“The time has come for those who take the

threat of global warming seriously to

embrace the development and deployment of

safer nuclear power systems.”

- Dr. James Hansen, Climate Scientist

“Nuclear energy is the only

non-greenhouse gas-emitting

power source that can

effectively replace fossil fuels

and satisfy global demand.”

-Patrick Moore, Co-founder, Greenpeace,

Statement to US Senate Committee on Energy

& Natural Resources, April 28, 2005

Nuclear power is

"environmentally

friendly, affordable,

clean, dependable

and safe."

- Christie Whitman, former E.P.A. chief.

NYT, WASHINGTON, April 24 — The nuclear industry

has hired Christine Whitman the former administrator of

the Environmental Protection Agency, and Patrick

Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, the environmental

organization, to lead a public relations campaign for new

reactors.

Bill Gates, the philanthropist

who co-founded Microsoft,

signed a deal with the Chinese

government last year through his

startup Terra Power to build a

sodium-cooled nuclear reactor

that runs on spent uranium.

Is Nuclear Power a green, safe &

affordable solution to Climate Change?

Nuclear PowerIs it Green?

Heavy elements FISSION into lighter elements, releasing energy

in the process by E = mc2, where m is the difference in mass

between the parent and products. About 250 MeV* is released in this

reaction in the form of kinetic energy of the products.

Nuclear Fission

*Energy to break a strand of DNA ~ 1 eV

Other decay products include:

Cs-137, Sr -90, I-131, Pu-239

Radiation Types

Alpha particles (4He++)

Beta particles (e+ and e-)

Gamma-rays (g)

Neutrons (n)

Activity and Half Life

The unit of activity, R, is the curie (Ci)

1 Ci ≡ 3.7 x 1010 decays/s

The SI unit of activity is the becquerel (Bq)

1 Bq ≡ 1 decay/s

Therefore, 1 Ci = 3.7 x 1010 Bq ~10 billion decays / second

Biological Effects of Ionizing

Radiation

Iodine-131

•Half Life of 8 days

•Decay Mode: BETA (0.606 MeV) and Gamma (0.364

MeV)

•Organ most effected: Thyroid

•Iodine-131 is produced by the fission of U-235 during

operation of nuclear reactors and by plutonium (or

uranium) in the detonation of nuclear weapons.

•Pathways: Inhalation, food chain (milk, vegetables)

•Most serious fallout product from nuclear testing.

Average American alive at the time received a thyroid

radiation exposure of 2 – 300 rads.

•Chernobyl released 83 million curies of I-131

Cesium-137

•Half Life of 30 years

•Decay Mode: BETA (0.19 MeV)

•Decay to Barium-137 that radiates gamma (0.6MeV)

•Behaves like Potassium and is taken up by living

organisms as part of fluid electrolytes.

•Both internal and external hazard from cancer

•Ingested, it is absorbed in the intestine, settles in

muscles, excreted after a few months.

•Radioactive cesium is present in soil around the world

largely as a result of fallout from past atmospheric

nuclear weapons test.

Strontium-90

•Half Life of 28 years.

•Does not occur naturally. It is a by product of fission.

•Beta emitter. Decays to Yttrium-90, also a beta emitter.

•Behaves like Calcium and concentrates in bone where it

damages stem cells of the bone marrow critical to

reproduction of cells that mediate immune function.

Causes leukemia and auto-immune illnesses.

•Interferes with neuron communication leading to brain

damage of developing frontal cortex (dyslexia, autism)

•Y-90 concentrates in the glands which controls

hormonal function – interferes with estrogen and

testosterone which contributes to breast and prostrate

cancer, sexual organs.

•Half Life of 24,000 years.

•Does not occur naturally. It is a by product of fission.

•Alpha emitter (5.15 MeV)

•Acts like iron and can cross the placental barrier to

reach fetus.

•Concentrates in testicles and ovaries.

•1 pound, if uniformly distributed, could hypothetically

induce lung cancer in every person on Earth.

•5 metric tons of plutonium are dispersed around the

Earth due to nuclear tests, bombs, satellite burn ups,

fires, accidents, spill and leakages.

Plutonium 239

Uranium U-238

•Half Life of 4.5 billion years.

•Alpha emitter (5 MeV)

•Wherever you find U-238 you will find all the 14

radioactive daughters of U 238 which emit all types of

radiation upt to 100 MeV in energy.

•Concentrates in bone and kidneys.

•Chemically behaves like Calcium.

•A severe exposure (of the order of

one milligram in the kidneys)

causes lesions of the tubular

cells and deterioration of the kidney

function.

Critical Mass: the minimum amount of

fissionable material to produce self-sustained

chain reaction, a condition called criticality.

In a nuclear power plant, the critical chain

reaction must control the neutron flux to avoid

an exponential increase in fissions, going

supercritical.

