The
Mysteries of Reprocessing Spent Nuclear Fuel:
Why Some of Our Best and
Brightest Are Figuring Out Ways to Remove Vast Amounts of Excess Plutonium From
the Biosphere, While Others Are Planning to Make More
David Rush, MD
November 1996 [Editor's Note: This is the fourth
in a continuing series of essays by M&GS associate editor David Rush about
the efforts in the post-Soviet republics to deal with a disturbing nuclear legacy
-- the environmental damage caused by nuclear weapons development and production,
the enduring consequences of the Chernobyl tragedy, and, more recently, the debate
about the role of nuclear power in the evolving Russian economy. As our "beat"
reporter in Russia, Ukraine, and the other republics, Dr. Rush combines his role
as a professional advisor to the scientific and medical communities on matters
of radiation and health with a deepening personal interest in the future of this
struggling and suffering people. Dr. Rush's previous M&GS articles include:
"Letter from Kiev and Moscow: Nuclear Realities 10 Years After Chernobyl" [M&GS
1996;3:A3]; "Russian Journal, July 1995" [M&GS 1995:133-34]; and "A Letter
From Krasnoyarsk: Disarmament, Conversion, and Safety After the Cold War."] [M&GS
1995:19-25] The Third International Radioecological Conference,
"The Fate of Spent Nuclear Fuel: Problems and Reality," took place from 24 to
26 June, 1996, in Krasnoyarsk, Russia. It was held at a crucial moment in the
checkered history of nuclear power generation and at a suspenseful moment for
Russians -- between rounds of the presidential elections. The contrasts
and contradictions that were obvious in Russian society at large were also reflected
in the conference. (In the former USSR, the military sector comprised as much
as 70% of the gross national product during the Cold War, in contrast with about
five or six percent in the U.S.) Some of us travelled to the former secret military
city, Krasnoyarsk-26, a prosperous oasis in a desert of economic chaos and dishevelment,
in what, from all appearances, had to be a civilian bus: windshield shattered,
it was unable to climb anything but slight inclines unless we got off and walked.
The bus was nursed along by a gifted driver who knew the quirks of his vehicle
the way an Indian mahout is supposed to know his elephant. (He had pasted a picture
of a bare breasted woman in the front of his bus: a casual chauvinism that was
evidenced by a similar image prominently displayed on the walls of one of the
local antinuclear activist offices. Ironically, women seem to be doing much more
than their share of the work needed to make anything in Russia function.) Obstacles
to Open Science Almost every shade of opinion can be published in the new
Russia: there were 12 newspapers in our host city of one million people. Even
so, there was almost no visible evidence that we were in the midst of a bitter
and historic election: no posters or sound trucks, just a few newspapers pasted
on scattered bulletin boards. One sensed uncertainty about how disagreement would
be resolved. This uncertainty was reflected in the conference: Russia has only
a weak tradition of open science, with its concomitant frank discussion, the give
and take of criticism and peer review, and the corrections that follow. The holdover
of Soviet culture seems to militate against civil and open public discourse. We
thus heard some very current and thorough work on the cytogenetics of radiation
exposure and on environmental radiation contamination, along with some pedestrian
and sloppy research, with essentially are no opportunities for constructive interchange
among investigators. Even were there scientific meetings at which to have such
discussion there would not be enough money for scientists to attend them.
