The dirtiest, most dangerous, and most expensive source of energy
Harry Vassallo
Nuclear energy is neither cheap nor clean, but the most powerful people on earth have always tended to portray it as such. In the post-WWII era the publicity blurb was needed to overlay the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki associated with the technology and to justify the immense expense of public funds for the construction of reactors also used for enrichment of radioactive minerals to weapons grade material. The problem of disposing radioactive waste was acknowledged from the outset but the surge in innovation driven by the war created an atmosphere of unquestioned confidence in technology: a solution would be found soon enough. Besides, the Cold War with its arms race and appropriately named Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) strategies to secure peace, relegated the waste issue to second place.
Eighty years later we are nowhere near to finding a safe way to dispose of spent fuel and materials from decommissioned reactors or from decommissioned weapons. The multinational atomic research CERN facility in Switzerland is said to be tasked with finding a solution but Italian Nobel Prize winner Carlo Rubbia advises us that a safe haven is still a very long way off.
Meanwhile a vicious circle combining military secrecy, with the very real dangers of nuclear accident and the menace of nuclear waste has effectively kept the industry outside the realm of public scrutiny. Throughout this 80 year history reality has erupted at times of crisis only. The accidents of Three Mile Island, the meltdown of a reactor in the US, and the explosion of Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union are the most famous but far from being the only ones. Each provoked a debate, created awareness and divided the public anew.
The deferential and the patronising tend to persuade themselves that something so costly, involving the pinnacle of scientific research and advocated by the most powerful persons on earth cannot be bad. Its critics always seemed an irreverent and disreputable crowd. Sceptics and those who feel that it is their civic duty to question authority at every step tend to have the opposite opinion. Only those who have not yet learned anything about the issue can be neutral. There is no middle way, no golden mean. The stakes are too high.
When somebody confidently argues that a material with a lethal dose level of one millionth of a gram (plutonium) can be safely disposed of by depositing it in a bunker somewhere, he earns the undying contempt of the unashamed sceptic. Who can assume anything like safety for the duration of a menace measured in thousands of years? Who can give anyone any assurance on such timescales?
Having established that the deposit of nuclear waste in salt mines or in basaltic rock was unsatisfactory, the EU’s Euratom agency together with the US and Japan developed a technology for vitrifying the waste and sinking it under the seabed. After US$120 M were spent on that project it was overtaken by the Chernobyl nuclear accident and enthusiasm for it waned.
According to Italian investigators, the technology was acquired by an Italian engineer, Roberto Comerio who proceeded to tout it around the world ending up with a clientele of around 45 countries desirous of ridding themselves of radioactive waste. It remains unclear whether the Maltese registered Comerio Industries or the BVI registered, Oceanic Disposal Management Inc, both owned by Comerio, ever combined to build and utilise the system as intended but it is now clear that Comerio’s enterprise utilised the Calabrian Ndrangheta to sink ships loaded with toxic and radioactive waste in the Mediterranean and in Third World Countries such as Somalia, Kenya and Sierra Leone. The discovery of one of these ships off the Italian coast on 12 September 2009 is likely to lead to the unravelling of one of the world’s worst nuclear scandals.
The risk of contamination of vast areas on sea and land is bad enough. However the deposit of such materials in unguarded locations around the globe, open up nightmarish vistas of nuclear terrorism utilising such waste to create a dirty bomb.
The unthinkable has already happened: Comerio appears to have acted as a go-between for a number of governments with organized crime receiving state funding to commit the outrage. Who can rest assured that this has been an Italian anomaly that cannot be repeated anywhere else or at any time in the future?
Just to add to the debate, a documentary entitled Uranium: le scandale de la France contamineé broadcast on France 3 in February 2009 http://programmes.france3.fr/pieces-a-conviction/51415247-fr.php documents 70 years of maladministration of French radioactive waste producing 300,000 tons of it dumped with little or no care across the country. The crimes of an Italian mafialike organization are to be taken for granted but a criminal conspiracy of every French administration starting from the development of its Force de Frappe under de Gaulle bankrupts the imagination. In the case of France, the bulk of the waste is made up of slag from its uranium mines.
Clean it is not. It can only be described as cheap by those who were brought up before the polluter pays principle appeared on any mental horizon: the costs of guarding wastes for centuries makes nuclear energy by far the most expensive ever invented.
It is also finite. Uranium, its fuel, is not the most commonly found mineral and will run out faster than oil if the world were to rely on it as its sole source of energy. Worst of all for the nuclear lobby, there is no time left to build all the reactors that would be required. Climate change will have overtaken us long before a sufficient number of reactors have been built.
Still, none of this prevents the industry from selling itself to the world as its saviour, the clean, safe answer to climate change.
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