PERFECTLY UNCLEAR

Nuclear power stations are like stars that shine all day long. We shall sow them all over the land. They are perfectly safe!

— Mikail Styrikovich in Ogonyok, 1980

The plants have safe and reliable controls that are protected from any breakdown with three safety lines. The odds of meltdown are one in 10,000 years.

— Ukrainian energy minister in Soviet Life, 1986

I spent my mornings this week reading The Power of Nuclear: The rise, fall and return of our mightiest energy source. (Go get yourself twelve hard copies today and request it at school and your local library!) I was pointed to this text because it is newly published and said to offer an up-to-date, definitive, evidence-based accounting of what we know about nuclear energy.

But, just one more time, I was dismayed to find someone preaching to their own choir rather than attempting to win anyone over. (Win me over, damn it!) It’s another entry on the subject of nuclear power that disregards every argument I’ve heard and nearly every piece of counter-evidence available.

Though the work acknowledges more than most, it is quick and complete in its disregard, of all things, of the very real and lasting harms of nuclear catastrophes, as attested to by victims and their family members. This, of course, when it’s not disregarding leading researchers and their studies as well as all the publicly available reports and press that offer resounding refutations, or at least something significant worth considering. The book really just puts up strawman after strawman, phalanx after phalanx of them, and then — to everyone's tremendous shock, doubtless — proceeds to knock them all down with nothing more than a sentence or two…

The book sets out explaining how it relies upon several trusted works from the best possible sources. I’ve written about some of those and pointed out their significant flaws previously. For example, Our World in Data. I love that site and the team does good work generally but with nuclear they miss some critical details and point us to texts arriving prior to more current or holistic work. They also do this while ignoring entirely anything that isn’t perfectly direct and objective (such as all of the totally valid first- and second-hand accounts from survivors and their families or even pertinent details such as the funding governments continue delivering to the spouses of workers who died on site — which, for Ukraine alone, suggests a fatality number not less than 1000X the official total…) Right.

So, I don’t need to rehash all that. I also won’t bring up the specific examples of Chernobyl or Fukushima, which I’ve covered at length before and which the author basically says didn’t happen; or, if it did, it wasn’t actually all that bad. Though, it must be said, he rightfully and refreshingly spells out how forced relocations and much public catastrophizing by authorities and the press did tremendous harm. Instead of revisiting the source material or all the details of any specific nuclear catastrophes, I'll just look at one brief paragraph from a chapter on nuclear waste that I think highlights perfectly how misleading the book and its framing, language, and examples are.

THE QUOTE

Chapter 10, starting on page 215, is titled Hidden Treasure: What should we do with nuclear waste. After offering the example of Onkalo, Finland’s state-of-the-art, 21st century radioactive waste disposal solution (a hole in the ground), the author pleads with us that radioactive waste is effectively harmless, so harmless that it is entirely uninteresting. Actually, he goes a little further and tells us that if it weren’t for irrational, wack-job environmentalist types we would just be dumping all our nuclear waste in the sea, just as we used to and just as God (or Nature or the good people at the IAEA) always intended.

Then we’re offered the opinion, stated as empirical fact, that, regardless of its real or make-believe harmfulness, the world has accumulated extremely little nuclear waste over the decades; so not only is it harmless and uninteresting but it’s not something anyone anywhere should even spend time considering because, like common sense or nuclear energy, there’s so little of it to be found. We’re told, on page 222, “Nuclear waste is compact. As a result, it doesn’t take up much space.” Wow. The author then offers up the following for scale. A dime? No. A banana? No. An Olympic-sized swimming pool? No. The Empire State Building? No, none of the above. He tells us that “If we put together all the spent fuel that has been collected from nuclear reactors around the world since the 1950s … it would fit into a single football stadium. Within the chalk lines of the pitch it would form a block 4m (13ft) high”

So, what’s wrong with all that? (Aside from being hilarious. ‘The total volume of all nuclear waste is small and therefore not big, or, in fact, as some might say, rather little.’ Yowza!) Well, every part of it is a problem. Though the statement is technically mostly factual it is deeply misleading, extremely so and in every way possible.

