Interview Conducted by Philip Bethge und Rafaela von Bredow
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Tag: nuclear energy
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Undeterred by Fukushima: Nuclear Lobby Pushes Ahead with New Reactors
The road to the construction site is flanked by ruins. At one point, there’s a church that looks like its steeple has been shaved right off. An icy wind whistles through empty farmlands.
The buildings, which are slowly decaying at the foot of a small hill, are relics of the former German province of East Prussia. Now they are located in the eastern part of the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, located between Poland and Lithuania.
At the top of the knoll, three cranes are pivoting. A massive construction pit comes into view, 20 meters (66 feet) deep and 500 meters long. Visitors can walk down a ramp to reach its bottom of sand-brown dirt.
Yevgeniy Vlasenko, the director of the nuclear power plant that will be built on the site, slips on his hardhat. With Vyacheslav Machonin, his construction supervisor, trailing close behind, Vlasenko heads for a mass of freshly poured concrete blocks. All around, workers are bending the iron rods that will be used in the building’s ring-shaped foundation.
“The reactor with its fuel rods will rest on top of this,” Vlasenko explains. His construction supervisor proudly reports to him that his workers are mixing 2,000 cubic meters (70,000 cubic feet) of concrete per hour for the structure. Should there be a core meltdown, the extremely hot uranium will drip down and be trapped in this basin. But, of course, Vlasenko insists that things “will never get to that point.”
Vlasenko doesn’t want to spoil the good mood on the construction site. Everything is reportedly going according to plan: In four or five years, at most, the first block of the new Kaliningrad Nuclear Power Plant will begin generating 1,200 megawatts of electricity. “Then we’ll sell the energy to Europe,” Vlasenko says. “Including Germany.”
Build Reactors ‘Until Your Noses Bleed’
The gaunt director and his more rotund construction supervisor can’t help but laugh a bit about the irony of selling nuclear power to Germany, now that it has decided to phase out its own nuclear power plants by 2022. “You used to build fantastic nuclear power plants, elegant and solid,” says Machonin, who is now working on his ninth such construction project.
Before this project, Machnonin was in the southwestern Iranian city of Bushehr. “There, we took over and finished the Siemens building project,” he says. “And we adopted some things from you there.” Both of them shake their heads. “How could the Germans just throw everything away,” asks Vlasenko. “Nuclear energy isn’t on its way out; it’s at the beginning of a renaissance.”
(-> Read original story at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)
Vlasenko is employed by Rosatom, the state-owned Russian nuclear company that is building a third of the nuclear power plants currently under construction across the world. The German and Russian opinions about the future of nuclear energy couldn’t be more different. While Germany has decided to abandon atomic energy, Russia is unflagging in its commitment to the power of nuclear fission.
Indeed, during a celebration marking the opening of a new reactor, Russian leader Vladimir Putin called on those in his country’s atomic industry to build nuclear power plants “until your noses bleed.” Likewise, he has plenty of derisive things to say about Germany’s nuclear anxieties. “I don’t know where they intend to get their heat from,” he says. “They don’t want nuclear energy; they don’t want natural gas. Do they want to go back to heating with wood?”
No Economic Sense
A year after the catastrophe at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, it is clear just how little the nuclear lobby and its government supporters have been unsettled by the disaster in Japan. But rejection of nuclear energy is growing among people the world over — and building new reactors makes no sense in economic terms.
On the face of things, it would appear that little has changed. Only a few countries, such as Switzerland, Italy and Belgium, are joining Germany in turning their backs on nuclear energy. Indeed, it is primarily Russia and the United States, the two nuclear heavyweights, that are competing in a new atomic race, though this time with technologies geared toward civilian purposes. New nuclear power plants are being built with particular relish in emerging economies, such as China and India, who want to satisfy at least part of their energy needs with uranium (see graphic).
For the builders and operators of nuclear energy plants, the accident in Japan came at what might be considered a bad time. After years of stagnation, not only the emerging economies of Asia — China, South Korea and India — but also Russia and the United States were beginning to put greater emphasis on nuclear energy. This decision was driven not only by the growing energy needs of the newly industrializing nations, but also by fears related to carbon emissions and climate change.
