Tweet After Chernobyl, Hans Bethe, pictured at left, said “the Chernobyl disaster tells us about the deficiencies of the Soviet political and administrative system rather than about problems with nuclear power” (PBS).  Dr. Bethe is right.  Managing nuclear power and our energy infrastructure is not limited to physics and engineering. It also involves economics, human ecology, national security and systems dynamics. It is logical to conclude that because the Chernobyl disaster was a hydrogen explosion in a badly designed nuclear power plant brought about by Soviet style mis-management, nuclear technology can be implemented safely. However, the data from Three Mile Island and Fukushima suggest that nuclear power, when implemented safely, is too expensive to compete with alternatives (hence the industry needs loan guarantees here in the USA). We need to think about energy in the context of Systems Dynamics, as discussed in “Thinking in Systems,” by Dr. Donella Meadows, also pictured at left, of MIT, Dartmouth, and the Sustainability Institute.

Similar arguments have been advanced after Fukushima. “As long as we don’t build them near earthquake faults, especially earthquake faults near oceans …” While the probability of an accident is low (altho business as usual does raise some concerns) the probability of an accident that occurs being catastrophic is very high!

Looking at Indian Point, which is on an earthquake fault, and thinking about systems, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima …

The area within a 50 mile radius of Indian Point includes New York City, Westchester, Rockland, and Nassau counties of New York, western Connecticut, and northern New Jersey. About 20 million people live there. Entergy says it’s “Safe, Secure, and Vital.” Others – who live near the plant – say it’s not safe, not secure, not vital, and Should Be Closed!

Indian Point is owned by Entergy, which has recently agreed to to notify state regulators of any major changes to the company’s administrative and financial operations, here.

The Price Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act (described here on the home pages of the NRC) limits the liability of a nuclear accident to $7 billion.  If we look at Chernobyl and Fukushima as examples, in the event of an accident,the area outside the plant would become a ghost town. Let’s do the math: $7.0 billion divided by 20 million people is … $7,000,000,000 divided by 20,000,000 people … $350 per person.  This includes privately owned residential real estate, commercial real estate, public community owned properties such as public schools, from elementary schools up to City College, infrastructure such as the George Washington Bridge, and properties such as Columbia University, New York University, etc.

In the event of a catastrophic accident at Indian Point, whether caused by nuclear engineering, or something akin to Soviet style mismanagement, the owners of Indian Point and their insurers would be on the hook for $350 per person for everyone who lives in or owns property in New York City, Westchester, Rockland, Nassau, Western Connecticut and Northern New Jersey. While it is true that real estate values have dropped somewhat in recent years, it is reasonable to assume that the 20 million people and others with interests in this area have a net worth somewhat greater than $350 per capita.

Matthew Wald, in the New York Times, Friday, May 13, 2011, wrote, “Disaster Plan Problems Found at U.S. Nuclear Plants” (click here).  Wald and Hiroko Tabuchi also reported “Japanese Reactor Damage Is Worse Than Expected” here,

In a development that is likely to delay efforts to bring the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station under control, the plant’s operator said Thursday that one reactor, No. 1, had sustained much more damage than originally thought and was leaking water.

There is less water than expected, water levels are about 1.0 meters below the bottom of the fuel rods normal position. …Junichi Matsumoto, a Tepco spokesman said “Exposed fuel has probably melted and slumped to the bottom of the vessel”. However, temperatures are cooler than expected – between 100 and 120 degrees Celsius / 212 to 248 degrees Fahrenheit.

David Lochbaum, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, was quoted “As bad as things are, they’re getting better.”

As Craig Bennett, in the Guardian, UK, wrote (here), “Fukushima shows us the real cost of nuclear power…. The economics of nuclear power don’t add up – which is even more reason to invest in renewable energy. ”

The real probablility of a nuclear disaster is such that we have had three since 1979. Indian Point, in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986, and Fukushima in 2011. All were exacerbated by multiple factors and a reinforcing feedback.

At Three Mile Island and at Fukushima, failures in the cooling system led to bigger problems. At Chernobyl it was the design of the cooling system – graphite tips – that led to the explosion.

Fukushima

1. Earthquake triggers a tsunami.
2. Tsunami knocks out backup power.
3. Disrupts cooling systems.
4. Magor leaks of radioactive materials into the Pacific Ocean.

Three Mile Island Event, described at Nuclear Tourist,

1. A valve between the condenser and the pump on the secondary side failed in the closed position, which reduced the amount of water being supplied to the steam generator; the main feedwater pumps and the turbine tripped within seconds.
2. All the water on the secondary side boiled within minutes.
3. The emergency feedwater pumps, which started as expected, were unable to inject water into the steam generators because several valves in the system were closed.

Chernobyl

According to the Nuclear Tourist, prior to Fukushima, here,

“The accident was by far the most devastating in the history of nuclear power, Emergency workers were exposed to high doses of radiation; the surrounding population to far less, An increased number of radiation-related thyroid cancers is now evident, Other than thyroid cancer, long term health impacts from radiation have not been detected, Severe environmental impacts were short-term, Low-level radioactive contamination will persist for decades, Chernobyl-type reactors have been upgraded for safety, Assistance for affected areas and populations remains essential, Principal examples of assistance activities in the United Nations system.”