TLDR

The author:

• Establishes the premise that there are far too few nuclear reactors in the world then tells us that we should consider them inherently safe because there's so little waste been produced (by so very few reactors)

• Confuses global “radioactive waste” inventories with “spent fuel” ones

• Gives us the wrong number

• Disregards almost all radioactive waste associated with nuclear power generation

• Misleads about the process and time associated with spent nuclear fuel use, storage, and disposal

• Dramatically inflates the timeframe of waste production to minimize the impact, adding at least 30 years or 70% to any sensible figure

• Provides a non-standard reference for waste volume, one with no fixed dimensions, for scale

• Fails to offer a relevant comparison

THE DEETS

Contradiction

What struck me first when reading this was how proponents of nuclear power commonly complain that virtually no new reactors have been built, particularly over the last 30 years (and how they want to see an energy revolution resulting in an explosion of new builds everywhere that will have them and as quickly as possible and at any cost.) That’s nearly the entire present refrain on nuclear. So, to my simple mind, any argument for how safe and good nuclear power is by noting how little waste there is — due to the total lack of historical production — seems like a funny start. Doesn’t it? Maybe that’s just me. Wouldn't every one of these people plunk down 5,000 more this instant if they had a magic wand? To me it sounds something like "We should trust Artificial Intelligence because it hasn't yet pulled planes from the sky or crashed the world economy and its shit visuals are getting better, according to the visually illiterate." If you don't think this framing is curious then ignore it.

What are we talking about?

The next thing worth noting are the wording and numbers on offer. The author starts by framing this about “nuclear waste” but then switches to “spent fuel” as a way to gauge the scale and impact of nuclear waste. That, from where I sit, is like starting a discussion about beverages and then kinda sneakily referencing only the artificially sweetened drinks produced by PepsiCo to imply the scale of global beverage consumption, or something. But I don’t think the author is trying to be sneaky here, not entirely. In some places I think he’s honestly confused. (I make the same errors all the time.)

So, the author validates the above numbers for the volume of “spent fuel” with a specific figure and a reference in an endnote. (I’ll never understand the one-liner endnote that gifts a simple number or citation. Just give me the damn number in-text or at least as a footnote...) The number found there is “29,000 cubic metres” and comes from page 50 of an IAEA report from 2022, titled Status and Trends in Spent Fuel and Radioactive Waste Management. Seems like a good source. And the number is indeed found there. Bold! Trouble is what this number represents. 

The authors gave us “...all the spent fuel that has been collected from nuclear reactors around the world since the 1950s.” Given that and the title of the chapter, I actually assumed we were talking about all the radioactive waste directly associated with the production of electricity at nuclear reactors. (Which still omits virtually all the pollution and waste that any total accounting would associate with nuclear power…) But that’s not what “29,000 cubic metres” is.

Where this number is found is in section six of the IAEA report, titled “Inventories.” Logical. This section is divided into five parts:

6.1. Data sources. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..43

6.2. Description of data aggregation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .44

6.3. Current inventories of spent fuel. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .46

6.4. Current inventories of radioactive waste. . . . . . . . . . . .49

6.5. Future forecasts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..52

As you can see, the paper differentiates between “spent fuel” and “radioactive waste.” And page 50 lands in the “Current inventories of radioactive waste” section — not under “spent fuel.” If you endeavour to go to the page, you find a graph labelled, “FIG. 19. Summary of reported global solid radioactive waste inventories (m^3). HLW [high-level waste] storage volume is 29 000 m^3.” That’s the author’s number.

