America's endangered radioactive relapse

Far from heralding a nuclear dawn, US President Barack Obama's recent announcement of loan guarantees to help fund new reactors only serves to highlight the strong and widespread perception in financial markets that nuclear energy investment is a risky business - a perception that is bound to be reinforced by the continuing grassroots anti-reactor opposition.

Harvey Wasserman

FOR the past several years, a well-financed corporate drumbeat has been touting the construction of new nuclear power plants in the United States. Official government filings indicate the reactor industry has spent in excess of $640 million promoting this 'reactor renaissance'.

In return, President Barack Obama recently announced he would support loan guarantees of some $54 billion to help fund these new reactors.Some $18.5 billion had been cited in Congressional budgeting under George W Bush in 2005.

But the new nukes scenario does not take into account increasingly ferocious resistance not only from traditional grassroots anti-reactor organisers, but also from fiscally conservative taxpayer and 'laissez-faire' advocates who oppose large government subsidies to private developers.These include the right-wing Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute and National Taxpayers Union, all of whom have expressed strong opposition to billions of dollars being risked on behalf of the reactor builders.

Compounding the industry's ills have been numerous problems at elderly reactors such as Vermont Yankee and New York's Indian Point, which have experienced significant radioactive leaks in recent days.Vermont's state Senate has voted 26-4 against extending Yankee's operating licence, which is due to expire in 2012.New York has nixed a financial agreement that would have allowed Entergy, owner of two reactors at Indian Point, to shift liability to a shell corporation. New Jersey is demanding that cooling towers be built at Oyster Creek, prompting its owners to threaten to shut it down altogether.

In Florida, a key rate hike meant to help build four new reactors has been overturned. In Texas, fierce political warfare has broken out over the financing of two new nukes.

Opposition to loan guarantees

Nationally, Obama's announcement of new loan guarantees has been met with a firestorm of opposition from local and Washington-based greens.Vermont's US Senator Bernie Sanders has made reactor opposition his No.1 priority.

Obama has announced some $8.3 billion in loan guarantees for two new reactors planned for Georgia. Their Westinghouse AP-1000 designs have been rejected by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) as being unable to withstand natural cataclysms like hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes.

Georgia's Vogtle site was to originally host four reactors at a total cost of $600 million; it wound up with two at $9 billion.

The Southern Company which wants to build these two new reactors has cut at least one deal with Japanese financiers set to cash in on American taxpayer largess. The interest rate on the federal guarantees remains bitterly contested. The funding is being debated between at least five government agencies, and may well be tested in the courts. It's not clear whether union labour will be required and what impact that might have on construction costs.

The Congressional Budget Office and other analysts warn the likely failure rate for government-backed reactor construction loans could be in excess of 50%. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu has admitted he was unaware of the CBO's report when he signed on to the Georgia guarantees.

Over the past several years the estimated price tag for proposed new reactors has jumped from $2-3 billion each in some cases to more than $12 billion today. The Chair of the NRC currently estimates it at $10 billion, well before a single construction licence has been issued, which will take at least a year.

Energy experts at the Rocky Mountain Institute and elsewhere estimate that a dollar invested in increased efficiency could save up to seven times as much energy as one invested in nuclear plants can produce, while producing 10 times as many permanent jobs.

Georgia has been targeted largely because its regulators have demanded ratepayers put up the cash for the reactors as they're being built. Florida and Georgia are among a small handful of states taxing electric consumers for projects that cannot come on line for many years, and that may never deliver a single electron of electricity.

Two Florida Public Service Commissioners, recently appointed by Republican Governor Charlie Crist (now a candidate for the US Senate), helped reject over a billion dollars in rate hikes demanded by Florida Power & Light and Progress Energy, both of which want to build double-reactors at ratepayer expense. The utilities now say they'll postpone the projects proposed for Turkey Point and Levy County.

In 2005 the Bush administration had set aside some $18.5 billion for reactor loan guarantees, but the Department of Energy has been unable to administer them. Obama wants an additional $36 billion to bring the fund up to $54.5 billion. Proposed projects in South Carolina, Maryland and Texas appear to be next in line.

But the NRC has raised serious questions about Toshiba-owned Westinghouse's AP-1000 slated for Vogtle, as well as for South Carolina and Turkey Point. The French-made EPR design proposed for Maryland has been challenged by regulators in Finland, France and Great Britain. In Texas, a $4 billion price jump has sparked a political upheaval in San Antonio and elsewhere, throwing the future of that project in doubt.