According to Richard Rhodes, author of “Nuclear Renewal“, Penguin Books, described here on Frontline, on PBS,

“The immediate cause of the Chernobyl accident was a mismanaged electrical-engineering experiment. Engineers with no knowledge of reactor physics were interested to see if they could draw electricity from the turbine generator of the Number 4 reactor unit to run water pumps during an emergency when the turbine was no longer being driven by the reactor but was still spinning inertially. The engineers needed the reactor to wind up the turbine; then they planned to idle it to 2.5 percent power. Unexpected electrical demand on the afternoon of April 29 delayed the experiment until eleven o’clock that night. When the experimenters finally started, they felt pressed to make up for lost time, so they reduced the reactor’s power level too rapidly. That mistake caused a rapid buildup of neutron-absorbing fission by products in the reactor core, which poisoned the reaction. To compensate, the operators withdrew a majority of the reactor’s control rods, but even with the rods withdrawn, they were unable to increase the power level to more than 30 megawatts, a low level of operation at which the reactor’s instability potential is at its worst and that the Chernobyl plant’s own safety rules forbade.

At that point, writes Russian nuclear engineer Grigori Medvedev, “there were two options: increasing the power immediately, or waiting twenty-four hours for the poisons to dissipate. [Deputy chief engineer Dyatlov] should have waited…But he [had an experiment to conduct and he] was unwilling to stop…He ordered an immediate increase in the power of the reactor.” Reluctantly the operators complied. By 1 a.m. on April 26, they stabilized the reactor at 200 megawatts. It was still poisoned and increasingly difficult to control. More control rods came out. A minimum reserve for an RBMK reactor is supposed to be 30 control rods. At the end, the Number 4 unit was down to only six control rods, with 205 rods withdrawn.

The experimenters allowed this dangerous condition to develop even though they had deliberately bypassed and disconnected every important safety system, including the emergency core-cooling system. They had also disconnected every backup electrical system, down to and including diesel generators, that would have allowed them to operate the reactor controls in the event of an emergency.

At 1:23 in the morning, the engineers proceeded with their experiment by shutting down the turbine generator. That reduced the electrical supply to the reactor’s water pumps, which in turn reduced the flow of cooling water through the reactor. In the coolant channels within the graphite-uranium fuel core, the water began to boil.

Graphite facilitates the fission chain reaction in a graphite reactor by slowing neutrons. Coolant water in such a reactor absorbs neutrons, thus acting as a poison. When the coolant water in the Number 4 Chernobyl unit began turning to steam, that change of phase reduced its density and made it a less effective neutron absorber. With more neutrons becoming available and few control rods inserted to absorb them, the chain reaction accelerated. The power level in the reactor began to rise.

The operators noticed the power surge and realized they needed to reduce reactivity quickly by inserting more control rods. They hit the red button of the emergency power-reduction system. Motors began driving all 205 control rods as well as the emergency protection rods into the reactor core.

But the control rods had a design flaw that now proved deadly: their tips were made of graphite. The graphite tips attached to a hollow segment one meter (3.28 feet long), which attached in turn to a five-meter absorbent segment. When the 205 control rods began driving into the surging Number 4 reactor, the graphite tip went in first. Rather than reduce the reaction, the graphite tips increased it. The control rods displaced water from the rod channels as well, increasing reactivity further. All hell broke loose–The reactor exploded.

The explosion was chemical, driven by gases and steam generated by the core runaway, not by nuclear reactions; no commercial nuclear reactor contains a high enough concentration of U-235 or plutonium to cause a nuclear explosion.

Adi Narayan compared Fukushima, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island on Bloomberg News, here, on March 17, 2011, a week after the disaster started in Japan.

“Radiation leaks from Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s earthquake-stricken reactors in northeastern Japan represent the worst nuclear power accident since the meltdown at Chernobyl, Ukraine, almost 25 years ago, scientists say.”

This is also described on “Chernobyl, Reality and Myth,” here. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island are described here, by Marc de Piolenc, who concludes “Far from causing a loss of confidence by the public in nuclear power, TMI should have bolstered it!”  What de Piolenc and other writers, miss, is that nuclear power and energy infrastructure is not limited to physics and engineering; it also involves economics, human ecology, national security and systems dynamics. The people on Wall Street understand this.

As described by Jane and Michael Hoffman in their 2008 book Green Your Place in the New Energy Revolution, and Al Gore in Earth in the Balance, in 1992, nuclear power was “killed” by the dynamics of the systems.  While accidents may be improbable, but when a accident occurs, as we have seen in Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, the probability is very high that it will be catastrophic. At the very least the investors will see their assets transformed into liabilities.  There are safer, easier, more reliable, and faster ways to make money.

An artist’s view is here.

But the last words are provided by Mycle Schneider, writing “Nuclear Power in a Post-Fukushima World” for the Worldwatch Institute, draft available (pdf):

“In the United States, the share of renewables in new capacity additions skyrocketed from 2 percent in 2004 to 55 percent in 2009, with no new nuclear coming on line. In 2010, for the first time, worldwide cumulated installed capacity of wind turbines (193 gigawatts), biomass and waste-to-energy plants (65 GW), and solar power (43 GW) reached 381 GW, outpacing the installed nuclear capacity of 375 GW prior to the Fukushima disaster. Total investment in renewable energy technologies has been estimated at $243 billion in 2010.”

“As of April 1, 2011, there were 437 nuclear reactors operating in the world – seven fewer than in 2002.”

I am not opposed to nuclear power. Looking at the data, however, it is clearly not competitive with solar, wind power, or renewables.

For more on the potential of renewable energy,  as outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, click here.