This prompted the backers of nuclear energy to make frantic attempts to downplay the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, with the aim of nipping the debate about nuclear safety in the bud. For example, John Ritch, the director-general of the World Nuclear Association, asserted that the disaster hadn’t cost anyone their life. “Nuclear power will be even safer after Fukushima,” Ritch told the BBC in November, “and will continue to mature as the world’s premier non-carbon technology.”
Declining Support
Ritch’s views are shared by Roland Schenkel, a German physicist who used to be the director-general of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. Fukushima, he says, did not prove that nuclear energy is risky elsewhere in the world. “Clearly, these plants were not appropriately protected against well-known specific risks, such as earthquakes and tsunamis.”
Still, all of these efforts at placating and winning citizens over have apparently failed. Already in June 2011, the leading British polling company Ipsos MORI identified a decline in global support for the continued use of nuclear energy or its expansion. In a survey of around 19,000 people in 24 countries, the company found that only 38 percent of respondents approved of nuclear energy, which put it at the bottom of the lists of energy sources, far below even coal-generated energy. The survey also found that the greatest numbers of people who had changed their minds about nuclear energy in the wake of Fukushima were found in South Korea, followed by Japan, China and India.
A poll conducted for the BBC in late November 2011 suggests that these survey figures are not a flash-in-the-pan reaction to the dramatic television images from Fukushima. Only 22 percent of the over 23,000 people questioned for the poll considered nuclear energy to be relatively safe and backed its further expansion. Somewhat surprisingly, there was also an increase in the number of people rejecting the construction of new nuclear power plants in France and Russia, where nuclear energy has traditionally enjoyed strong support. While the views of Americans seemed to be unaffected by events in Fukushima, there was even a slight gain in support for nuclear energy among the British, which might have something to do with the fact that many environmental activists there have embraced nuclear energy as a tool for combating climate change.
China Leads the Pack
On balance, it would be a stretch to speak of a renaissance in nuclear power. According to official figures, there were 436 nuclear power plants still operating around the world at the beginning of March 2012, or eight fewer than the record figure reached in 2002. “If you also subtract the reactors in Japan that have been taken off the grid, the number is only 388,” says nuclear expert Mycle Schneider. “That’s not exactly a renaissance.”
Indeed, despite all the upbeat rhetoric from the atomic industry, hardly any nuclear expert seriously believes there will be a significant increase in the number of nuclear power plants in operation around the world. Schneider points out that existing reactors have a high average age and are gradually being disconnected from the grid. “The nuclear power plants being planned or under construction will not make up for this unstoppable reduction,” he adds.
Granted, according to statistics from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), 63 nuclear power plants are currently being built. However, a number of these are projects with no end in sight, such as the dozen plants that have already been on the organization’s list for more than 20 years. The current record is held by the second reactor unit of the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant in the US state of Tennessee, whose construction commenced in 1973. The Westinghouse reactor is supposed to finally begin operation this year, but its launch was recently pushed back yet again.
China leads the pack with 26 new nuclear power plants. Despite its skyrocketing energy needs, the country still conducted safety checks at all of its new plants in the wake of Fukushima. Construction work on several new plants is scheduled to commence this year, and a number of plants, such as the Hongyanhe Nuclear Power Plant in northeastern China, are supposed to begin generating energy. However, officials have not approved any new building projects since March 2011, the month of the Fukushima disaster.
China is also putting much emphasis on renewable energy. Indeed, in 2010, the country boasted 42,287 megawatts in installed wind energy capacity, or over four times as much as its nuclear reactors can generate. This gradual turning away from carbon-based energy production is also supposed to continue, with plans calling for 100,000 megawatts of wind energy and 43,000 megawatts of nuclear energy capacity by 2015.
Resistance in India
India is following China in terms of both skyrocketing growth and the expansion of its nuclear-energy capabilities. Speaking at the India International Nuclear Symposium in late February, Minister of Power Sushil Kumar Shinde praised nuclear energy as both cheaper and “greener” than imported coal.