The most minor issue is that “radioactive waste” isn’t “spent fuel.” As the report notes of “radioactive waste”: 

During the operation of a reactor, different types of radioactive waste are generated. This waste includes filters used in water and air treatment, worn out components and industrial waste that has become contaminated with radioactive substances. This waste has to be conditioned, packaged and stored prior to its disposal. Most of this waste (by volume) has low levels of radioactivity (VLLW [very low-level waste] or LLW [low-level waste]). At the end of its operating life, a reactor is shut down and eventually dismantled. During dismantling, contaminated and activated components are separated, treated and if necessary managed as radioactive waste. The largest volumes of radioactive waste generated are in the VLLW or LLW classes. Smaller volumes of ILW [intermediate-level waste] are also generated. The majority of the waste (by volume) from dismantling is, however, not radioactive and can be handled as industrial waste, in accordance with the country’s regulations. (p13)

Okay. And the report differentiates those materials from “spent fuel”, explaining:

After its use in a reactor, spent fuel is highly radioactive, emits significant radiation and heat, and is typically transferred to wet storage in a fuel pool for several years. After this period (sometimes referred to as a cooling period), the spent fuel can be safely transferred to storage facilities, either wet or dry, or reprocessing facilities. The length of time that spent fuel stays in various types of storage depends on its characteristics and intended disposition. For example, spent fuel intended to be reprocessed may spend very little time in storage (a few years), while spent fuel intended for direct disposal may spend several decades in storage. (p14)

So the author is under the wrong category if what he wants to talk about is “spent fuel.” If that wasn’t bad enough, notice that the author is laser focussed on only the tiny fraction of radioactive waste from nuclear power generation that is both “solid” and “high-level”. Without clearly specifying, the author is ignoring all of the huge volumes of requisite liquid waste, which is the overwhelming majority of the waste associated with spent fuel and nuclear power production, as I understand from the report he offers. And then he pairs that with disregarding the overwhelming volume of radioactive waste that isn’t the very most radioactive and falls below the “high-level” threshold. Well, what’s wrong with that? 

That reads to me as a systematic disregard for what is effectively the entire problem. Certainly the IAEA, even in the author’s chosen report, agrees with me. They don’t imply anywhere that it’s only the high-level waste that is the stuff needing serious consideration, careful handling and containment, and long periods of time for reduction in radioactivity, proper decontamination, and disposal. 

On page 10 of the IAEA report, for example, dealing with radioactive waste classifications, they spell out that what is termed “very short-lived waste,” — waste falling into the lowest inclusion criteria — is “Waste that can be stored for decay over a limited period of up to a few years and subsequently cleared … for uncontrolled disposal, use or discharge.” Right. So the stuff that we’re least concerned about may need to be specially stored, maybe for “a few years”, to allow for sufficient decay in radioactivity before being considered benign. (Of course, they don’t spell out what they mean by “a few” Three? Nine? 50 or 100 would be a small number of years relative to the 10,000 required for higher level radioactive waste… Right.

As for liquid waste, on page 51 of the IAEA report, they spell out that, “While most States process liquid radioactive waste into solid form within a short time of it being generated, a few — notably, the USA and the Russian Federation — have large volumes of liquid waste in long term storage.” What are “large volumes”? On the following page they tell us, “The volume of liquids to be processed is very high, in the range of 60 million m^3, including 6.7 million m^3 of high level liquids, located mainly in the Russian Federation and in the USA. The volume of liquid waste that has been disposed of by injection into deep wells, based on data provided in the National Profiles of the Russian Federation and the USA, is around 62 million m^3.”

What am I missing here? Even just looking at the “high-level” liquid waste (still ignoring virtually all the radioactive waste produced by nuclear reactors), you’re talking about an accumulation of many  millions of cubic metres needing to be dealt with. This is hundreds of times more, a whole different order of magnitude greater, than the volume of “high-level” waste on offer from the author.

If you wanted to talk about all “solid radioactive waste,” (ignoring the liquid but capturing all the contaminated material of all levels of radioactivity needing to be kept, treated, and/or specially disposed) the IAEA report begins with an introductory summary spelling out how “The current total global inventory of solid radioactive waste is approximately 38 million m^3...” Right. So, again, “29,000” and “38,000,000” are, to me, as different as two numbers can be...

