[May 5, 2008 / No. 1337]

Greenpeace Founder's Support of Nuclear Power: Now THERE's an Idea

Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore has been traveling the country lately, delighting opponents of his old environmental group by advocating for nuclear power development. That's quite a switch for a guy who founded Greenpeace in the 1970s to oppose U.S. nuclear testing -- and save the whales, too, of course.

Moore left Greenpeace in 1986, which means he was still with the group when it firmly cemented its reputation for whacky demonstrations -- allegedly in support of environmental causes -- that actually did more harm than good and helped give environmentalists a bad name.

Since 2006, he has been co-chairman of the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, an organization that supports nuclear-energy development.

In late April, Moore was in Idaho, where he told the Boise Metro Chamber of Commerce that while he doesn't believe there is proof that humans are behind global warming, the possibility that fossil fuels are a primary cause is sufficient reason to phase out coal-fired generation and start building more nuclear plants. According to an April 24 report in The Idaho Statesman, Moore said we'll need to build hundreds of nuclear power plants over the next century, because there won't be enough wind, solar, hydroelectric or other renewable energy sources to meet future demand.

I have a hard time seeing Moore as a credible spokesman for anything. My dealings with Greenpeace as a reporter back in its early years were sour enough that I still don't trust anyone who was affiliated with the group. (When I was a reporter at a Seattle radio station, the Greenpeace folks were so aggressive at self-promotion and arrogant in telling us what we should cover as news that we pretty much stopped taking their calls and recycled their news releases for scratch paper.) So the fact that Greenpeace's founder is now calling for a resurgence in nuclear power development is a good reason for the utility industry to go in the opposite direction.

Yes, it's true that nuclear power plants emit no greenhouse gases, but that doesn't make them clean by any stretch. To argue so is to ignore the elephant in the room -- the issue of nuclear waste disposal. Until we come up with an acceptable, viable and realistic solution to storing the spent fuel rods and other radioactive garbage from these power plants, we have no business building more of them. In the Pacific Northwest alone, the cumulative spent nuclear fuel being stored at power plants is 2,008 MTU (metric tons of uranium); add in the stuff at Hanford and INEL and it comes to 11,207 MTU. If you also count California and Arizona, the total climbs to 16,047 MTU -- all with no place to go.

Nuclear power supporters claim the technology is there -- that we know how to permanently and safely store these materials. But technology isn't the main issue; it's our inability, as a nation, to come to any agreement on where to site a so-called "permanent" waste storage facility. After reviewing the history of our attempts to deal with this issue, I don't think we'll ever resolve it.

We have been fighting about this for close to 50 years -- almost since the world's first large-scale commercial nuclear power plant came on line in December 1957, in Shippingport, Penn. And whatever progress made has been one step forward, two steps back. In the early 1960s, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) considered using a salt mine in Kansas to store spent nuclear fuel from the nation's growing number of nuclear power plants, but the site was full of abandoned oil and gas exploration boreholes.

By 1971, 22 commercial nuclear power plants were on line in the United States, but we still had nowhere to put spent nuclear fuel. In 1975, the Energy Research and Development Administration, which replaced the AEC, conducted a multiple-site survey in 36 states, focusing on buried salt deposits and federal nuclear facility sites -- but the scope of that effort was reduced due to decreased funding and political opposition from states (the NIMBY factor at the state level).

By 1979 -- the year of the worst accident in U.S. commercial reactor history, at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Penn. -- the number of licensed reactors had grown to 72. Spent fuel rods from those plants were for the most part being stored on-site, in cooling ponds.

In 1980, a Department of Energy EIS determined that deep geologic disposal would be the preferred alternative for permanent nuclear waste disposal, which led to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 (NWPA). The act established a repository site screening process that would develop two repositories to assure regional equity, and aimed to start waste disposal at a site in 1998.

By 1983, DOE had named nine potential repository sites in six states. But critics claimed these were sites recycled from the 1975 search, and that the NWPA required DOE to do a new screening process rather than use sites considered prior to passage of the NWPA.

It was 1986 -- the year of the Chernobyl nuclear accident (April 26) -- before DOE narrowed it down to a requisite three sites for more detailed investigation, with the goal of selecting one final site for licensing. DOE indefinitely postponed the second repository siting program, and in 1987 Congress amended the NWPA to designate Yucca Mountain, Nev., as the sole repository site.

By 1990, there were 110 nuclear power plants in the United States.

Fast forward to January 1998, the NWPA deadline for DOE's repository to start accepting waste. Both states and the nuclear industry have since filed lawsuits over the missed deadline, and legislation that would put an interim storage facility on the Nevada test site died in Congress. The following December, DOE released its Yucca Mountain Viability Assessment, which called the site "viable" but said much work still had to be done before the site could be officially recommended in 2001.

That actually didn't happen until 2002. President George W. Bush approved the DOE's recommendation, and Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn exercised the state's right to veto the Yucca Mountain project. Congress overturned Guinn's veto, and President Bush officially designated Yucca Mountain as the nation's nuclear waste repository site. The state of Nevada followed up by filing major lawsuits against DOE, NRC, Bush, and DOE then-Secretary Spencer Abraham.

In 2004 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit threw out the EPA's 10,000-year radiation standard for Yucca Mountain, but dismissed Nevada's other lawsuits.

So, here we are, in 2008, when we have The Las Vegas Review-Journal reporting on Feb. 19, "Long-range prospects for a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain are clouded because there is no fix in sight for budget shortfalls plaguing the Nevada program, a Department of Energy official said."

According to the article, Ward Sproat -- director of the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management -- said DOE has abandoned its "best achievable" goal of having a repository opened by 2017, and DOE is now reluctant to set a new target.

"DOE officials" also reported, The Review-Journal says, that in time, more than $1 billion will be needed annually for construction.

Meanwhile, Washington state has gone so far as to consider filing a lawsuit to compel the Department of Energy -- yes, that same DOE referenced above -- to force the government to clean up the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. According to The Tri-City Herald (4/4/2008), that's less likely now, as negotiations with the state, DOE and EPA are to resume in May. (Stay tuned.)

Fifty-three million gallons of waste are still stored at Hanford in underground tanks -- some of them single-sided tanks that started leaking back in the 1970s. As part of its cleanup work, DOE is to build a $12.2-billion vitrification plant at Hanford to treat the radioactive waste. Although the plant is required to begin treating waste in 2011, DOE has said the full plant may not be operating until 2018, The Herald reported.

So, the spent fuel from existing nuclear power plants is being stored on site and in dry storage at 46 independent spent-fuel storage locations around the country. The Yucca Mountain site is nowhere close to completion, and is still mired in lawsuits and public opposition. DOE has yet to fulfill its obligations to clean up nuclear waste at the Hanford Reservation -- stuff that has been there since the Second World War.

And we're supposed to build MORE nuclear power plants?

And then there's the cost of new plant construction, with forecasts ranging from $2.4 billion to $14 billion per plant -- too much wiggle room for my comfort. Then there's the fact that both Washington and Oregon have laws that effectively block new nuclear development. And surely not everyone has forgotten the $2.25-billion WPPSS bond default from the last time the region tried to go nuclear.

Reviving nuclear power development as a solution to the utility industry's CO₂ problems is an irrational, irresponsible idea. It should be given about the same credibility as a Greenpeace idea [Jude Noland].