Nevertheless, after Fukushima, there has also been growing resistance to nuclear energy among Indians. In October 2011, demonstrations were held against the Rosatom-built power plant in Koodankulam, on the southern tip of India, which have succeeded in postponing its start-up.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has complained that environmentalist groups based in the US and Scandinavia backed the demonstrations. “The atomic energy program has got into difficulties because these NGOs … don’t appreciate the need for our country to increase the energy supply,” he said in the February edition of Science magazine.
Still, the anti-nuclear movement is thrilled. “It’s already remarkable that these sorts of problems are suddenly appearing in such tightly run countries as India and China,” says Tobias Münchmeyer, a Greenpeace nuclear expert based in Berlin.
New Plants for America
But for the time being, Western builders of nuclear power plants can still take comfort in all of the contracts they have from emerging economies. It is primarily US-based reactor-builders like Westinghouse who are the big players on the global stage. Back in 2007, Westinghouse, which is a subsidiary of Toshiba, and a partner signed contracts to build four new nuclear facilities in China. Two AP1000-type reactors are currently being built in Sanmen, in the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang. The first reactor is scheduled to enter operation in 2013. Construction work is simultaneously being conducted at the Haiyang facility on the eastern coast of China.
Plans also call for new nuclear power plants to be built in the United States. In early February, for the first time since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) approved the construction of two new Westinghouse reactors. Workers have already dug up the ground and laid the power lines for the reactors in the pine forests of the southeastern state of Georgia. The two 1,000-megawatt giants, which together cost $14 billion, are scheduled to go online in 2016. The new reactors are part of an expansion of the Vogtle Electric Generating Plant operated by the energy supplier Southern Company near the city of Augusta.
If the nuclear industry is to continue supplying 20 percent of America’s energy, there’s no way to avoid building new plants. The fact is that many of the 104 nuclear reactors currently in service in the United States are extremely old, and most of them have already been operating for over 30 years. To buy some time, since 2000, the NRC has extended the operational life span of 71 reactors to 60 years.
The main focus of criticism are the 23 ancient boiling water reactors, developed by the US industrial giant General Electric. These are the same type of power plant that blew up in Fukushima.
The US Department of Energy has $18.5 billion in federal guarantees available for building new nuclear power plants. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, the co-winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics, praises the expansion project in Georgia as pioneering. “The Vogtle project will help America to recapture the lead in nuclear technology,” he says.
Approval could also soon be in the works for two reactor blocks in South Carolina. Indeed, energy suppliers are putting added pressure on the NRC, which has already received applications for some 30 additional reactor blocks. Still, critics doubt that all of the planned facilities will actually be built. Even under the best of conditions, a single nuclear power plant costs, per megawatt of capacity, almost twice as much as a coal-fired power plant and almost four times as much as a gas-fired one.
For this reason, Amory Lovins, an energy expert at the Colorado-based Rocky Mountain Institute, thinks that the supposed renaissance of atomic energy is nothing more than a nuclear-industry fabrication. Indeed, since a significant portion of the financing for nuclear facilities comes from federal subsidies and private investors are hardly ever involved, Lovins compares the situation to a form of “nuclear socialism.”
“The nuclear industry is in a desperate effort to demonstrate that it is healthy,” he says. “Loan guarantees are not a sign of economic health,” he adds, in the same way that “blood transfusions are not a sign of medical health.”
Germany Supports Plants Elsewhere
Rainer Baake, a former senior official at Germany’s Environment Ministry who is viewed as the architect of the nuclear phase-out passed by the Social Democrat-Green coalition government in 2002, also finds it hardly surprising that there is not “more serious thinking about new reactors in any country with a liberalized energy market.” He notes how two new nuclear power plants in France and Finland are not being financed according to standard market rules. “Costs have doubled, as have construction times,” Baake says. “As a result, investment bankers regard the buildings as a kind of cautionary warning.”
Even more surprising is the fact that Germany, the country so openly set on phasing out its own nuclear energy, intends to provide government support to the construction of a new nuclear power plant in far-away Brazil. Sitting on Economics Minister Philipp Rösler’s desk is an application for a so-called Hermes export credit guarantee from the German government valued at €1.3 billion. In the Brazilian municipality of Angra dos Reis, located in the southern part of the state of Rio de Janeiro, the French nuclear giant Areva wants to build a nuclear power plant that German engineers had planned to build in the 1980s.
