Vol. 7 | No. 1 | Spring 2008
Expanded use of nuclear power could help reduce global warming emissions—but could also increase safety and security risks. To minimize these risks, the U.S. government and its nuclear power oversight agency much change their policies and practices.
By Lisbeth Gronlund
Global warming demands a profound transformation in the ways we generate and consume energy. Electricity use currently accounts for about 28 percent of all U.S. global warming emissions, and without a greater focus on conservation and efficiency measures, electricity consumption is projected to almost double by 2050. However, scientific research concludes that developed nations must reduce emissions by at least 80 percent during this same timeframe to avoid the most dangerous effects of global warming. We must therefore be willing to consider all available technologies for addressing climate change.
One of these technologies is nuclear power. Today, 104 reactors produce about 20 percent of our nation’s electricity; because nuclear power results in few global warming emissions (its life cycle emissions are comparable to those of wind power and hydropower), greater use of nuclear power could help reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. However, it could also increase the risks to our safety and security.
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An Indefensible Proposition
Nuclear power plants conduct security drills against unrealistically weak terrorist attacks. To set the security requirements for nuclear power plants, the NRC defines the size and abilities of a group that might attack a nuclear facility (and against which the plant owner must be able to defend). Although this information is not made public, it was widely known before September 11, 2001, that the NRC defined this group as three attackers, armed with nothing more sophisticated than handheld automatic rifles, who had received information about the facility and its defenses from an insider. Nevertheless, it is not clear that plant owners can even defend against the unrealistically modest attacks defined by the NRC. During nearly half of the mock attacks staged at nuclear power plants before 9/11, three attackers were able to enter the facility and destroy enough safety equipment to cause a meltdown— despite the fact that operators typically received six months’ advance notice of the date on which the attack would occur. |
The Risks of Nuclear Power
In the December 2007 report Nuclear Power in a Warming World, UCS assessed the risks posed by U.S. nuclear power and detailed the steps the U.S. government and nuclear industry can and must take to minimize these risks. These steps are pragmatic and doable—and their implementation is vital if nuclear power expands in the United States or worldwide. The risks of nuclear power can be grouped within four general categories:
The most recent shutdown was at Ohio’s Davis-Besse nuclear power plant in 2002. Concerned about potential safety problems, Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) staff wanted to shut down the reactor immediately. However, NRC managers heeded the economic pleas of the plant owner, and waited three months for a scheduled shutdown. Government researchers concluded that Davis-Besse was 150 to 230 days away from disaster when it was finally shut down.
The United States has strong nuclear power safety standards, but as these year-plus closures indicate, the NRC is not adequately enforcing its own regulations. The NRC’s poor safety culture is the main source of this problem. For example, a significant number of NRC staff members have reported feeling unable to raise safety concerns without fear of retaliation, and a large percentage of those staff members say they have suffered harassment or intimidation.
Sabotage and terrorist attacks. Despite having one of the world’s most well-developed regulatory systems for protection of nuclear facilities against sabotage and attack, the United States lacks adequate security standards to defend against credible threats. Quite simply, the NRC’s assumptions about potential attackers are unrealistically modest (see the sidebar at right). The NRC would ideally base its security standards solely on plausible threats to nuclear facilities; however, it has tried to avoid imposing high security costs on the nuclear power industry, and thus set weaker security requirements than justified.
Nuclear waste. The used fuel from reactors is highly radioactive and must be disposed of in such a way as to protect the environment from contamination and living organisms from exposure. A permanent underground repository—if properly sited and constructed—would provide the stability needed to isolate this waste for tens of thousands of years. However, a repository location must be chosen based on a high degree of scientific and technical consensus. Such a consensus does not now exist on the nation’s first proposed repository, in Yucca Mountain, NV.
Fortunately, there is no immediate need to begin operating a permanent repository, as spent fuel can be stored in dry casks (steel cylinders that are sealed to prevent leaks and encased in concrete) at reactor sites for at least 50 years. Dry casks present less of a hazard than spent fuel pools, but because they are currently stored out in the open they are vulnerable to attack by terrorists.
Nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism. An expansion of nuclear power could increase the risk that more nations or terrorists will acquire the material needed to build nuclear weapons. However, this need not be the case—if the United States and other nations make the right policy decisions about nuclear reactor fuel and the facilities that make it. In any event, nuclear power is only one factor that will affect this risk: many nations already have the capability to make nuclear weapons, and terrorists have a variety of potential sources for nuclear weapons and the materials to make them.
