The debate about the economics of nuclear energy versus renewable energy has distracted politicians, the media and members of the public from the physical hazards of nuclear energy. The three principal hazards are its contribution to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the risk of nuclear accidents, and the impossible task of managing nuclear wastes for 100,000 years. This article offers a concise review, drawing attention to some issues that are not widely known, including a fourth hazard, radiation exposure of the unborn child. I write wearing the hat of a physicist.
Proliferation
The nuclear fuel “cycle” provides two pathways to the production of nuclear explosives, reprocessing and uranium enrichment. In the first pathway, fissile plutonium is extracted from the spent fuel of nuclear power plants (NPPs) or military reactors by a chemical process known as reprocessing. A 1000-megawatt NPP produces about 200 kg of reactor-grade plutonium annually. Contrary to misinformation by nuclear power proponents, this can be used to make nuclear weapons, as confirmed by a Commissioner of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (Dr Victor Gilinsky), a former leading nuclear bomb maker (Dr Theodore Taylor), and the US Department of Energy. Two hundred kg of reactor-grade plutonium would provide the explosives for about 20 bombs, although they would be less “efficient” at causing death and destruction than using weapons-grade plutonium made in military reactors.
In the second pathway, uranium enrichment is continued beyond the 3–5% of fissile Uranium-235 used in most NPPs to a level suitable for nuclear weapons. Conventional “wisdom” that 80–95% enrichment is necessary for a nuclear weapon is not generally correct. While it’s true for small nuclear bombs that can fit into the warheads of missiles, as little as 20% enrichment may be sufficient for a large, crude, nuclear bomb that could be delivered by ship.
Training in nuclear science and engineering for research, medical isotope production and nuclear energy provides many of the skills needed for making nuclear weapons. Beyond this, nuclear energy has directly assisted and cloaked the development of nuclear weapons, or the expansion of their numbers, by six countries: the UK, France, India, Pakistan, North Korea and South Africa.
Plutonium from the United Kingdom’s first generation of NPPs was used to supplement the plutonium produced in the UK’s military reactors and hence expand its nuclear weapons inventory. France has a close relationship between its military and civil nuclear programs. India drew upon its experience with Canadian-designed NPPs to develop its bomb. Pakistan and North Korea were assisted in developing their nuclear weapons by metallurgist-engineer A.Q. Khan, who gained his skills in the European non-military URENCO uranium enrichment research facility. South Africa covertly used its uranium enrichment plant for both its Koeberg NPP and its bomb; it is the only country to have dismantled a successful nuclear weapons program.
Countries that commenced nuclear weapons programs disguised as nuclear energy programs and discontinued them before fruition, were Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Libya, South Korea and Taiwan.
This summary is drawn from research published by the Institute of Science & International Security, the Nuclear Weapon Archive, the Nautilus Institute, and Richard Broinowski’s book Fact or Fission: The truth about Australia’s nuclear ambitions (2nd edition, 2022).
Major accidents
Although there have been hundreds of nuclear accidents, the most serious were the Kyshtym disaster in former USSR in 1957, the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in the United States in 1979, the explosion at Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986, and the meltdown of three of the six reactors at Fukushima Daiichi in Japan in 2011. Except for Three Mile Island, which took the US to the brink of a major disaster, each of these accidents has likely caused many thousands of cancer deaths from exposure to ionising radiation.
Nuclear proponents, who ignore the large body of scientific evidence that low levels of ionising radiation are carcinogenic, claim that only about 50 people were killed by the Chernobyl explosion. They only recognise the prompt deaths from exposure to high-level radiation. However, the experts at the International Agency for Research in Cancer estimate that the Chernobyl disaster will induce 16,000 cancer deaths in Europe alone by 2065.
Previously, it was thought that the airborne radiation fallout from the Fukushima disaster descended only on the local area or was blown out to sea, and that only very low levels reached densely populated Tokyo, 240 km south of Fukushima. However, recently it was revealed that a plume of highly radioactive micro-particles rich in the isotope Cesium-137 blanketed Tokyo. The researcher who detected the micro-particles, Satoshi Utsunomiya, and his results were suppressed until they were mentioned in 2019 in the Scientific American (11 March 2019) and reported in detail in the open-source online repository arXiv.
Nuclear wastes
At the time of writing, there is no operating final repository for high-level NPP wastes anywhere is the world, although the Onkalo underground repository in Finland is close to operation. No other country has reached Finland’s stage of final storage. The US spent US$15 billion on an unsuitable site in Nevada and then abandoned it. Temporary storage at most nuclear stations around the world is in deep pools of water, which are potential terrorist targets; a small minority of temporary storage is in stainless steel casks.
Incidentally, the costs of managing nuclear wastes, including decommissioning of radioactive NPPs, have not been included in the CSIRO GenCost or Frontier Economics reports on energy costs.
Low-level nuclear wastes are also of concern. For example, at Olympic Dam uranium and copper mine in South Australia, a small mountain of over 100 million tonnes of low-level radioactive waste is not covered and is blowing in the wind. Although it is expected to induce very few cancers per year in Australia, it will continue to expose people for tens of thousands of years. Summing over the long-term future gives a very large number of total deaths.
Low-level radiation from ‘normally’ operating NPPs
For many years, studies of cancer incidence in people living near NPPs have been inconclusive, due mainly to inadequate data on radiation exposure and on individual cancers. However, recently the German Childhood Cancer Registry conducted a case-control study of all cancers registered between 1980 and 2003 in children younger than five years living near all Germany’s major nuclear power stations. Distance from a NPP was used as a proxy for radiation exposure. This is the most comprehensive study in the world.
The results, which are statistically significant, are that young children living within a 5 km radius of an NPP have 2.2 times the incidence of leukaemia compared with residence outside this zone. A smaller increase is observed in solid cancers – these have longer latency periods than leukaemia and so would mostly appear in older children that were not studied. This important study has received little publicity outside Germany. On rare occasions when it is mentioned, it is misrepresented by vested interests.
The likely cause of the observed increased childhood cancer risk near NPPs in Germany is the exposure of their mothers, when pregnant, to low-level radiation releases from NPPs. Contrary to misinformation spread by the nuclear lobby, there is a large body of evidence that low-level ionising radiation is harmful, that there is no safe threshold. Some of this evidence comes from many case-control studies of childhood cancers following prenatal x-rays of their mothers (reviewed here), a procedure that was routine in the bad old days before the advent of ultrasound. The foetus is very sensitive to ionising radiation, because of its high rate of cell division, and so even very low doses can induce cancer.
One of the nuclear power station sites proposed by the Coalition, Mt Piper NSW, is about 5 km from the township of Wallerawang and several smaller communities.
To conclude, nuclear energy is a very dangerous, unforgiving technology, as well as being very expensive. Additional refutations of myths and misinformation about nuclear (and renewable energy) are on my personal website.