A report compiled by a Brazilian nuclear expert on behalf of the German environmental organization Urgewald finds that the proposed Angra location is dangerous. Wedged between the sea and steep slopes, the reactor would be practically defenseless against a tsunami or one of the region’s frequent earthquakes. Worse yet, there is only a single coastal road on which the population could be evacuated. “We have the potential for a catastrophe that could even surpass Fukushima,” the report says.
Likewise, the report notes that the Angra location doesn’t meet the criteria that Eletronuclear, the Brazilian regulatory agency, “currently uses to identify suitable locations for future nuclear power plants.” This month, Germany’s Economics Ministry plans to decide whether it will make the construction of Angra 3 possible by extending a loan guarantee.
In the wake of the Fukushima accident, the German government raised the prospect of also no longer granting Hermes loan guarantees for the export of nuclear technology should the country decide to phase out its own nuclear energy facilities. Since then, however, the issue has not been discussed. Klaus-Peter Willsch, a prominent member of Merkel’s ruling Christian Democrats and a member of the parliament’s Budget Committee, even disputes the claim that safety considerations played a role in the government’s decision to phase out nuclear energy. “We only did it on account of people’s sensitivities,” he says.
Phasing Out the Phase-Out
Everything is relative, it would seem, including Germany’s nuclear phase-out. The Rosatom higher-ups working in Kaliningrad on the nuclear power plant project have their own thoughts about that, as well. Project director Sergey Boyarkin finds it rather convenient that the second reactor block in Kaliningrad is scheduled to enter into service at the end of the decade, right when Germany is supposed to be shutting down all of its plants. “We are making an offer to German energy companies that we could lay a power line from Kaliningrad, along the Nord Stream gas pipeline through the Baltic Sea,” Boyarkin says. Doing so, he adds, would help Germany avoid shortages in its power grid.
The Russian nuclear executive also thinks it’s conceivable that, before that could happen, Germany might once again phase out the phase-out. The first phase out he’s referring to is that passed in 2002 by the Social Democrat-Green coalition government led by then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and then-Vice Chancellor Joschka Fischer, which was then postponed by 12 years in 2010 by Chancellor Merkel. “Merkel has already revised once what Gerhard and Joschka passed back then,” Boyarkin says.
Translated from the German by Josh Ward
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Jonathan Schell: ‘Our Illusion Is that We Can Control Nuclear Energy’
SPIEGEL: Mr. Schell, what unsettled you the most about the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe?
Schell: Clearly this whole accident just went completely off the charts of what had been prepared for. If you look at the manuals for dealing with nuclear safety accidents, you’re not going to find a section that says muster your military helicopters, dip buckets into the sea and then try as best you can to splash water onto the reactor and see if you can hit a spent fuel pool. There’s going to be no instruction saying, go and get your riot control trucks to spray the reactor, only to find that you’re driven back by radiation. The potential for total disaster was clearly demonstrated.
SPIEGEL: But supporters of nuclear energy are already preparing a different narrative. They say that an old, outdated nuclear power plant was hit by a monster tsunami and an earthquake at the same time — and, yet, so far only a handful of people have been exposed to radioactive energy. Not a single person has died.
Schell: Clearly it’s better than if you had had a massive Chernobyl-type release of energy. But I think that any reasonable analysis will show that this was not a power plant that was under control. The operators were thrown back on wild improvisation. The worst sort of disaster was a desperate mistake or two away. Through a bunch of workarounds and frantic fixes, technicians at Fukushima headed that off, but that was no sure thing. No one will be able honestly to portray this event as a model of nuclear safety. It would be like saying that the Cuban missile crisis showed the safety of nuclear arsenals.
SPIEGEL: It is not just in Germany, but also in the United States and China that people are stockpiling supplies of iodine tablets. And shipments from Japan are supposed to be tested for radioactivity. Where does this profound fear of nuclear energy come from?