And what if you’re just trying to be sensible and want to talk about estimating the radioactive waste from nuclear reactors, which is what I assumed the chapter was about? (Still ignoring all the waste and pollution associated with uranium and plutonium mining, shipping, and processing or the building and decommissioning of power plants. Oh yeah, and the contamination resulting from mishaps at power plants and nuclear waste facilities that spread across entire districts, states, countries, and continents— you know, some of the world’s radioactive waste...) Well, then you would add 62 million for the liquid waste to the 38 million estimate for solid waste, landing you in the 100,000,000 cubic metre range… Right.

So what is that, for scale? If you wanted to put all that waste into a football stadium (American football), as similar to the author’s proposal, well, you couldn’t. AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, (the largest in the league by volume), would only take about 1.3 million cubic meters. And all of the professional football stadiums in all of the United States only number 32. You’d need something like 80 to do the job (So like one in every state and two or three in the biggest states.) To think of it another way, all of that radioactive waste would fill perhaps 500 supertankers, the largest sea-going craft ever constructed; meaning you could park one giant supertanker of radioactive waste in every city in Canada, the United States, and Mexico — and still have one left over for every city you can name in Europe. Is that volume a little? Or, if you prefer, this volume amounts to 40,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools — which, if laid out in a straight line from end to end, would allow you and nine competitors to swim in a pool of toxic waste stretching roughly from Vancouver to Seattle (Berlin to Dresden, Beirut to Tel Aviv, or Tokyo to Hamamatsu…) Freestyle or butterfly, that seems like a lot of toxic waste to get through. —but we’ll return to this scale comparison in a second. 

Timeline

Pretend we agree about what we’re talking about and the volume. From there go and look at the 75-year timeline the author presents: “since the 1950s.” The author knows very well that very few nuclear reactors were built or came online in the first decade and a half after we first split the atom, so through the 1950s. We all agree that the first reactor came into being in 1954 and by 1957 the whole world only had three more built, turned on, and connected to the energy grid.

Over the following decade, we built many more reactors and by 1970 there were 85 in existence. However, still almost no spent fuel waste (or “radioactive waste”) had been produced in that time. In the next two decades, by 1990 (and despite Chernobyl), we wound up with 391 functioning nuclear reactors. Those took us from generating around 500 terawatt hours of nuclear energy globally at the end of the 1970s up to 2,000 tWh in 1990). And yet, as the author would decry, between then and now, over thirty years, the rate of reactor builds stalled. The planet added only another 51 reactors, to a total of 440, generating only an additional 700 tWh of annual global nuclear energy. So what am I getting at? 

Well, to my eye, what is framed as 75 years of nuclear waste production looks like far less, if we were trying to be honest. Add to the above picture what we learned about radioactive waste and spent fuel. Nuclear fuel rods take years to go from fuel to waste (either stored or finally disposed of but out of the reactor core.) We all know, certainly the author knows, nuclear fuel rods aren’t quickly burned through, removed from a reactor, and tossed out, like a battery from your flashlight or a log converting from wood to ash in an hour in your fireplace. Right. As the IAEA explains in Storage and Disposal of Spent Fuel and High Level Radioactive Waste:

The useful life of a fuel element in the core of an operating reactor is usually 3–7 years. By the time it is removed from the core it is highly radioactive and generates both heat and radiation, primarily gamma radiation and neutrons. The fuel elements are therefore handled and stored under water, which provides both the necessary cooling and necessary radiation shielding. Over time both the radioactivity and the cooling requirements decrease. The minimum period for storing spent fuel under water is 9–12 months, after which cooling requirements have usually dropped enough that dry storage can be considered. Shielding requirements, however, remain for thousands of years. (p1)

So you’ve gotta cut an unknown period, maybe a decade, from both the start and the end of this 75-year timeline the author proposes. But it’s worse than that. 

If you go back to the source cited by the author, the IAEA report, you’ll find that, though the report was published in 2022, that’s not when the numbers were gathered. As they clearly spell out, “Different reporting dates will affect the accuracy of a ‘snapshot’ for a given date. However, most of the reporting dates are within a year or two of the selected reference date for this publication (31 December 2016).” 

That being so, it’s safe to say that what’s presented (“all the spent fuel that has been collected from nuclear reactors around the world since the 1950s” or, to paraphrase, “75 years of waste”) is at most 1965 to 2009 or maybe 2013 (2016 minus “3-7 years”), or about 45-ish years. So, drastically less time than presented. 

