The Nuclear Power Deception
Footnotes
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Footnotes for Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 1. Strauss 1954. 2. Komanoff and Roelofs 1992, p. 23. 3. Strauss 1954. 4. AEC 1948, p. 43. 5. Nucleonics 1953, p. 49. 6. Suits 1951. The speech was given in December 1950 and printed in February 1951 in Nucleonics. Paragraph breaks not shown here. For paragraph breaks in the quote, see Chapter 3, p. 50. 7. Murray 1953c. 8. Cole 1953. 9. Ott 1953. 10. Paley Commission 1952, Vol. IV, p. 220. 11. Asselstine 1986. 12. Golay 1993, p. 1-4. 13. quoted in Demaree 1970, p. 93. 14. The phrase "Energy for Peace" was coined by George Perkovich of the W.Alton Jones Foundation. 15. Alvin Weinberg, 1981 interview, quoted in Ford 1982, p. 25. 16. Strauss 1954 17. David Dietz quoted in Ford 1982; pp. 30-31. 18. Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish chemist, calculated in 1896 that a doubling of carbon dioxide levels could increase the Earth's temperature by 4 to 6 degrees Celsius. Even before that, in 1827, the eminent French mathematician and physicist, Jean Baptiste Fourier, warned that industrial activities may affect the Earth's climate. For a historical account of scientific investigations of climate change see Falk and Brownlow 1989. However, the threat to the Earth's ecosystems and to society posed by the build-up of greenhouse gases, of which carbon dioxide is the most important one, did not become an important global policy issue until the 1980s. 19. Yergin 1991 discusses these issues at length. See for instance pp. 308-323 for the prelude to Pearl Harbor. The United States moved its Pacific fleet from its southern California base to Pearl Harbor in 1940 partly to deter Japanese demands for more Indonesian oil. 20. See Appendix for details of how the calculation is done. The symbol E in Einstein's equation stands for energy, m for mass, and c for the speed of light. The symbol c2, pronounced "c-squared," stands for the speed of light multiplied by itself. A gram is about one-thirtieth of an ounce. A pair of gold earring studs typically weighs a few grams. There are one million grams in a metric ton, which is about 10 percent larger than a U.S. ton of 2,000 pounds. A U.S. ton is also called a short ton. 21. Trace amounts of plutonium occur in nature but they are of no practical significance. 22. For one description of the military aspects of this "romance with the atom," a phrase coined by Robert Alvarez, see Makhijani et al., eds. 1995, Chapters 1 and 6. 23. Electricity can be generated in other ways, as for instance by direct conversion of chemical reactions to electricity in a battery. But such methods are very expensive and so far uneconomical for centralized, large-scale power stations. 24. Two fissile isotopes of plutonium are created in nuclear reactors: plutonium-239, which is the bulk of the plutonium, and plutonium-241. The other two isotopes of plutonium created in reactors in significant quantities are fissionable but not fissile. They are plutonium-240 and plutonium-242. 25. Uranium ores can have far higher uranium concentration, as much as 10 percent or higher, but they are rare. Ores containing less than 0.2 percent uranium could be mined if uranium prices were higher, as they were in the early 1980s. Residues from refining of gold and copper, which contain as little as 0.01 percent uranium, can be processed to yield uranium as a by-product. 26. The various steps to extract and refine uranium, along with the environmental consequences of each step are described in Makhijani et al., eds. 1995, Chapter 3. 27. Pure U3O8 is actually a black compound. Yellow cake derives its yellow appearance from the presence of ammonium diuranate in the final product. 28. Lamarsh 1983, p. 119. 29. Reactors that use thorium-232 as the raw material to produce fissile uranium-233 are also possible, but no significant commercial reactors of this type have been built. 30. See TMI Commission 1979 for an account of the accident. 31 See Lamarsh 1983, pp. 280-285. 32. Reactor control in water moderated and cooled reactors can also be accomplished chemically by adding a neutron absorbing material, generally boric acid, to the water. This kind of control is called chemical shim. It is not used by itself, but to supplement the control achieved by use of control rods. 33. Lamarsh 1983, p. 286. Reactivity relative to the fraction of delayed neutrons is measured in "dollars" and "cents." One dollar of reactivity occurs when the reactivity is equal to the proportion of delayed neutrons, at which stage the reactor is prompt critical. Evidently, to control the reactor, the reactivity must be kept below one dollar, which is why reactivity for normal reactor operation is measured in cents, with one cent being one-hundredth of the reactivity at prompt criticality. 34. This estimate is calculated as follows: With 3.3 percent enriched uranium fuel, after 30,000 megawatt days of burn-up, the spent fuel contains about 3.3 percent fission products and about 1 percent uranium-235. The energy release per fission for uranium-235 and plutonium-239 is about the same. Since about 1 out of every 3.3 fissions is plutonium (the rest being uranium-235), about 1/3.3, or 30 percent of the energy comes from plutonium. The fraction of energy from plutonium will vary with fuel enrichment and burn-up. Relative abundance data are from Benedict et al. 1981, Figure 3.3, p. 88. 35. Benedict et al. 1981, p. 378. 36. Sachs 1995, p. 33.
