Sprol

Today was the first day that I actually thought about the source of the electricity that powers the laptop I use to write this story. Is your web browser nuclear powered? You won’t find out in the About box.

If you’re like me you have no idea. Ever since some of us have been alive, the good stuff comes out of that wall socket all of the time. The juice flows. Just pay that bill.

Odds are nuclear fission is not a major source of the energy that you consume in an average day, yet that doesn’t make the discussion of its possible impact on your quality of life any less important. Truthfully, it is not only the quality of your life that is in question; it is the very future of such life.

What you are looking at is the LaSalle Nuclear Reactor located in Seneca, Illinois- from an effective altitude of 81 miles above sea level.

Looks harmless enough, like some sort of abstract art. hanging on a clean wall in an aluminum clad museum, or one of Larry Ellison’s houses.

LaSalle is the 34th largest nuclear reactor in the country. One of 13 reactors in Illinois. By some estimates if Illinois were a separate country it would rank seventh or eighth in the world in nuclear capacity.

On top of creating approximately 20% of the state’s nuclear energy The LaSalle plant has become known as a crucial safety concern. In the neighborhood of nuclear reactors, this is akin to being the bad house on the block.

In 1996, LaSalle was ranked #12 on the Public Citizen’s list of the “25 Worst Nuclear Reactors in the Nation.” LaSalle’s dismal safety ranking was not without its warnings. In November of 1992, the governor of Illinois was notified that all of the state’s nuclear reactors, LaSalle included, were using a fire-retardant barrier that has been proven not to work. Despite such formal notification the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has still not required replacing these necessary fire barriers.

Imagine what else they’re not fixing.

Some good friends of mine are renovating an old house. There are surprises involved, some good and some not so good.

When you are renovating an old nuclear facility, the surprises are all bad.

The NRC placed LaSalle on its “adversely trending” list. The list is meant to identify plants with deteriorating conditions. LaSalle is also identified as having high worker radiation exposure. Additionally, Commonwealth Edison, which licenses the LaSalle plant, has been fined numerous times for safety violations and worker horseplay.

These problems are not unique to LaSalle. Nuclear reactors are proving to be much more dangerous than its industry would like for you to believe. In 1985 Congress heard testimony from the NRC itself that the “probability of a severe nuclear accident in this country over the next 20 years involving large releases of radioactive materials was roughly 45%.” I don’t know about you, but that sounds like quite a gamble. Furthermore the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has examined the way that the NRC conducts its risk assessments and has found their methods “seriously flawed.”

In effect, the NRC has been calculating risk on the assumption that everything will run perfectly as it should. There will be no human error, safety violations, equipment malfunctions, or engineering miscalculations. Of course if everything always ran perfectly there would be no use for risk calculations at all as there would be no risk.

Accurate calculations would place the risk of a US nuclear accident at a significantly higher level.

In addition to being extremely unsafe and unstable nuclear power in current commercial form is uneconomical. Nuclear power has cost the US over $492 billion. Since 1950 nuclear power has received over $97 billion in subsidies from the federal government. These subsidies include deferred taxes and lower limits on liability.

You would think that nuclear power must somehow be cheaper to the consumer in order to justify this level of federal spending. It isn’t. Commonwealth Edison’s customers pay the highest electric bills in the region.

If you’re like me, you might have thought that nuclear power is a necessity. You may even assume that United States of America, the largest consumer of power in the world, depends on nuclear power to supply a bulk of its energy.

No. Nuclear power supplies approximately 20% of US electricity supply. However, numerous studies have placed the level of wasted electricity due to inefficiency somewhere between 25-44% of all total electricity. If investment is made to increase efficiency, the US could conserve the equivalent output of 145-210 nuclear reactors. That is more than double the amount of reactors that are currently in use.

Unfortunately, there is another problem with nuclear reactors, if of course you need the possibility of just one more disaster to turn you off of nuclear power. The problem, which has been highly publicized as of recent, is the threat of terrorist activities aimed at nuclear plants.

Nearly four years after the terrorist attacks of September 11th there are still no regulations that address the threat a commercial airliner may pose to the public if it came into contact with a nuclear reactor. Worse than “crossing the streams.”

In fact the government has failed to adequately address any type of large scaled terrorist attack to its numerable nuclear reactors. The NRC maintains that such attacks are “improbable,” or very unlikely at the least, which of course they are. Most Americans believed the same before September 11th.

The first commerical nuclear plants were built like the engines of huge nuclear submarines. Maybe they had the right idea, and a vehicle is the best way to make nuclear power. When the plant gets too old, scuttle it over the Marinas trench. Didn’t the film Godzilla start like that?

Nuclear plants are enormous weapons capable of being used by people desiring to economically bankrupt the U.S., cause irreparable environmental damage, and kill massive amounts of people. After previously publishing important design elements to nuclear plants the government is now reconsidering the brilliance of such moves and increasing security in order to limit access to nuclear reactors. But they are easy to spot.

Security measures often include extra guards, obtrusive shrubbery, and more demanding background checks of nuclear plant employees. However, these tactics are nothing more than what the average tall office building has been doing since 2001.

In an opinion paper dated October of 2001, referring to the safety of nuclear plants, Ralph Nader states that “If these facilities can’t be made secure, the federal government has no choice but to shut down the plants. The risk is too great to do otherwise.” Nader may not be famous for moderate opinions, but no one can deny that he speaks with public safety in mind.

Is the risk to great? What do you think should be done?

Sources:
Nuclear Energy Information Service
Union of Concerned Scientists
Energy Information Administration-Illinois State
Nuclear Tourist
washingtonpost.com. Vedantam, Shankar. “Nuclear Plants are Still Vulnerable, Panal Says”
Public Interest-Critical Mass Energy Project
The Nader Page