive material from the closed reactor was being transferred into onsite storage. One of the containers with radioactive fuel in it was mishandled during transfer and was almost dropped from the machine to the ground 18 feet below. If that wasn’t bad enough, this nuclear reactor was already under scrutiny for poor planning. The temporary storage site they are still using for the waste is right at the edge of the Pacific Ocean just 100 feet back from the high tide line.
A Better Government Association review of federal and state records shows that since 2007, there have been at least 35 reported leaks, spills, or other accidental releases in Illinois of water contaminated with radioactive tritium.The most recent incident, which leaked 35,000 gallons, occurred over two weeks in May and June at Exelon’s Braidwood plant, southwest of Chicago. The leak was ongoing even as state inspectors were at the plant, being assured by Exelon officials there were no problems.
A 2014 incident at Exelon’s Dresden facility in Grundy County involved the release of about 500,000 gallons of highly radioactive water. Contamination was later found in the plant’s sewer lines and miles away in the city sewage treatment plant at Morris. Most sewage treatment plants are not equipped to remove radioactive substances, so the contamination mostly passed through the treatment plant and into the wastewater discharged into nearby waterways.
At another facility also run by Exelon in Cordova, Illinois, the Quad Cities nuclear plant had a leak that some employees at the plant estimated had been leaking years prior to being discovered. The leak was so difficult to repair that it took eight months before it was stopped. Groundwater radiation levels were detected at levels up to 375 higher than allowed by federal standards to be in drinking water. When Exelon threatened the state of Illinois that it would close the facility, the state allowed Exelon to push through big rate hikes to its customers.
Several years ago, a disaster offsite created a real and scary threat that could have had horrible consequences for three nuclear reactors if it occurred. Boone Dam, located upstream from three of Tennessee Valley Authority’s nuclear reactors, developed a sinkhole underneath it. There had been an earthquake registering 5.9 not too far away three years previously, and, according to seismologists, earthquakes in the area of the dam and reactors tend to have more underground movement than out in the western United States. Boone Dam is as high as Niagara Falls and holds back millions of gallons of water. Ultimately, this means that three reactors could potentially be hit by a wall of water if the dam had a breach and failure.
Workers noticed water and sediment running out from beneath the dam. Senior level inspectors were notified at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and crews from the TVA worked around the clock to try to figure out what was happening. They monitored the activity at the dam, and if no big storm occurred first, they hoped to solve the problem.
Six months later, the Tennessee Valley Authority was still trying to figure out a solution. If the dam was destroyed, not only would several towns including Knoxville be hit by the resulting floods, the nuclear reactors would also be hit with tsunami-like rushes of water, potentially leading to a disaster much like the Fukushima plant in Japan was. As of the writing of this chapter, it is now six years after the sinkhole was first discovered, and the construction to fix the sinkhole is still ongoing.
These issues are more serious and frequent than the government discloses. A reliability and risk engineer working with the risk analysis division of the NRC claimed portions of an investigatory report of potential dam disasters affecting downstream nuclear facilities had major portions redacted to conceal the true extent of vulnerabilities. One engineer specifically said one reactor operated by Duke Energy would almost certainly sustain core damage if the Jocassee dam upstream were to suffer a failure. That part of the NRC report was supposedly also redacted.
There is no place currently in the United States where nuclear waste from these reactors can be disposed of. The federal government spent over 30 years and $15 billion trying to establish a repository in Nevada at Yucca Mountain, but it failed. The repository, according to the government, would cost upwards of $96 billion to complete. However, despite still trying, there is still no place for the waste.
Even more disconcerting is the fact Yucca Mountain was planned to hold 70,000 tons of nuclear waste and already 79,000 tons await. Ultimately, this repository is over capacity decades before the facility opens–that is, if it ever does.
The new plan is to have a permanent location open and accepting waste in 2048. Until then, the government is talking about interim storage in the next eight years but leaves open the possibility of that not happening. Their back-up plan is to leave the high-level radioactive waste exactly where it is now: at currently operating and formerly running nuclear reactors. So, in addition to a nuclear reactor and its hazards, there is also the radioactive dump. At most nuclear reactors, almost all of the high-level wastes ever generated by them is still sitting inside the gates.
When the Rancho Seco nuclear reactor near Sacramento, California, shut down, scientists had a unique opportunity to study the relationship between cancer and the nuclear reactor. Based on reviews of 20 years of data tracking all cancers, the area near the now closed reactor experienced a decline in cancers, but what stood out was a steep decline the 10 years following the closing. Other studies looking at other reactors after closing also found declines in the population near the plant. These studies led scientists to conclude once an active nuclear reactor is closed, the cancer rates and health risks to people living within miles of the plant decreases . This is related to the elimination of atmospheric releases and ongoing leaks from daily operations. However, there remains the continued risks from wastes stored on the site and accidents which may occur during the decommissions of the facility which takes 5-10 years or longer to complete. Any contamination of the water supply will still be affecting the population as well. To state it bluntly, a closed reactor plant is not as dangerous as an operating one but, to use the word safe, is far from the reality of the continuing dangers.
Millions of people live within the 10 mile radius of a nuclear reactor considered ground zero. Tens of thousands of them live with a bottle of potassium iodide pills in the house in case of a nuclear accident spreading radiation their way. Accepting the fact that a meltdown is possible is just part of everyday life near the reactor. These people generally don’t realize, though, that leaks and vented radioactive gases are an everyday part of their lives as well. By living near a nuclear power plant, you are gambling that your body will not be affected over the long term from cumulative exposure. At minimum, people deserve to have all the information about what they are breathing and being exposed to. Once they have the full truth, they, not the government nor the nuclear plant, can decide what counts as an acceptable risk.
Because of all the hazards associated with nuclear plants, living near one is always dangerous. Tony and I have always maintained that a buffer of 20 miles between the plant and a residence was acceptable. Knowing the information about releases of radioactivity in the air and water made this distance far enough away except, of course, in the event of a major disaster and release.