Most nuclear reactors in the world use fuel made from low-enriched uranium (LEU), which cannot be used to make nuclear weapons. However, the enrichment facilities used to make LEU can also be used to make highly enriched uranium (HEU)—which can be used to make nuclear weapons. Any nation with an enrichment plant (only a few countries have such facilities today) would have a leg up on building nuclear weapons.
The other nuclear weapons material is plutonium, a by-product of most nuclear reactors. Plutonium cannot currently be stolen from nuclear power plants because it is bound up in large, heavy, and highly radioactive spent fuel assemblies. The U.S. government, however, is proposing a plan to “reprocess” this waste to extract the plutonium and use it to make new nuclear fuel. Because plutonium is not highly radioactive, it can be handled without serious harm. Moreover, if the plutonium is no longer contained in a large, heavy object, it could be stolen by an insider or taken by force during routine transportation.
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What Price Safety?
It is possible to design a nuclear reactor with improved safety systems, but not without additional cost. New reactors could be designed to be safer than today’s plants, and much more resistant to sabotage and attack. For those designs still in the early stages of development, there is not enough information to judge whether this potential will be realized, though it is clear that any reactors designed to use plutonium-based fuels will increase the risk of nuclear terrorism and nuclear weapons proliferation. Unless the NRC requires new reactors to be safer, however, the EPR’s manufacturer might choose to remove some safety features to make it more economically competitive in the U.S. market. |
Such theft is made easier because commercial reprocessing facilities and fuel fabrication facilities handle many tons of separated plutonium in solution or powder form each year. And because of the inherent uncertainty in measuring solutions and powders, as many as tens or even hundreds of pounds of plutonium may be unaccounted for each year. A relatively simple nuclear weapon can be made with roughly 15 pounds of plutonium.
While plutonium can be used to make fuel for reactors, it is not necessary for nuclear power. Nor are there benefits to reprocessing: plutonium-based fuel is more expensive to produce than LEU fuel, and reprocessing nuclear waste would not reduce the amount of radioactive waste requiring disposal.
Minimizing the Risks
Nothing will affect the public’s willingness to accept nuclear power as much as a massive release of radiation due to a power plant meltdown or terrorist attack, or the death of hundreds of thousands due to the detonation of a nuclear weapon made with materials obtained from the nuclear power industry. There are clear, pragmatic steps the industry and the U.S. government should take to minimize these risks:
Build safer nuclear power plants. NRC policy currently stipulates that new reactors need only provide the same level of protection against accidents as today’s reactors. By taking the simple step of requiring new U.S. reactors to be significantly safer than existing ones, the NRC can make nuclear power safer (see the sidebar). Requiring safer reactors would eliminate any financial incentives for reactor manufacturers to reduce safety margins, and make these reactors competitive in the United States.
Improve government oversight. Because the NRC has proved itself unable to establish and maintain a good safety culture, Congress must intervene. It should require the NRC to do what the NRC requires of nuclear power plants that have a poor safety culture: bring in outside managers who can address the problem with a different perspective.
Increase protection against attackers. To ensure that nuclear power facilities can defend against credible terrorist threats, Congress should assign the responsibility for assessing these threats and setting defense requirements to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which already does so for all other important U.S. infrastructure and industries. In this case, the DHS will need to gain adequate expertise on nuclear reactors.
Ensure that nuclear power does not make it easier to obtain nuclear weapons materials. Terrorists currently cannot acquire such materials from U.S. nuclear power facilities, but this would change if the United States follows through on its plan to reprocess nuclear waste. The United States should therefore abandon this plan and instead reinstate a ban on reprocessing. And because reprocessing would allow other nations to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons, the United States should also take the lead in forging an indefinite global moratorium on reprocessing.
To further reduce the risk of nuclear proliferation, strict international controls should be placed on uranium enrichment facilities. These controls should not discriminate between nations that have nuclear weapons and those that do not.
Address the nuclear waste problem. The Department of Energy should prepare for the possibility that Yucca Mountain will not be licensed. By beginning to identify and study other potential sites for a geologic repository for spent nuclear fuel, the department can ensure that one will be built within the next several decades.
In the interim, the NRC should ensure that spent fuel stored in dry casks at nuclear power plants is adequately secured against attack. For example, the dry casks could be surrounded with an earthen berm to shield them from attacks.
The risks posed by climate change may turn out to be so grave that the United States and the world cannot afford to rule out nuclear power as one additional tool for curbing global warming. On the other hand, it may also turn out that nuclear power cannot be deployed on the scale needed to make a significant dent in worldwide emissions without resulting in unacceptably high safety and security risks. Either way, the government and the nuclear power industry must not delay in improving the safety and security of our nation’s nuclear reactors.
Lisbeth Gronlund is senior scientist and co-director of the Global Security Program.