On the other hand, personal connection seems possible across great gaps. It was
heartening, for example, to see a young Greenpeace activist chatting unselfconsciously
with one of the directors of K-26. Russian hospitality remains profoundly generous
and rules of personal etiquette remain very important: I left a banquet after
what must have been the fifteenth toast, having been told that only the first
eleven are dictated by protocol. Such formalities are not, however, a substitute
for collaboration and communication to promote open and dissident science; indeed,
we were confronted privately with a surprising amount of fairly petty criticism
of the work of others, criticism which, if delivered impersonally and constructively,
almost surely would have been helpful in the struggle to create a just and informed
society. A greater feeling of common purpose and cohesion is urgently needed;
I found the citizens' movements far ahead of the scientists and doctors in this
task. The tools for democratic and respectful resolution of conflict are only
just being formed. The site of the conference was chosen
with careful intent: just 26 kilometers downstream from the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk
along the banks of the Yenisei River, is the site of Krasnoyarsk 26 (K-26), now
also called Zheleznogorsk [Figure 1]. K-26 is the former Soviet
Union's third and last military plutonium (Pu) production site. Here, three plutonium
production reactors and accessory industrial plants were built entirely underground,
to decrease their vulnerability to nuclear attack. There is no current
demand for more military plutonium. Rather, western scientists and some Russians
are trying to figure out how to remove from the biosphere the plutonium that has
been extracted from decommissioned nuclear warheads, forever and in a form in
which it cannot be reused to make nuclear weapons. Thus, two of K-26's three reactors
were shut in 1992 as part of the Gore-Chernomyrdin agreements. The third is scheduled
to be closed after a nearby coal-fired power station is completed, providing an
alternative source of heat and electric power for the closed city of 100,000 that
was built to house the staff and families of the euphemistically titled Mineral
and Chemical Combine. In the late 1970s, work was
started on the second Soviet reprocessing plant for spent nuclear fuel at K-26,
called RT-2. (RT-1, at the Mayak complex near Chelyabinsk in the southern Urals,
has been reprocessing spent nuclear fuel from naval reactors and from the earliest
Soviet civilian reactor designs since 1988. Its throughput has been going down
precipitously since a peak in the late 1980s [1]). Work on
RT-2 was stopped in 1986 for a number of reasons: there was no perceived need
for more plutonium, either for nuclear weapons, or for power generation in breeder
reactors or mixed with uranium in so called MOX fuel; moreover the world price
for the far safer, and easier to use alternative, uranium, had, contrary to some
forecasts, come down instead of rising sharply. Illusory
Promises The promise that reprocessing would be integral to the production
of endless amounts of cheap power had proven false and critics contend that reprocessing
generates more, not less, radioactive waste than initial storage of spent nuclear
fuel (this is disputed by some nuclear industry insiders). The reuse of the plutonium
and uranium produced by reprocessing entails either mixing them together (mixed
oxide, or MOX, fuel) and using MOX fuel in light water reactors, or using plutonium
alone in so-called fast breeder reactors. The combination of fast breeder technology
and reprocessing has given the illusory promise of endless, cheap, renewable energy;
hence Japan's current plans to acquire 30 tons of plutonium and thus achieve energy
independence. (Conference participants heard that Japan's Pu stockpile is likely
to rise to about 100 tons by 2010.) Both MOX and fast breeder technologies,
however, have proven much more complex, expensive, unreliable, and dangerous than
the early rosy projections of the nuclear industry and its national and international
acolytes (the former Soviet, French, British, and Japanese governments and the
International Atomic Energy Agency in particular). The commercial nuclear power
industry is unlikely to embrace MOX and fast breeder technologies, not because
of the terrible security problems in creating, storing, and using vast amounts
of plutonium, but because of the terrible costs. (One conference report asserted
that the French breeder reactor, Superphenix, has set in its checkered history
a dubious world record for the cost of the electricity: $1.30/Kwh, vs $0.02-0.04
from other sources). It is confusing why anyone would want to invest more
billions of dollars in reprocessing plants (the not-yet completed Japanese Rokkasho
plant is now expected to cost $17 billion -- twice the initial estimate -- and
six to seven times the amount of the much dirtier operating European plants).
The U.S. rejected reprocessing in the late 1970s and Germany abandoned its completed
seven billion DM breeder reactor and did not build its planned reprocessing plant.
Why build more capacity when existing plants are underutilized and their products
are of such questionable value? William Walker of Sussex
University gives the following reasons for the survival of reprocessing in France
(Cogema) and the United Kingdom (Sellafield): - these began as military
programs and were not subject to civilian, especially local civilian, review;
- there has been much inertia due to heavy prior investment;
- electric
utilities have been attracted to the idea of using reprocessing plants for storage
of spent nuclear fuel as local storage capacity is exhausted;
- the costs
are mostly borne by German and Japanese utilities rather than locally;
- political
control in France and Great Britain is centralized relative to other European
countries, so that local and regional concerns can be overridden rather easily
[2].