Schell: In the public mind, nuclear power is associated with nuclear weapons. In both, a nuclear chain reaction is, in fact, the source of power. It’s true that you can’t have an atomic explosion in a nuclear power plant, but people are quite right to make that association. For example there is also the proliferation connection. In other words, the problem with the association of nuclear power with nuclear weapons goes beyond the escape of radiation and Chernobyl-type accidents. The third big challenge is, of course, the waste problem. You have to keep that waste underground for maybe a half-million years. So we’re acting in a kind of cosmic way in the terrestrial setting, even though we just don’t have the wisdom and staying power to do so.
SPIEGEL: You say that dealing with nuclear energy is like gambling with “Mother Nature’s power.” Why is it so totally different from other sources of energy?
Schell: Because it’s so colossally more powerful. Comparable energy can be found, at best, in the center of stars. It’s basically not found on earth naturally, and it’s only through our own scientific brilliance that we’ve been able to introduce it into the terrestrial setting. But, unfortunately, we’re not as advanced morally, practically and politically as we are scientifically, so we are not prepared to control this force properly. The most dangerous illusion we have concerning nuclear energy is that we can control it.
(-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)
SPIEGEL: Despite all these concerns, we have seen an emerging renaissance in nuclear energy in recent years.
Schell: I don’t think there really was a nuclear renaissance. There was the phrase “nuclear renaissance,” but already in many parts of the world the financial aspects of nuclear power were not working out. The bankers were not stepping forward to finance new power plants. Insurance companies were reluctant to cover the risk.
SPIEGEL: Many environmentalists are now even calling for an expansion of nuclear power — because they see it as the only way to limit climate change.
Schell: I find their arguments weak. In the first place, there are about 450 nuclear power plants around the world. To make a serious dent in carbon emissions, you would have to double or triple that –and not only in countries as technically sophisticated as Japan. More importantly, I fear the attempted solution would be self-defeating in its own terms. Think how the high the cost will be if we pour our scarce resources into this faulty one and then there is a truly catastrophic accident down the road, and we were forced by this to liquidate the investment. This would be not only a disaster in its own right, but a disaster for the overall effort to head off global warming.
SPIEGEL: German Chancellor Angela Merkel had always been a supporter of nuclear energy. Now she is talking about expediting Germany’s planned phase-out of nuclear power. Will Germany be able to succeed in eschewing nuclear power entirely?
Schell: The anti-nuclear movement certainly has been stronger in Germany than in practically any other country, even before the Fukushima incident. I’d say it looks quite possible that Germany will go back to the phase-out policy, and that its nuclear power plants will be taken offline quickly. And I’d be surprised if Japan did not go in the same direction.
SPIEGEL: Why don’t we see similar anti-nuclear protests in the United States?
Schell: The whole nuclear industry has had a low profile in the United States, perhaps, in part, because we haven’t seen the construction of new power plants since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.
SPIEGEL: But President Barack Obama has now announced the construction of new nuclear power plants.
Schell: … and people in the US don’t seem to be bothered by it so far. That’s been true, until now. New polls show that support for nuclear power has dropped sharply. Honestly, I don’t think Americans have been thinking about this issue very much. Now the Fukushima accident will concentrate people’s minds.
SPIEGEL: Will Obama abandon his pro-nuclear energy policies?
Schell: There’s a real chance that, in practice, he will back off — also for budgetary reasons. If you try to add in all kinds of new safety features, then you raise the price. The cost of building a nuclear power plant today already costs tens of billions of dollars.
SPIEGEL: The greatest enthusiasm to be found anywhere once permeated the US shortly after the discovery of nuclear energy. During the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration enthusiastically promoted its “Atoms for Peace” program.
Schell: That story is interesting because with President Dwight D. Eisenhower, we see the close connection at every stage of nuclear power with nuclear weapons. Eisenhower increased the US arsenal from around 1,400 to 20,000 nuclear weapons. But he also wanted an element of peace in his policy. This is where the “Atoms for Peace” program came in, whereby countries would be given technology to produce nuclear power, the “friendly atom,” in exchange for constraints on proliferation of nuclear weapons — the “destructive atom.” That rationale is still embodied today in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
SPIEGEL: Obama has outlined his vision of a world without nuclear weapons. But the reaction to it has been lukewarm, even within his own team.
