Opinion: Is Nuclear Power Coming Back from the Dead? Not If We Can Help It Say Activists Who Buried Nukes More Than 40 Years Ago
Photo: clamshellalliance.com
by Clamshell Alliance
Forty-five years ago, on March 28, 1979, one of the nuclear reactors at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania experienced a partial meltdown, nearly triggering a regional catastrophe. The American public got the message: Nukes are just too dangerous. The nuclear industry sank into a coma.
But as the industry seeks a revival with backing from Congress, the White House, and teams of industry propagandists, prominent activists from the No Nukes/Safe Energy movement of the 1970s are reviving, too. “Shifting to renewable energy and conservation can save the planet from climate collapse, without the risks and expense of nuclear technology,” says Paul Gunter, whose anti-nuclear activism has barely paused since he was first arrested protesting the Seabrook, New Hampshire nuclear plant in 1976.
As a member of the Clamshell Alliance, a New England grassroots coalition, Gunter was part of the movement that used mass nonviolent protests and creative community education to thrust the dangers of nuclear power onto the national agenda. Now the co-director of the Takoma Park, Maryland-based organization Beyond Nuclear, Gunter is part of a cluster of “Clams” gearing up for a new round of No Nukes activism.
Today’s Clams point out that accidents, poor design, phony insurance, out-of-control cost overruns, decades-long ramp-ups, and the absence of a long-term disposal plan for radioactive waste still haunt the industry. These adversities also haunt the memories of those who first brought these serious issues into public view. For example:
The area around Chernobyl in Ukraine is still uninhabitable, 38 years after a nuclear reactor meltdown. Thirteen years after the multiple meltdowns at Fukushima, Japan, 2000 people have died as a result of the accident and 30,000 former residents (of the 140,000 who fled) have not returned. These are just two of at least 133 potentially catastrophic nuclear accidents worldwide.
Germany, once heavily nuclear, has closed all of its nuclear plants as have Italy and Lithuania. Spain and Switzerland are shutting theirs down. Japan kept all of its nuclear plants shuttered for several years after the accident at Fukushima and, according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the 17 that did restart are at risk in future seismic events.
The latest generation of nuclear reactors is unproven, would take years to come online, and are already showing they will cost vastly more than anticipated.
The war in Ukraine has illustrated the vulnerability of nuclear reactors to war, attacks by terrorists, and other potential disasters.
Meanwhile, conservation and true clean energy from renewables like solar, wind, small hydro, and geothermal have become far cheaper, faster to deploy, and more reliable than any nuclear or fossil alternative.
“Since the 1970s, activists have demanded the shutdown of nuclear power plants until these and other serious problems were fixed,” says Phil Stone, a one-time member of the Worcester-based Central Massachusetts Safe Energy Project, a Clamshell affiliate. “Clamshell inspired numerous nonviolent safe-energy organizations to form around the country following the Seabrook occupation of 1977. This, in turn, helped foster the near-total halt of US nuclear power plant construction following the Three Mile Island accident in 1979,” Stone said.
Clamshell activists of that era have stayed in touch and have been meeting regularly. Rebranded as Clamshell Alliance: No Nukes, the revived organization released “Nuclear Power is STILL the Wrong Answer,” a paper pointing out that nuclear is no more viable today than it was 50 years ago. The statement calls for climate change activists and others to take action again to counter another con job by the nuclear apologists.
“Nuclear Power is STILL the Wrong Answer” offers eight reasons why nuclear will never solve our energy problems, and illuminates a pathway toward an alternative green and democratic future powered by renewable energy systems owned and governed by their users.
Stone added, “The new Clamshell Alliance: No Nukes website also offers other resources on why nuclear power has never been, and will never be, a solution to climate change or to our energy needs—and the numerous ways we can power our needs with truly safe energy.”
“With Congress on the brink of approving legislation to speed up nuclear licensing and further shield the industry from the consequences of nuclear disasters, we’re putting out a call for a new generation of climate and environmental justice activists to join us in proclaiming No Nukes,” said Gunter.
More Information:
Paul Gunter, info@clamshellalliance.com
Phil Stone, philstone300@gmail.com
Clamshell Alliance : A group of Clam members from the 1970s and ‘80s have been meeting, writing, and organizing a response to the nuclear industry’s plans to build a new generation of reactors. This group has been meeting via zoom since the fall of 2021, as well as in person for many years at the World Fellowship Center in Conway NH. Even though we are using the name Clamshell Alliance, we are not the same organization as the one that had local chapters across New England and carried out the direct actions in Seabrook and elsewhere.
For all the problems old-tech nuclear had, James Hansen estimates it saved the lives of 1.8 million people relative to how many would have died with the dirty alternatives we would have built instead. Add to that millions of cases of respiratory afflictions and health crisis events, and hundreds of billions of dollars in medical expenses which we were also able to avoid. It also displaced around 60 billion tonnes of CO2, as well as thousands of tonnes of mercury, arsenic, and other heavy-metal poisons that would have been released. If anti-nuclear activists of that period were actually instrumental in preventing the building of more nuclear power plants, we may have wound up with needless sickness, death, pollution, and CO2 release from the coal power that we used instead (which many anti-nukes of that period actually preferred).