Walker does not believe reprocessing will
survive in the long term. A Jobs Program for Unemployed
Military Workers? Why is there interest in another reprocessing plant at
K-26? The answer is straightforward: K-26 is in desperate financial straits. The
technical workforce has dropped by at least a third, from a peak of 12,000 to
an acknowledged 8,000. We were told that many highly qualified professional personnel
are now forced to do whatever work they can find, sometimes in menial jobs. K-26
has diversified; it now builds satellites. We witnessed the almost comical presence
of a Samsung television assembly plant in one of the unused RT-2 buildings, in
the middle of a very high security area, hard up against several thousand spent
nuclear fuel assemblies sitting in their holding pools. K-26 hopes its economic
savior will be the completion of RT-2. This is a strategy for economic survival
for K-26, but a potential plague for most of its neighbors. Times really
have changed in Russia. One example: K-26 now finds it needs a heavyweight public
relations department. While hardly as smooth as their glossy western counterparts
(they readily admitted to us that the people who live in Krasnoyarsk would just
as soon K-26 did not exist), Russian PR people share the tendency of their Western
counterparts for hyperbole and artfully selective use of data. As we drove by
the artificial lake in the residential part of K-26, we were told how the residents
of the closed city love to swim and fish in the lake's pure water and eat the
uncontaminated berries they pick right outside RT-2's security fence. The Russian
"spin managers" omitted to mention that the two reactors closed in 1992 used open
cooling technology: Yenisei river water was pumped in to cool the reactors and
were dumped untreated and with all its radioactive waste right back into the river.
This caused massive, if uneven, pollution downriver and plutonium is detectable
in high concentrations 2,000 kilometers north at the mouth of the river in the
Arctic. Politics of Reprocessing K-26 residents recently
voted to maintain the city as a closed site. (A visitor still needs prior permission,
a visa, to enter this small magic kingdom [see sidebar, "A Visit to K-26"].) One
cannot much blame the local population: the residential part of the complex is
modern, clean, a kind of weird Swiss village inserted into the drabness of Russia.
Keeping the city closed has achieved what affluent guarded and fenced residential
communities in the U.S. aim for: material goods are kept inside and those who
might want to earn or take some of them are kept out. The administration and residents
of K-26 hope that RT-2 will be an economic savior, now that the world finds little
need for more of its primary product -- plutonium for thermonuclear weapons.
Tom Clements, who follows plutonium issues for Greenpeace
[see sidebar on conference participants], gave his assessment of the geopolitical
realities for reprocessing. Clements felt that because of its opposition to the
creation of yet more plutonium in the world, the U.S. would try to convince countries
over which it has influence (notably South Korea) not to contract to reprocess
spent nuclear fuel at RT-2. Without such international contracts and funding,
the billions of dollars needed for completion and operation of the plant cannot
be raised. The next speaker, Prof. Yuri Yershov, a member of a high level
Russian review panel on RT-2, forcefully responded that Russia did not need or
welcome advice from foreign governments -- or foreigners in general -- on its
national decisions. Yershov then proceeded to conclude that the project made almost
no sense at all. His sensitivity to outside pressure probably flowed from several
sources, including the loss of confidence and sense of well being that followed
the loss of Russia's superpower status and possibly a desire to demonstrate that
he was not a western (U.S.) pawn in contending with domestic hard line nationalists
(the communists before the election were attacking Yeltsin in these terms). Yershov's
sensitivity was easily understandable, but it led him to assert that the decision
making process in present day Russia is balanced and fair, even within the Ministry
of Atomic Energy (Minatom), whose legacy includes the nuclear devastation of Russia's
environment, population, and economy. Minatom built, managed, and owned K-26.
This writer cannot be as optimistic as Yershov. Mycle Schneider of the
World Information Service on
Energy (WISE), Paris, described the terrible pollution record of Cogema and
how reprocessing has left more, not less, residual radioactive waste than primary
storage. Paul Wilcox of British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) had by far the conference's
most elegant slides, which he used to defend his position that BNFL's reprocessing
activities are environmentally sensitive, technically competent, will bring prosperity
to the local community, and are an obligatory part of the developed nations' energy
future. Martin Forwood of Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment (CORE)
told a very different story, describing BNFL's history of obfuscation and deception,
regular radioactive leaks into both the Irish Sea and into the air, and unfulfilled
promises of jobs for local people. Jinzaburo Takagi, a nuclear chemist
who worked for years in the Japanese nuclear industry, spoke of the leak of radioactive
sodium from the Monju fast breeder reactor in Fukui Prefecture, north of Kyoto,
last December. Takagi said the leak and, even more, the subsequent industry coverup,
had engendered deep hostility by the Japanese public to Japan's plutonium program.