Schell: Within the Obama administration, it seems to be the president himself — and possibly even the president alone — who really believes in this vision. But he has the public on his side. If you ask people if they would like to live in a world without nuclear weapons, a very high majority answer in the affirmative. On the other hand, there is a powerful bureaucratic infrastructure left in the Pentagon, in the State Department, in the Energy Department that is not ready to translate Obama’s vision into action and works to thwart it. He needs more supporters among his own officials.
World Destruction Is Less Likely Today, But ‘Technically’ Possible
SPIEGEL: Is a world without nuclear weapons even a realistic vision? With the technology already out there, wasn’t the genie permanently released from the bottle with Hiroshima in 1945?
Schell: There will never be a world that is not nuclear capable. Once that knowledge was acquired, it could never be lost. So the art of living without nuclear weapons is an art of living without them, but with the knowledge of how to make them. The classic argument against a nuclear weapons-free world is that somebody will make use of that residual knowledge, build a nuclear weapon and start giving orders to a defenseless world. But what I point out is that other countries would also have that knowledge and they could, in very short order, be able to return to nuclear armament. Therefore, the imbalance is much more temporary than it first seems.
SPIEGEL: Is the outlawing of nuclear weapons possible without also abolishing nuclear energy as well?
Schell: A nuclear weapons-free world should be one in which nuclear technology is under the strictest possible control. But strict control of all nuclear technology is, of course, far more difficult as long as you continue to have nuclear energy production, as long as uranium continues to be enriched and as long plutonium is still being made somewhere.
SPIEGEL: How serious do you think the current threat is of nuclear technology falling into the wrong hands?
Schell: It is extremely real. The two most active hot spots for nuclear proliferation right now are Iran and North Korea. But you also have many other countries that are suddenly showing a renewed interest in nuclear power. The transfer of the technology in the Middle East, especially, is becoming a real danger. We may have fewer nuclear weapons, but we have more fingers on the button.
SPIEGEL: Does that make the world today more dangerous than it was during the Cold War?
Schell: No. I have too lively a memory of the Cuban missile crisis in the middle of the Cold War, which really looked like the potential end of the world. Regardless, it is true to say that the nature of the danger has changed.
SPIEGEL: So the elimination of humanity through nuclear weapons is still a concrete possibility?
Schell: Technically, the option is still there. What’s harder, though, is to frame scenarios in which all of the weapons would be fired simultaneously. Clearly, this is not as likely as it was during the Cold War. There are other colossal risks associated with lesser uses of nuclear weapons, though, ones that we are just becoming aware of. For instance, we have learned that the ecological perils of nuclear warfare can be triggered by much smaller numbers of weapons. There’s a new study showing that the use of just 100 or 150 nuclear weapons in a conflict between Pakistan and India would cause a nuclear winter through the burning of cities and the lofting of soot into the atmosphere. That would produce global famine.
SPIEGEL: How great a threat do you think there is of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists?
Schell: Over the long term, it’s clear that this danger is rising. It’s just in the nature of scientific knowledge and technology to become more and more available as time passes. The moment must come when it passes beyond the control of states alone and into the hands of lesser groupings.
SPIEGEL: To what extent are nuclear power plants protected against terrorist attacks?
Schell: So far, few adequate security precautions have been taken to mitigate the potential consequences. The nuclear energy industry has succeeded with its argument that such measures would simply be too costly.
SPIEGEL: Does the example of the events in Japan show that human beings are incapable of learning from history? After all, the country is one that has experienced the horror of nuclear bombs first hand and nevertheless decided to rely on atomic energy.
Schell: Kenzaburo Oe, the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, said that going ahead with nuclear power in Japan is a betrayal of the victims of Hiroshima. But perhaps Fukushima will be a turning point — not just for Japan, but for the rest of the world as well.
SPIEGEL: Mr. Schell, we thank you for this interview.