In a nuclear bomb, you want a supercritical

chain reaction.

Thousands of pellets of enriched uranium are sealed inside 12-14 ft metal fuel rods to generate electricity in a nuclear reactor.

Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR)

U-235 absorbs slow neutrons – they are slowed down by water – the

neutrons become ‘thermalized’. Control rods absorb neutrons and

moderate the chain reaction. A meltdown can happen if they fail.

Cooling Towers

Reactor

443 plants world wide (16% energy), 103 in the US (20% energy)

Current Status

Nukes In California

Nukes In CaliforniaThe Diablo Canyon Power Plant is an electricity-generating nuclear power plant near Avila Beach in San Luis Obispo County, California. After the permanent shutdown of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in 2013 it is the only nuclear plant operational in the state.

No green house gases are directly released

in the nuclear fission reaction.

It is True...

But what about during the ENTIRE fuel cycle?

Uranium Mining

Uranium is mined as ore from open pits or deep shaft mines. High grade ores yield 10 kg uranium per tonne

rock.

World Nuclear Power Plants need 67,000 tonnes of natural uranium per year – 67,000,000 tons of rock!

Uranium Miner

"I used to go in and haul the rocks out, and I guess that's where I got hurt, because there was a lot of dust after they did the blasting and we went in right away."

- Bernard BenallyRed Rock Navajo Reservation, Arizona

High Grade Ore is a Limited Resource

Known uranium reserves will last for about fifty years at the

current consumption rate. If the nuclear share is increased to

10% of the current world energy supply by construction of

1000 new nuclear power plants (more than four times the

current world nuclear capacity), the reserves will last for about

fourteen years.

If low grade ores of less than 0.1% are used (1 kg of U per ton

of rock) the energy consumed to extract the one kg of uranium

will surpass the amount of energy which can be generated

from that kilogram in the nuclear system.

In-Situ Leach Mining

At an ISL site, a series of wells are drilled into the orebody. Millions of litres of

strong acid or alkaline solution are then injected directly into the groundwater,

stripping the uranium from the host rock and mixing it into the water. In the center

of a circle of injection wells, a production well sucks most of the uranium bearing

water up to the surface and pipes it into a processing plant where the uranium is

recovered and the wastes are dealt with by either moving them elsewhere or

pumping them back into the ground and thereby polluting the groundwater.

Nuclear Energy InstituteEducational Website for Kids

In-Situ Leach Mining

Uranium Mill TailingsThe rock containing Uranium is crushed into a fine sand. After the uranium is

chemically removed, the sand is stored in huge reservoirs. These left-over piles

of radioactive sand are called "uranium tailings".

Uranium Mill Tailings

By 1989, some 140 million tons of mill tailings have accumulated in the United States alone, with 10 to 15 million tons added each year. Although their radiation is generally less concentrated than other types of waste, some of the isotopes in these tailings are long-lived and can be hazardous for many thousands of years.

Atlas Mines Tailing Pile

10.5 million tons of uranium mill wastes including 426 million gallons of highly-contaminated liquid. An Oak Ridge National Laboratory study shows that the steady rate of uranium tailing contaminant leakage into the Colorado River is estimated at 9,648 gallons per day.

Uranium Tailings at Elliot Lake Ontario

130 million tons radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years

Uranium Mill Sites

Through a series of chemical leaching processes,

crushed ore is transformed into a powdered concentrate

called yellowcake. Most of the ore that goes into the mill

exists as waste, which contains 85% of the ore's original

radioactivity.

Purified Yellow Cake in Aqueous Solution

converted intoUranium Hexafluoride gas UF6

Uranium Refiner, Blind River, Ontario, Canada.

Storing hexafloride (UF6) waste in cylinders requires

constant monitoring because the estimated lifetime of

cylinders is measured in decades, whereas the half-life of U-

238 is 4.5 billion years, and UF6 is highly unstable.

CFC is a GHG

The enrichment of uranium fuel for nuclear power

uses 93 percent of the refrigerant chlorofluorocarbon

(CFC) gas made annually in the United States. CFC

compounds are also potent global warming agents

10,000 to 20,000 times more efficient heat trappers

than carbon dioxide, which itself is responsible for 50

percent of the global warming phenomenon.

Enriching Uranium

Uranium: 238U is >99% in nature 235U is ~0.7% in nature

• Naturally occurring Uranium must be enriched to ~5% 235U for nuclear power plants

• Enrichment methods

– Gas centrifuge (Now in Iran and formerly found in Iraq)

– Gaseous diffusion (used in USA)

– Electromagnetic isotope separation – uses strong magnetic field to deflect ions of lighter isotope farther than heavier isotope

Gaseous diffusion

• Thousands of diffusion filters needed

Filter U-235 from U-238through miles of filters

Portsmouth, Ohio, Gaseous Diffusion Plant operating around the

clock, consuming in 1 day as much electricity as a city of the size of

Sacramento or Memphis, Tennessee.