Monju remains closed. Its reopening and the opening of Japan's reprocessing plant
have become uncertain. The Japanese reprocessing plants, along with the cancelled
German plant, suffer from the inherent faults of these technologies. They also
suffer commercially because they are designed to pollute far less than Cogema
(the worst) or Sellafield, which results in higher operating expenses. This concern
for safety means they cannot offer their services as cheaply as the dirtier French
and British plants. Thus, the participants at this conference were left
with an inescapable conclusion: a decision that could profoundly in-crease the
danger of nuclear proliferation and terrorism -- and that could prove economically
wasteful in the long run -- was going to be taken for a parochial and short term
benefit that might, in any case, prove illusory: a jobs program for underemployed
technicians and scientists from the formerly massive Soviet military establishment. References
1. International Physicians
for the Prevention of Nuclear War, Institute for Energy and Environmental
Research. Nuclear wastelands: A global guide to nuclear weapons production and
its health and environmental effects. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 1995. [Return
to text]
2. Walker W. Why does reprocessing survive
in Europe? In The fate of spent nuclear fuel: problems and reality. Third international
radioecological conference (proceedings). Krasnoyarsk. 22-27 June, 1996. [Return
to text]
A Visit to K-26 Some of the
conference participants visited the partially completed RT-2 site. While our pass-
ports were checked both on entering K-26 and again at the RT-2 gate, the metal
detector inside the spent fuel depository was pushed into a corner and obviously
was never used. I carried my full and uninspected day pack unchallenged into the
core of the storage site, where we stood a few feet over the pool in which innumerable
spent fuel assemblies are stored. Security seems to be more a matter of
keeping documents in order than truly safeguarding a vast amount of highly radioactive
material or the planes at the airport, where we had a similar experience.
Before we entered the storage area at K-26, we changed our street shoes for slippers
and also put on white chefs' hats and dingy black lab coats -- surely symbolic
gestures to indicate that we were in a very special place, rather than any real
factor in keeping the place clean or in making sure that contaminated material
did not leave the site. The spent fuel rods are kept underwater in a vast
building that looked to be well over the size of a football field. We were shown
the fuel rods, illuminated by under water lights. One of our party carried a Geiger
counter: the radio-activity levels varied to as high as 100 times background in
this supposedly entirely safe and highly controlled environment. We were
told that the average annual worker exposure is about 100 Mrem (a range of 50-500
Mrem). Our observations suggested that this figure was optimistically low.
Another member of our party had spent the early part of his career in the nuclear
power industry: he was shocked at the seeming absence of any materials controls,
at the flimsy barriers that separated us from the open part of the holding pools
(we noticed a bright orange life preserver to be used should someone happen to
fall in) and the use of what appeared to be actual irradiated used fuel assemblies
(minus the fuel) for demonstration purposes (we found the highest ambient levels
of radioactivity near these demonstrational as-semblies). We were less than reassured
about the safety and security of the site. -- DR Conference
Participants The visit to K-26 served as an intriguing counterpoint to
the conference, where the participants comprised a varied lot, including:
- local anti-RT-2 activists, as well as officials from K-26 and RT-2;
- the
surprisingly open and jovial chief engineer at RT-1;
- some of the new
breed of independent and critical Russian scientists -- people asking hard questions
about health and safety and the technical and economic soundness of Russia's nuclear
activities (in general, these critics were conversant with outside standards and
techniques, and often work under very trying circumstances that include very limited
resources and lots of political pressure and, sometimes, sabotage);
- the
head of public relations from K-26 -- one of the few participants with easy mastery
of the Soviet style of complete denial (no environmental damage and, if there
was, it was only because the U.S. forced us into it);
- a technically sophisticated
representative of British Nuclear Fuels, the operators of the dirty and notorious
reprocessing plant at Sellafield on the Northwest coast of England (the man scheduled
to talk from Cogema, the even dirtier and more notorious reprocessing plant in
La Hague, France, never showed up);
- a very funny and passionate young
geographer from Greenpeace Russia;
- people from the Russia-wide environmental
coalition, the Socio-Ecological Union (they had a remarkably well attend-ed and
lively regional meeting just prior to the conference);
- activists representing
organizations in England, France, Japan (including the most important and knowledgable
critic of Japan's plutonium and nuclear energy policy), the Netherlands, Germany,
and the U.S., especially the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), who continue
their invaluable work on nuclear issues in the former Soviet Union;
- and
this correspondent representing Physicians for Social Responsibility, the U.S.
affiliate of the medical antinuclear movement, International Physicians for the
Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW).
-- DR
© Copyright 1996 Medicine and Global Survival |