Interview conducted by Philip Bethge and Gregor Peter Schmitz
(-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)
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Japan’s Chernobyl: Fukushima Marks the End of the Nuclear Era
Japanese television brought the catastrophe into millions of living rooms throughout the country, where viewers watched in horror as an explosion struck a nuclear reactor in Fukushima.
The explosion on Saturday blew off the roof of the reactor building, sending a cloud of thick white smoke into the air. When the smoke had dissipated, only three of what had been four white reactor buildings were still visible.
Nothing but a ghostly shell remained of the fourth building.
The outside walls of the reactor 1 building had burst. The steel shell that contains the red-hot fuel rods apparently withstood the explosion, but it was unclear if a major disaster could still be averted. In addition, four other reactors in Fukushima’s two power plant complexes were not fully under control.
Second Explosion
Then, on Monday, a second explosion hit the Fukushima Daiichi plant, this time involving the facility’s reactor 3. The blast injured 11 workers and sent a huge column of smoke into the air. It was unclear if radiation leaked during that explosion, which was apparently caused by a build up of hydrogen, with the plant’s operator saying that radiation levels at the reactor were still below legal limits. The US reacted to Monday’s explosion by moving one of its aircraft carriers, which was 100 miles (160 kilometers) offshore, away from the area, following the detection of low-level radiation in its vicinity.
Shortly afterwards, the government announced that the cooling system for the plant’s reactor 2 had also failed. The explosions at reactors 1 and 3 had been preceded by similar breakdowns. The Jiji news agency reported on Monday that water levels at reactor 2 had fallen far enough to partially expose fuel rods.
The television images on the weekend left no doubt: The highly advanced island nation had apparently experienced the worst nuclear catastrophe to date in the 21st century, triggered by the worst earthquake in Japanese history.
A short time after Saturday’s blast, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano appeared on the main TV channel and spoke about the accident — in the manner of a teacher telling students during a class trip what they are going to do next. Then a grey-haired expert on nuclear power plants joined Edano and appealed to the population to remain “reisei,” to stay calm and cool.
Reisei, reisei: It was as if the government was more concerned about cooling down the heads of Japanese citizens than the partially melted nuclear fuel rods. …..
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Mushroom Clouds and Everpresent Danger: Surviving Cameramen Recall Nuclear Test Shots
The atomic missile with the explosive power of 1.5 kilotons of TNT detonated precisely above the heads of the five United States Air Force scientists. At first the men felt only the heat from the explosion. But then the blast wave forced them to their knees.
George Yoshitake’s camera was clicking the entire time.
At 7 a.m. on July 19, 1957, the cameraman was standing with a small group of nuclear scientists on the Yucca Flat test site in the state of Nevada. A fighter jet had fired the missile at an altitude of five kilometers (3.1 miles), which was considered a safe distance from the ground. “I was busy behind the cameras,” Yoshitake recalls. “Then I could see the flash go off out of the corner of my eye.” He looked up. “There was this huge, doughnut-shaped cloud up in the sky where the blast when off.”
The only thing protecting him from the bomb’s fallout was his baseball cap.
Yoshitake is one of the few people who have stood directly underneath an exploding atom bomb and survived. The American was one of about 40 photographers and cameramen in the 1352nd Photographic Group of the US Air Force. Their mission was top secret. Today Yoshitake, now 82, can finally talk openly about his experiences.
The special unit’s job was as fascinating as it was dangerous. To film and photograph the American nuclear tests in the Nevada desert and in the South Pacific, the foolhardy men had to place themselves within only a few kilometers of the centers of the explosions.
Images the Public Never Saw
Between 1947 and 1969, the material was edited to make more than 6,500 motion pictures in a secret film studio in the Hollywood Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, just a few kilometers from the bright lights of Sunset Boulevard. The studio on Wonderland Avenue was called the Lookout Mountain Air Force Station. Using special film and high-speed cameras, cameramen and photographers used the film and photographic footage to artfully produce motion pictures and still photographs.
“Those men are great guys; they documented a period of time that was both unique and hopefully will never be repeated,” says US documentary filmmaker Peter Kuran, 54, who is working on the story of the “atomic filmmakers.” Kuran wants to preserve the historic film material for posterity. “The photos are the icons of an era,” he says.