Depleted Uranium• After isotope separation, the remaining

238U is said to be “depleted” as it is missing 235U – however, 238U is radioactive

• Uranium is a very dense metal (1.7 x Pb), making it ideal for use in armor and shell casings

DU Used in Recent Wars:

Balkans: 200 TonsAfghanistan: 800 TonsGulf War 1: 350 TonsIraq War: 200 tons???

Decay Series for U-238

Elements with Z 83 are

unstable and

spontaneously decay by

alpha and beta radiation

until they turn into stable

lead with Z = 82.

Note: some elements can

decay by both modes.

Decay Series for U-238

U-235: Converting the Gas into a Green salt and then into Metal

Uranium is shipped to Fernald from the Portsmouth plant as a gel. It is heated into gas in these three autoclave vaporizers. The gas is converted into green salt and then into

metal for fuel fabrication. Feed Materials Production Center, Fernald, Ohio.

Thousands of pellets of enriched uranium are sealed inside 12-14 ft metal fuel rods to generate electricity in a nuclear reactor.

Nuclear Fuel RodsA typical 100 MW reactor contains 50,000 fuel rods containing

more than 100 tons of uranium.

Cooling Towers

Reactor

PWR Nuclear Power Plants Need Water – LOTS of Water.

100,000 gallons per minute are pumped to one or more Cooling Towers, consuming 28-30 million gallons of water per day. An equally huge volume of wastewater is discharged at temperatures up to 25 F hotter than the water into which it flows. Indigenous marine life suited to colder temperatures is eliminated or forced to move, disrupting delicately balanced ecosystems. Nuclear power plants discharge a significant amount of tritium as part of their routine operations; sometimes more is discharged as a result of mishaps and incidents. There have been 10 reported tritium leaks at US nuclear power plants in the last decade.

Nuclear Power Plants Need COOOOL Water! With Global Warming water

temperatures can rise to high….

NUCLEAR GENERATING STATION USESSeawater for cooling: up to 2.4 billion gallons daily

“Once-through cooling is contributing to declining fisheries and the degradation of estuaries, bay and coastal waters. These (power) plants indiscriminately 'fish' the water in these habitats by killing the eggs, larvae and adults when water drawn from the natural environment flows through the plant.” -2005 analysis completed for the CA Energy Commission

Water Vapor is a GHG!

“The most powerful greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is water vapour... Just a rise of 1% of water vapour could raise the global average temperature of Earth's surface more then 4 degrees Celsius.”

-Andrew E. Dessler, Texas A & M University -Vladimir Shaidurov, Russian Academy of SciencesThe Science and Politics of Global Climate Change

After three or four years in a reactor, the pellets will become inefficient for producing electricity and the fuel rods will be removed from the reactor. After removal, the fuel rods (now called spent nuclear fuel) will be highly radioactive, requiring safe long-term disposal.

Present nuclear power plants utilise only 0.7 per cent of uranium and the remaining 99.3 per

cent is the spent fuel Plutonium, which remains highly radioactive for over 10,000 years in

the storage.

Nuclear Waste

250,000 tons of Spent Fuel Rods

10,000 tons made per year in US

Spent Fuel Pools HIGHLY Radioactive

Nuclear Power Requires a Military to Protect it as a terrorist target

The radioactive reactor building must also be

decommissioned after 40-50 years of operation,

taken apart by remote control and similarly

transported long distances and stored.

GHG will be produced in the process.

(The cost is paid by US taxpayers!)

Nuclear Waste DisposalYucca Mountain, Nevada

77,000 Tons of High Level WasteCANCELLED

Yucca Mountain

Reprocessing the Hot Rods

The PROBLEMIran, North Korea, India:

Every Nuclear Power Plant is a source for atomic weapons.

There is no “civilian” nuclear power. Nuclear Power must have military

protection because of the plutonium.

Reprocessing Plutonium

• 239Pu is a waste product in nuclear power reactors, that is intermixed with other spent reactor fuels.

• In order to become weapons grade, it must be separated out (“reprocessed”)

THE RODS ARE FULL OF PLUTONIUM!Plutonium:Nuclear Power By-Product

•Each 1000 megawatt nuclear

power plant produces 500 lbs of

Pu per year.

•Global production due to nuclear

power plants: ~1,200 tons

•Global production due to nuclear

weapons: 250 tons.

•5 kg in an atomic bomb!

Nuclear Power Requires a Military to Protect it from theft and proliferation

Nuclear Processing Plant Accident1999, Tokai, Japan: Uranium Processing Plant converts enriched

uranium hexafluoride (UF6) to uranium dioxide (UO2) (MOX).