Taxpayers are also on the hook for potential future accidents from these new reactors. In 1957, the industry promised Congress and the country that nuclear technology would quickly advance to the point that private insurers would take on the liability for any future disaster, which could by all serious estimates run into the hundreds of billions of dollars. Only $11 billion has been set aside to cover the cost of such a catastrophe. But now the industry says it will not build even this next generation of plants without taxpayers underwriting liability for future accidents. Thus the 'temporary' programme could ultimately stretch out to a full century or more.

In the interim, Obama has all but killed Nevada's proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump. He has appointed a commission of nuclear advocates to 'investigate' the future of high-level reactor waste. But after 53 years, the industry is further from a solution than ever.

Meanwhile, the NRC has reported that at least 27 of America's 104 licensed reactors are now leaking radioactive tritium. The worst case may be Entergy's Vermont Yankee, near the state's southeastern border with New Hampshire and Massachusetts. High levels of contamination have been found in test wells around the reactor, and experts believe the Connecticut River is at serious risk.

Deep wedge

Obama has now driven a deep wedge between himself and the core of the environmental movement, which remains fiercely anti-nuclear. While reactor advocates paint the technology green, the opposition has been joined by fiscal conservatives like the National Taxpayers Union, the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation.

Reactor backers hailing a 'renaissance' in atomic energy studiously ignore Finland's catastrophic Olkiluoto project, now $3 billion over budget and three years behind schedule. Parallel problems have crippled another project at Flamanville, France, and are virtually certain to surface in the US.

The reactor industry has spent untold millions lobbying for this first round of loan guarantees. There's no doubt it will seek far more in the coming months. Having failed to secure private American financing, the question will be: in a tight economy, how much public money will Congress throw at this obsolete technology?

The potential flow of taxpayer guarantees to Georgia means nuclear opponents now have a tangible target. Also guaranteed is ferocious grassroots opposition to financing, licensing and construction of this and all other new reactor proposals, as well as to continued operation of leaky rustbucket reactors like Vermont Yankee.

Technological flaws

Despite the huge amounts of money at its disposal, the reactor industry must still deal with the inconvenient intrusions of hard reality.  Both in the US and worldwide, the technology continues to be its own worst enemy:

The usually supine NRC has told  Westinghouse that its 'standardised' AP-1000 design might not withstand hurricanes, tornadoes or earthquakes.

Regulators in France, Finland and the UK have raised safety concerns about Areva's flagship EPR reactor. The front group for France's national nuclear power industry, Areva's vanguard project in Finland is at least three years behind schedule and at least $3 billion over budget.

And the Obama administration indicates it will end efforts to license the proposed radioactive waste repository at Yucca Mountain. After more than 50 years of trying, the nuclear industry has not a single prospective central dump site.

'If history repeats itself as farce, then the nuclear power industry represents the most incompetent jester of all time,' says Michael Mariotte of the Nuclear Information & Resource Service. It 'seems intent on repeating every possible mistake of its failed past - from promoting inadequate, ever-changing reactor designs to blowing through even the largest imaginable budgets. If the computer industry followed the practices of the nuclear industry, we'd still be waiting for the first digital device that could fit in a space smaller than a warehouse and cost less than a family's annual income.'

Nuclear sites throughout the world sit on or near earthquake faults. Ohio's Perry reactor was damaged by a tremor in 1986, just before it went on line. In 1991 Hurricane Andrew did $100 million in damage to Florida's Turkey Point, causing a critical loss of off-site communication. In 2007 a massive earthquake shook Japan's Kashiwazaki, shutting seven reactors.

And radioactive waste continues to build up at sites throughout the world, including some 50,000 metric tons here in the US.

The abovementioned vote of no confidence from regulators in three European countries has stunned Areva, not to mention its potential customers, including the United Arab Emirates. 'It hasn't helped at all,' says one key source. 'One of the key arguments has been that the EPR is safer than all the others.'

That Areva would sell reactors to the UAE at all has raised widespread fears that atomic bombs will soon proliferate throughout the Middle East. Both India and Pakistan got radioactive weapons materials from their commercial reactors.

