Beyond Nuclear International

But war is not the only risk at besieged nuclear plant

By Vladimir Slivyak

(Note: This text below a Deepl translation from the Russian of an opinion piece in the Moscow Times. The Russian version is also republished on Beyond Nuclear International.)

A potential worldwide nuclear accident at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is back on the agenda. The UN and the IAEA, without addressing any of the parties to the conflict directly, are pleading for an end to the shelling of the nuclear plant. According to international media reports, the Russian army has deployed not only troops but also weapons on the territory of the plant.

How bad is the situation?

Only a nuclear catastrophe, like the one at Chernobyl, can be worse. Let me remind you that one reactor exploded then. The radioactive cloud moved in such a way that not only parts of the present-day Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, but also many countries in Europe became contaminated. Part of the radiation reached Africa and even North America.

There are six reactors at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.

Is a major accident possible? Quite possible. It is enough to de-energize the plant by destroying the power lines — and these lines are already being shot at. The emergency generators, of course, will be able to supply power to the plant for some time, as long as they are in good order, but it’s a matter of hours.

I recall a Russian nuclear power plant on the verge of an accident in the early 1990s, when a hurricane brought down power lines and the generators were out of order. Not even a war was needed.

Reactors are not the only source of danger. At the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant site, spent nuclear fuel, the most dangerous type of nuclear waste, is stored in containers. Bombing this site would also lead to one of the biggest nuclear accidents in history. In 1957, there was an explosion at the then-secret Chelyabinsk-based Mayak nuclear waste storage facility — radioactive contamination spread to some 20,000 square kilometers of Soviet territory.

Dialing down consumption is the answer to replacing Russian oil and gas

By Paul Hockenos

This is the way energy efficiency works, say the experts: skimp here and there, shave a degree off heating processes, reduce speed limits by 10 km/h, insulate doors and windows. Bit-piece skrimping adds up quickly – very quickly – and could help the West immensely in dealing with a stop to Russian energy imports.

Of course, renovating old buildings and outfitting new ones with state-of-the-art energy efficiency and generation capacities is the long-term strategy that experts say is a game changer. Industries have to get energy smart, too, and revamp technology in ways that will, among other things, save them money.

But the low-hanging fruit is much easier to pick – and will be the go-to measures should energy from Russia be cut off abruptly. According to the International Energy Agency, for example, households and buildings turning down the thermostat by 1 degree Celsius in Europe would save about 10bn cubic metres of gas within a year, a useful saving on total Russian gas imports of 155bn cubic metres, if implemented alongside other such measures. German experts say double the impact by dialing back by 2 degrees – and taking short showers, turning off the lights, and shutting doors at home. This could cut back gas consumption in Germany by as much as 10 percent.

Can’t we all wear extra thick sweaters in solidarity with the people of Ukraine? It’s not too much to ask, I think.

The Belgian think tank Bruegel argues that energy conservation in residences can be promoted with either regulation or economic incentives. Public and private buildings can be required to reduce heating or encouraged to do so through “saving-bonuses” paid on the basis of energy saved.

Critics who cherry pick out-of-context soundbites are missing the overall trajectory

By Linda Pentz Gunter

This week, Beyond  Nuclear introduces the fifth in our series of Talking Points: Germany’s Energy Revolution (’Energiewende’) is working.

The purpose of the Talking Points series, is to provide some concise and accessible factoids that answer the many questions in circulation about the role, if any, of nuclear power in addressing climate change.

In the view of Beyond Nuclear, nuclear power not only has no role to play in addressing what is now a climate emergency, it is a proactive impediment to progress, wasting time and diverting money from the measures we should and now urgently must take to get off fossil fuels— those being renewable energy implementation, conservation and, above all, energy efficiency.

Germany’s green energy revolution — known in German as the Energiewende — is constantly misrepresented in the talking points dished out by the other side. It has become the convenient whipping boy of the pro-nuclear crowd, who simply cherry pick headlines out of context without looking at the actual facts.

The purpose of our Energiewende Talking Points, is, therefore, to set the record straight. This was validated in some measure by Javier Blas’s July 29 timely Bloomberg article — Paris Faces an Even Colder, Darker Winter Than Berlin. France is more vulnerable than Germany to blackouts once the weather turns colder. 

France is equally misrepresented by the pro-nuclear lobby, held up as the poster child of the nuclear success story. But the truth is rather different. As we point out in these Talking Points, the French nuclear monopoly, and the country’s reliance on electric heat, means it has to import power in winter, often from Germany. Its nuclear supply cannot meet demand but at the same time has stifled growth in renewable energy. 

The Talking Points are all freely available to download and print at home. An email request — to info@beyondnuclear.org — will get you as many printed copies as you need, usually for the price of an optional tax-deductible donation.

Ontario needs above-ground, attack-resistant vaults for radioactive waste

By Angela Bischoff, Clean Air Alliance

We need a safer interim storage solution for Ontario’s nuclear wastes.