Why does that matter? Well (aside from being inflated by 70%, which seems pretty drastic), because the author wants you to divide his “29,000 cubic metres” of radioactive waste by 75 years (and then believe what you have there is a very small number.) I want you to see that all of that is fraudulent and that I think you should divide 100,000,000 cubic metres by 45 and see just how enormous that number is. If you don’t find my argument compelling or don’t feel the author is being so very fraudulent then just look at his scale.

Scale

The author, very weirdly, gives us “a single football stadium” to think about. Of course, he doesn’t tell us if he means NFL or FIFA. But then, just as weirdly, he clarifies that he’s not at all talking about the volume of a sports stadium (which is exactly what I thought we were talking about); instead, he wants us to think of the playing surface and a 4m high block of nuclear waste the width and length of that [unknown game’s] playing surface. What? Why not a more standard metaphor? Why not just tell us what you mean? Why send us to an endnote?

You do have to go to the endnote to find that he spells out what he means by “a football field”. And he doesn’t mean anything anyone means by “football field”, whether you’re in Boston or Barcelona. He means exactly “105 x 68m (340 x 220ft).” What? I had to look up what that was. An NFL “football field” which, is commonly used as a unit of measure, and when it is that's almost always understood as “100 yards long” (so excluding the endzones), making the “football field” 91.44 x 48.8m. Nothing like the above number and not what he means. And it’s not that same “football field” inclusive of the endzones: which would make it 109.7 x 48.8m. So what he means is a “soccer field”, but not ANY soccer field because, just like baseball, according to FIFA rules, there's no standard field dimensions. Instead, regulation permits a broad spectrum of lengths and widths ranging between 100.6 and 109.7m long and 64 and 73.2m wide). In this way, a “football field” for scale is a lot like a “root vegetable” or "car" for scale and tells us next to nothing.

Is there any doubt you would only do this if you were trying to be vague? (And why no picture or diagram?) I mean, why not “an Air Jordan filled with almond butter towering to the median distance to the moon from the peak of Everest”? My mind’s eye and mind’s scale can resolve this with the same ease as a non-standard “football field”, but only the play space, and to a height of 4 metres… Gah!

Little? Compared to what?

So to figure out if even the author’s proposed volume “29,000 cubic meters” (what I consider not only fraudulent but excluding in effect all the radioactive waste) is a small amount of waste, let’s consider something else we mine. How about gold? Gold is a good comparison to uranium for many reasons but perhaps best because it has a very similar mass density to uranium: gold weighs 19.3 grams per cubic centimeter and uranium is 19.05 g/cm3. 

The critical difference between the two resources is that gold is a substance humans have been seeking out and digging up for not less than 10,000 years. (There are grave sites in modern-day Bulgaria, at the Varna Necropolis dated to approximately 4500 BC containing the oldest examples we have. These are intricate gold works like necklaces of gold beads, a polished axe with gold-wrapped handle, gold appliqué cow figures, and a gold penis sheath. Clearly these were not anywhere near humanity’s first attempt at mining, processing, and working the metal but are closer to something you might find in a craft market today. Right.) And, unlike uranium, we really want to get at gold. We want to get at all of it. And we can and have had the tools and desire, and lay persons can freely go out and do so, and have, for basically all of human civilization and across countless civilizations around the world.

So how much gold have humans dug up and processed across the planet over those many thousands of years? Well, due to its value we actually have a pretty good estimate for that. Roughly 200,000 metric tons of gold (or 10,350 cubic metres) have been mined to date. 

This means that from long before ancient Egypt, Sumeria, and China, since long before the earliest known writing, all humans have pulled from the earth gold to a volume just 35% that of the highly radioactive solid waste produced (by virtually no one in a handful of countries) at nuclear reactors just in my lifetime… As such, it’s hard for me to see how this volume, 29,000 cubic meters, is effectively nothing, as it is presented.

...and I would ask, just once again, who is trying to have a real discussion about any of this? And where do I find them?