Footnotes for Chapter 7 173 Johansson et al., eds. 1993, p. 9. 174 Greenwald 1991. 175 NPOC 1990. The Nuclear Power Oversight Committee includes representatives of nuclear utilities (Commonwealth Edison Company and Duke Power Company), nuclear industry groups (EPRI, EEI, ANEC, INPO, U.S. CEA, and NUMARC), the major nuclear vendors GE and Westinghouse, as well as power plant construction firms (Bechtel, ABB, and Combustion Engineering). 176 NEI 1995. 177 Faltermayer 1988, p. 105. 178 Jaffe 1981, p. 45. 179 UCS 1990, pp. 1-6, 1-7. 180 Asselstine 1986. 181 U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, "Policy Statement on Severe Reactor Accidents Regarding Future Designs and Existing Plants," Federal Register, Vol. 50, p. 32138 (August 8, 1985), as cited in UCS 1990, p. 1-3. 182 NPOC 1990, p. I-2. 183 NPOC 1990, p. I-2 184 As quoted in Nucleonics Week 1989, p. 10. 185 Lidsky 1988, p. 226. 186 UCS 1990, p. 2-11. 187 As listed in UCS 1990, pp. 2-11 and 2-12. 188 In late January 1996, the first ABWR was commissioned and connected to the electricity grid in Japan. See Nuclear Energy Insight96, Nuclear Energy Institute, Washington, D.C., February 1996, p. 1. 189 UCS 1990, p. 2-12. 190 NEI 1998. 191 UCS 1990, p. 2-12. 192 NPOC 1990, p. I-2. 193 Nucleonics Week 1989, p. 3-4. 194 Nucleonics Week 1989, p. 6. 195 NEI 1998. 196 It has also been proposed that an MHTGR design could operate using a direct-cycle gas turbine instead of a steam generator system. With a direct-cycle gas turbine, the hot helium gas from the reactor core directly drives a turbine, with no water-to-steam cycle involved at all (Lidsky 1986). 197 UCS 1990, p. 5-8, citing NRC's Graybook (NUREG-0020). 198 GA (undated), p. 1. 199 UCS 1990, pp. 2-28 and 2-29. 200 As summarized in UCS 1990, p. 2-33. 201 Lidsky 1987. 202 UCS 1990. 203 Mann 1955. 204 UCS 1990, p. 3-5. 205 P.M. Williams, T.L. King, and J.N. Wilson, Draft Preapplication Safety Evaluation Report for the Modular High-Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor, NUREG-1338, NRC Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research, March 1989, p. 4-21, as cited in UCS 1990, p. 3-5. 206 UCS 1990, fn. 3-11, pp. 3-5 and 3-6. 207 ACRS letter dated 13 October 1988 from William Kerr (Chair, ACRS) to Lando Zech, (Chair, NRC), "Preapplication Safety Evaluation Report for the MHTGR," at 4, as cited in UCS 1990, p. 3-53. 208 F.A. Silady, et. al., "Safety and Licensing of the MHTGR," Nuclear Engineering and Design, vol. 109, 1988, pp. 278-279, as cited in UCS 1990, p. 3-55. 209 Pigford 1996. 210 UCS 1990, p. 3-52. 211 UCS 1990, p. 3-52. 212 NRC memo (9 September 1987) from Robert A. Erickson to Thomas L. King, "Advanced Reactor Safeguards Reviews," as cited in UCS 1990, p. 3-46. 213 Lidsky 1986. 214 UCS 1990, p. 3-5. 215 C.W. Forsberg et al., Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Proposed and Existing Passive and Inherent Safety-Related Structures, Systems, and Components (Building Blocks) for Advanced Light-Water Reactors, ORNL-6554, October 1989, pp. 1-2, as cited in UCS 1990, p. 3-5. 216 As reported in Nucleonics Week 1989, p. 9. 217 Besides Medvedev 1990, Chapter 1, see also NRC 1987, Chapter 4, for a description of the details of the reactor accident and events leading up to it. For interviews with workers who were in the plant at the time of the accident and experienced some of its effects, see Chernousenko 1991, Chapter 2. 218 NRC 1987, Table 6.3, page 6-6. The radioactivity release figures in this table do not match up with those in Table 6.2, page 6-4. The latter total, also supposedly decay-corrected, is 50 million curies, given by day of release, rather than broken down by radionuclide. Both tables give figures as calculated by Soviet authorities and presented by them to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). 219 IPPNW and IEER 1992, Chapter 4. 220 Medvedev 1990, pp. 77-78. The rest of the section on Chernobyl is based on this source, unless otherwise mentioned. 221 Medvedev 1990, p. 78. 222 Cesium-134 and cesium-137 have half-lives of about 2 years and 30 years, respectively. 223 Medvedev 1990, p. 111. 224 Medvedev 1990, p. 110. 225 Medvedev 1990, p. 116. 226 For a discussion of cancer risk factors per unit of radiation, see Makhijani et al., eds. 1995, pp. 19-21 and 72-74. 227 Baverstock et al. 1992; and Likhtarev et al. 1995. 228 Medvedev 1990, p. 165. 229 Grigory Medvedev, quoted in (Zhores) Medvedev 1990, pp. 167-168. 230 Alfven 1972. |
Institute for Energy and Environmental Research