A Criticality accident involved a self-sustaining chain reaction caused from handling of too large amounts of enriched uranium. The chain reaction continued for around 20 hours, before it could be stopped, releasing large amounts of gamma and neutron radiation. 1 worker died.

A complete life-cycle analysis shows that generating electricity from nuclear power

emits 20-40% of the carbon dioxide of a

gas-fired system when the whole system is taken into account.

Nuclear Power: The Energy Balanceby Jan-Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Smith, Center for Energy Conservation, Netherlands

In sum….Is nuclear power green?

Nuclear PowerIs it Safe?

Nuclear AccidentsIf you set aside Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the safety record of nuclear [power] is really very good.

-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, June 2001

The events at Fukushima are level 5, so far and there has only been one 7 in history: Chernobyl in 1986.

http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/mar/14/nuclear-power-plant-accidents-list-rank

Three Mile Island: April 1979Nuclear Power became unpopular after Three Mile Island

when an accident caused the fuel rods to partially melt.

Three Mile Island: April 1979

13–17 million curies of radioactive iodine excaped in air

2.4–13 million cures of Xenon and Krypton (gamma emitters)

Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Disaster, April 26th, 1986

Chernobyl reactor number 4 in

Ukraine was ripped apart by an

explosion on 26 April 1986, and

burned for 10 days. . 10 tons of

the 200 tons of enriched

uranium blasted into the

atmosphere. It released a

massive amount of radioactivity

(1018 becquerels) over Europe

and the rest of the world

•Evacuation of more than a thousand square miles

•400 times more radiation released than Hiroshima Bomb

•350,000 people dislocated

•Exclusion Zone is a permanent Ghost Town.

Local Effects

Chernobyl released 50-80 million curies of radioactivity into the atmosphere

Average Background Radiation in Europe: 0.3 kBq/m2

1 Curie = 10 Billion Bq

Chernobyl Nowand forever

The New Shelter

The new protective covering - 110 meters high, 260 meters wide - costs about 2 billion euros. Financed mainly by the G7 and some European countries, it is being built 300 meters from the nuclear reactor by Bechtel. It should last about 100 years. And then another one will have to be built, forever.

•600,000 exposed to high levels of radiation

•6 million people exposed to low levels

•56 deaths to date

•4,000 cases of thyroid cancer to date

•The official number of disabled Chernobyl

rescue workers today in Ukraine is 106,000.

•2 million officially classified as victims

•Increased rates of birth defects

•Hundreds of Billions of dollars in costs to date

•9,000-90,000 cancer induced deaths will occur

(Depending on who you’re talking to….)

Chernobyl Consequences

30 years later…

Fukushima Daiichi nuclear

disaster: March 13, 2011

The nuclear plant, located about 240 kilometers (150 miles) north of Tokyo,

was swamped by the tsunami that followed Japan's historic March 11

earthquake. The flooding knocked out coolant systems at the plant, leading

to spectacular hydrogen explosions in two reactor buildings, a suspected

explosion inside a third and extensive damage from the spent fuel housed in

a fourth unit that had been shut down before the quake.

The "outer building" surrounding Unit 3 of Fukushima I

explodes due to the ignition of built up hydrogen gas, on

March 13, 2011. This is the reactor which has the

extremely dangerous plutonium-laced MOX fuel.

Radioactive cesium has taken up residence in the exclusion zone,

replacing the human inhabitants.Cesium-137 has a half-life of 30

years, and since it takes about 10 half-lives for any radionuclide to

disappear, it will maintain ownership of the exclusion zone for

centuries. - Physicians for Social Responsibility

Nuclear PowerIs it Cheap?

Depends on who you talk to!

Pro Nuclear graph:

Anti Nuclear graph:

The Energy Policy Act of 2005

Major Incentives for Investment

•$14 billion in tax dollars, taxpayer-backed

loans, and tax credits to build 6 new

nuclear reactors.

•$2 billion line item to compensate nuclear

corporations for any delay

•Price Anderson Act caps the industry’s

liability at $15 billion

Obama Funded Billions for New Nukes:

Cost to Clean up the Mess that

can never be cleaned up?

Research shows that improved efficiency saves as much energy as new nuclear power plants and is

much cheaper and employs more people.

Nuclear PowerIs it Green, Cheap & Safe?

The Sun radiates 4 x 1023 kilowatts of Energy

Solar Constant: 1.4kW/m2 at top of Earth’s Atmosphere

US Average Power Received: 180W/m2

The unleashed power of

the atom has changed

everything save our

modes of thinking and we

thus drift toward

unparalleled catastrophe"

-Albert Einstein

Bronze Buddha at Hiroshima

Nuclear Power