Today, old-tech nuclear is struggling and is on its way to becoming obsolete, and wind and solar have finally reached a point of being competitive. But their build-out has been slow, and hasn’t even halted the continuing growth in fossil fuel consumption yet. They further have an intermittency problem, and are only able to provide electricity, which doesn’t cover many things we use fossil fuels for. But now we are also on the verge of seeing a new generation of nuclear. Many of the new designs use core fuels which cannot melt down (such as liquid fuels, or highly-robust Triso), and the reactors operate at higher temperatures–heat that could be used for energy storage in molten salts for flexible output which could back-up wind and solar. Heat that could be used for industrial processes, large ship propulsion, synfuel production, and mega-scale CO2 removal from the atmosphere. And the designers feel that with inherent safety and modular manufacturing, they have a chance to right the cost curve for nuclear, and greatly shorten the build time. A build permit for a demo unit of the first advanced reactor in the U.S. issued last Dec. and the builder plans to have it operational in 2026, with more teams expecting to file build applications soon. Some of the new reactors are even being designed to consume the spent fuel from the old reactors. There is potential for great benefit here. So now, the misguided anti-nukes of old are riding again, to agitate against this badly-needed new technology (by citing the problems with the old technology), and to rescue us from the better future we might attain. I hope the next generation is smart enough to see where this road paved with good intentions is headed.
The nuclear industry is seeking to revive nuclear power as a clean, “green” and renewable energy source that doesn’t contribute to climate change. Dead wrong on all counts. The mining, milling, and enrichment of uranium ore is an extractive industry that leaves a trail of sickness and contamination of both people and the environment in its wake, as well as a big carbon footprint. Nicholas, you correctly mention all the respiratory illnesses and deaths caused by fossil-fueled power plants. What you leave out is all the cancers, genetic damage, and deaths caused at all the different stages of the nuclear fuel cycle.
The nuclear industry has always been big on promises (promising electricity from nuclear energy that would be “too cheap to meter”) but when accidents like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima happen, the only thing they seem to be efficient at is covering up. The radioactive water that has been stored at the Fukushima site since the meltdowns in 2011 is now simply being released into the ocean. They still have no safe long-term solutions for the high-level nuclear wastes being stored on site at reactors all over the country.
The only thing renewable about nuclear power is the highly radioactive spent fuel from nuclear reactors, which will need to be stored safely for up to a million years. (See Christine Ro’s article, “The Staggering Timescales of Nuclear Waste Disposal,” Forbes, November 26, 2019.)
And by the way, the development of nuclear power and nuclear weapons have always been and continue to be inextricably intertwined. So are their dangers.
As the Clamshell Alliance press release indicates, the next generation needs to learn about the history of the nuclear industry, otherwise they will be vulnerable to the nuclear propaganda machine, which is coming back full force after lying low for some decades.
Nuclear energy does not contribute to climate change, which is why it is supported by the likes of James Hansen, Ken Caldeira. Kerry Emanuel, Tom Wigley, Pascale Braconnot, Zion Lights, the IPCC, and the Nature Conservancy–none of which could be accused of being industry shills. And right now, about half of our greenhouse gas warming potential is being masked by the shading/cooling effect of combustion particulates in the air. So as we get off fossil fuels and we lose that shading effect, the pace of warming will greatly increase–unless we either do geoengineering to replace it, or we rapidly draw down hundreds of billions of tonnes of atmospheric CO2. Fortunately, several teams are now developing smaller, hotter nuclear reactors designed for air cooling, and the forced air and “waste” heat from those could drive direct-air CO2 capture systems. At efficiencies we have already attained, a single 200 MW power plant could remove as much as a million tonnes of CO2 per year, making it a badly-needed carbon-negative power source.
Uranium mining practices were horrid back in the early days of the Cold War (when nearly all of the uranium mined was for weapons production), and racism clearly drove denying Native miners any radon protection. But we don’t mine uranium like that any more, and we have much cleaner and safer options. Tortkuduk, the worlds largest in-situ leach mine can bring up as much as 4000 tonnes of U per year from a brackish aquifer without underground work or radon exposure and with no tailings piles–from a compound about the size of a Walmart store. In today’s reactors, that much uranium could produce around five times a year’s energy from the sprawling Garzweiler lignite mining and power complex, which has devoured farms, meadows, villages, towns, and old-growth forests in Germany, and likely killed more people with its emissions than nuclear power ever has. And soon, we’ll be able to pull uranium out of seawater, for some of the cleanest metal mining on the planet.
“Too cheap to meter” came from the shoe-salesman Lewis Strauss who was never part of the nuclear industry. Nuclear companies didn’t and likely never will promise that. But on the other hand, old-tech nuclear saved an enormous number of lives and hundreds of billions in medical expenses (benefits which no-one promised) so it still seems like we got a pretty sweet deal. And some of the advanced reactor developers think they can get the energy price down to cheaper than coal–which would be huge.
What TMI, Chernobyl and Fukushima all had in common was core meltdowns. It makes no sense to cite them as arguments against developing reactors which cannot have core meltdowns. Spent fuel has been a logistical and political problem, but it has caused no environmental harm and the cumulative death toll from handling and storing hundreds of thousands of tonnes of spent fuel over more than 50 years has yet to budge from zero. Our houses are filled with things which have a much higher actual death toll. And we are maybe a couple of decades out from having kinds of reactors which can consume spent fuel (which, by the way, currently contains more energy than we’ve ever gotten from all fossil fuels), so the notion we are going to store it for a million years instead of turning it into trillions of dollars worth of energy seems highly doubtful.
Nuclear weapons production preceded nuclear power and has never needed it. Bomb fuel is made in production reactors, not power reactors. However, our civilian power reactors gave us the means to destroy the bomb fuel from 20,000 nuclear warheads. That’s more warheads than exist in the world today. It has been the greatest anti-proliferation tool we’ve ever had–far more effective than all the disarmament activist combined have ever been. And new reactors in development would be even more effective at consuming bomb fuel.
I hope the next generation does learn about the problems with old-tech nuclear–but also the benefits we got from it. I also think it would be good for them to look at how those problems are being addressed, how the benefits could be greatly expanded, and maybe even consider how they could help. But most of all, I hope they will be guided by science and reason, and not be swayed by outdated hyperbolic fear-mongering.