The International Joint Commission’s Great Lakes Water Quality Board is calling for Ontario Power Generation’s (OPG) nuclear waste storage facilities to be “hardened” and located away from shorelines to prevent them from becoming compromised by flooding and erosion.

According to a report prepared for OPG, the total capital cost of building above-ground, attack-resistant, reinforced concrete vaults at the Pickering, Darlington and Bruce Nuclear Stations would be approximately $1 billion. This safer interim storage solution can be fully paid for by OPG’s nuclear waste storage fund, which has a market value of $11.3 billion.

The total radioactivity of the nuclear wastes stored at the Pickering, Darlington and Bruce Nuclear Stations is 700 times greater than the total radiation released to the atmosphere by the Fukushima accident in 2011.

Ontario Power Generation (OPG) is proposing to continue to store these wastes in dry storage containers in conventional commercial storage buildings at its nuclear stations until at least 2043. In the long term, OPG is hoping that the nuclear wastes can be transferred off-site to a permanent storage facility where they would be placed in caverns 500 to 1,000 metres below ground.

OPG wants to keep radioactive waste in conventional storage buildings on the edge of the Great Lakes for decades to come.

Small Modular Reactors epitomize culture that embraces exaggeration

By M.V. Ramana

In 2006, Elizabeth Holmes, founder of a Silicon Valley startup company called Theranos, was featured in Inc magazine’s annual list of 30 under 30 entrepreneurs. Her entrepreneurship involved blood, or more precisely, testing blood. Instead of the usual vials of blood, Holmes claimed to be able to obtain precise results about the health of patients using a very small sample of blood drawn from just a pinprick. 

The promise was enticing and Holmes had a great run for a decade. She was supported by a bevy of celebrities and powerful individuals, including former U.S. secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, James Mattis, who later served as U.S. secretary of defense, and media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Not that any of them would be expected to know much about medical science or blood testing. But all that public endorsement helped. As did savvy marketing by Holmes. Theranos raised over $700 million from investors, and receive a market valuation of nearly $9 billion by 2014. 

The downfall started the following year, when the Wall Street Journal exposed that Theranos was actually using standard blood tests behind the scenes because its technology did not really work. In January 2022, Holmes was found guilty of defrauding investors.

The second part of the Theranos story is an exception. In a culture which praises a strategy of routine exaggeration, encapsulated by the slogan “fake it till you make it”, it is rare for a tech CEO being found guilty of making false promises. But the first part of Theranos story—hype, advertisement, and belief in impossible promises—is very much the norm, and not just in the case of companies involved in the health care industry. 

Small Modular Nuclear Reactors

Nuclear power offers a great example. In 2003, an important study produced by nuclear advocates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology identified costs, safety, proliferation and waste as the four “unresolved problems” with nuclear power. Not surprisingly, then, companies trying to sell new reactor designs claim that their product will be cheaper, will produce less—or  no—radioactive waste, be immune to accidents, and not contribute to nuclear proliferation. These tantalizing promises are the equivalent of testing blood with a pin prick. 

And, as was the case with Theranos, many such companies have been backed up by wealthy investors and influential spokespeople, who have typically had as much to do with nuclear power as Kissinger had to with testing blood. Examples include Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley investor; Stephen Harper, the former Prime Minister of Canada; and  Richard Branson, the founder of the Virgin group. But just as the Theranos product did not do what Elizabeth Holmes and her backers were claiming, new nuclear reactor designs will not solve the multiple challenges faced by nuclear power.

Greenpeace radiation readings show IAEA downplayed dangers

Adapted from Ukraine Crisis Media Center and Greenpeace International press release. See the full report.

The Russian military occupation at Chornobyl resulted in crimes against the environment and global scientific understanding of radiation risks, said Greenpeace experts during a press conference at the Ukraine Crisis Media Center on July 20. 

With the approval and cooperation of the State Agency of Ukraine on Exclusion Zone Management (SAUEZM) and the Ukraine Foreign Ministry, the Greenpeace team was able conduct a limited radiation survey inside the highly contaminated 30km exclusion zone of Chornobyl. It was limited by the fact that most of the 2600km2 zone has not been checked and cleared of Russian landmines. 

The Greenpeace investigation team found radiation in areas where Russian military operations occurred at levels at least three times higher than the estimation by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and which classifies it as nuclear waste. In April 2022, the IAEA provided very limited data with assurances that radiation levels were ‘normal” and not a major environmental or public safety issue. 

The Greenpeace team also documented with Ukrainian scientists at Chornobyl that due to the Russian military actions against essential laboratories, databases and radiation monitoring systems, severe damage has been done to the unique scientific infrastructure developed in cooperation with the global science community, including lab equipment needed to study the impact of radiation on people and the environment, thereby threatening the safety of this and future generations. 

Greenpeace released the results of its investigation at a press conference in Kyiv, also attended by Yevhen Kramarenko, Head of SAUEZM and Serhiy Kireev, General Director of the State Specialized Enterprise “EcoCenter” in Chornobyl.