Areva's design safety fiasco follows a Pink Panther-style stumble in October, when federal and state officials bailed on a massive media celebration planned for the Cadarache nuclear facility's 50th anniversary. As much as 39 pounds of plutonium dust is now believed to contaminate the historic research centre, enough to make numerous Nagasaki-sized bombs. According to the Financial Times, 'the discovery that France's Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) had wildly under-estimated the quantity of plutonium dust that would accumulate - and then delayed notifying the Nuclear Safety Authority - has led the latter to hand its findings to the public prosecutor, who will decide if there should be an investigation into the CEA's management ... This is a severe blow to the credibility of the CEA, flagship of French nuclear research, and to Cadarache, soon to be the site of the world's first fusion reactor.'

The uproar, writes the Financial Times' Peggy Hollinger, has 'cast a shadow over the Nuclear Safety Authority's behaviour since it became independent of the government.'

Finnish regulators have also gone to virtual war with Areva over the catastrophic Olkiluoto project. In a conversation with me in southern Ohio last summer, CEO Anne Lauvergeon blamed Areva's problems on the Finns. But similar complaints are now coming from French regulators over Areva's parallel project at Flamanville, in northern France.

Areva has also run afoul of British regulators, who say its massive incursions into the UK's nuclear industry have raised serious safety concerns.

Meanwhile the NRC's critique of the Westinghouse AP-1000 reactor has shattered the industry's expensive image of a 'renaissance' that is 'ready to go.' As the machine of apparent choice at vanguard sites throughout the US, the AP-1000 has been touted by the industry as a standardised 'cookie-cutter' design that might make reactor construction and operations easier to manage.

'Betting the farm'

Wall Street has made it clear it will not finance (or insure) new reactor construction unless backed by the federal treasury. Congressional critics warn half the reactor construction loans are likely to go into default. 'This only underscores Moody's assessment that new reactors are "bet the farm" investments,' says Michele Boyd of Physicians for Social Responsibility. 'So why is the federal government going to back these projects with US taxpayer dollars?'

Now these critiques from the American NRC and regulators in Britain, France and Finland confirm that no safe standardised design exists, either here or in France, and that the industry could be years away from finalising one that can be successfully deployed.

The same applies to radioactive waste. The Obama administration now seems poised to finalise its promise that 'all licence defence activities will be terminated' on the proposed Yucca Mountain dump. Distinguished by its $10 billion price tag and the visible earthquake fault running through it (not to mention the dormant volcanoes that surround it and the water perched at its peak), Yucca is bitterly opposed by some 80% of Nevada's citizenry. After a hugely subsidised half-century of futility, the US reactor industry has not a single named prospect for a centralised commercial waste dump. The 'solution', as put forth by Stewart Brand and other industry advocates, seems to be focussed on leaving high-level radioactive waste at the sites and letting future generations deal with it. In the years since the Shippingport reactor in Pennsylvania opened in 1957, the industry's go-to device is a concrete 'dry cask' with vent holes and armed guards.

Meanwhile, despite repeated industry denials, the bad news about the health impacts of reactor radiation pours in. 'Downwind or near eight reactors that closed in the 1980s and 1990s,' says New York-based expert Joe Mangano, 'there were immediate and sharp declines in infant deaths, birth defects, and child cancer incidence age 0-4' when the reactors shut. 'The highest thyroid cancer rates in the US are in a 90 mile radius of eastern PA/New Jersey/southern NY, an area with 16 reactors at seven plants, which is the greatest density in the US.'

The near-simultaneous demise of Yucca Mountain with the regulatory credibility of the AP-1000 and Areva EPR, along with the attacks by Moody's and other financial critics, might come as a death blow to any such technology in a sane society. But the financial reach of the atomic lobby remains powerful in Congress and the White House.

At this point, the only certainty about the future of reactor construction is that still more shoes will drop on an industry whose decomposed credibility has become legend.        

Harvey Wasserman is Senior Adviser to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service. He is the author of Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth (introduced by Robert F Kennedy, Jr) (see the advertisement on this page).His other books include Harvey Wasserman's History of the United States (introduced by Howard Zinn), A Glimpse of the Big Light:Losing Parents, Finding Spirit (introduced by Marianne Williamson), and Passions of the Patriots: Our Famous Founders' Secret Lives by 'Thomas Paine'. They are available from www.harveywasserman.com.

*Third World Resurgence No. 235, March 2010, pp 14-17