At the height of the Cold War, the superpowers embarked on a spectacular race to develop nuclear weapons. It was accompanied by an unparalleled propaganda war that involved large numbers of tests. By the time the international Treaty banning Nuclear Weapon Tests In The Atmosphere, In Outer Space And Under Water, or Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (NTBT), was signed in 1963, the Americans alone had already detonated more than 200 atomic and hydrogen bombs in the atmosphere. The goal, from the very beginning, was to create impressive images to convince politicians to approve ever-growing military budgets.
But the public never saw most of the images. “The work these people did was so secretive that nobody even knew who they were for a long time,” says Kuran. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that the first photographs and films were declassified, thanks to the documentary filmmaker’s relentless efforts. Kuran traveled throughout the United States, searched through archives and urged the US Department of Energy to release the films and photographs.
Copies of the material are now stored in gray cardboard boxes in the basement of Kuran’s house in Vancouver, Washington. Nuclear weapons have become a central focus of his life. “When I was 15, I visited Japan with a YMCA (youth) group,” he says. “We happened to be in Hiroshima on the anniversary of the bombing and I saw a film about the destruction of the city. I was the only American in a crowded room full of Japanese. Everyone was looking at me.”
(-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international
Kuran felt horrified and ashamed. Initially, he embarked on a career as a developer of special effects for productions like director George Lucas’s “Star Wars” movies. But he couldn’t forget his experience in Japan. More than three decades later, he coincidentally came into contact with those chroniclers of the nuclear tests who were still alive. The nuclear filmmakers were grateful for the attention. “We’re finally getting recognized for some of the work we did,” says Yoshitake. “It was liberating to be able to talk about it.”
The cameraman now lives in Lompoc, California, about a three-hour drive north of Los Angeles. He is one of the last surviving members of the photographers’ unit. Most of the others died long ago, many of cancer. Yoshitake says he is “more in contact with the widows.”
From 1955 to 1963, Yoshitake worked for the nuclear weapons test program. “I filmed about 30 explosions,” he reports. “The amazing ones, the most spectacular ones were the hydrogen bombs in the Pacific.” The bombs were usually detonated early in the morning, before dawn, says Yoshitake. “They told us to look away at the initial blast,” he recalls. “For several minutes after the blast, you could see this eerie ultraviolet glow high up in the sky. And I thought that was so spectacular, so meaningful.”
The images from the Pacific seem almost magical, including the photos of the seven-kilometer fireball created by “Shrimp,” the most powerful bomb the United States ever detonated. On March 1, 1954, a 15-megaton bomb, part of an operation called Castle Bravo, exploded over the Bikini atoll. The destructive power unleashed by the explosion was more than twice as high as the experts had predicted and tore a crater two kilometers in diameter into the island. Within a few minutes, a mushroom cloud rose 40 kilometers into the sky. The entire archipelago was contaminated with radiation and remains uninhabited to this day.
The cameramen came within about 30 kilometers of the artificial suns in the South Pacific. In the Nevada desert, Yoshitake and his colleagues even came within about eight kilometers of the fireballs. “We could see how the shockwave came rolling across the valley floor,” says Yoshitake. “We hung onto our cameras so we wouldn’t fall over.”
A few seconds after the explosions, the men also felt the heat from the bombs. The cameraman took it all in stride. “We were young. For me it was a just a job at the time. Only now do I realize how dangerous the work was,” he says.
For Yoshitake, the work only became unpleasant when it was time to document the effects of the bombs. He shudders when he remembers a test performed in June 1957 under the code name “Priscilla.” Only 30 minutes after the detonation, he had to photograph monkeys, sheep and pigs that had been placed in close proximity to the blast site. “A few of the animals were still alive,” says Yoshitake. The skin on the pigs was charred black, he says, while the eyes of the monkeys had been taped open so that scientists could study the effect of the flash of light on the retina. “The animals were squealing, crying. It smelled of burned flesh. It was just terrible.”
At least the cameramen wore protective suits on those missions into the center of destruction. But when they confronted the nuclear blasts from afar, they were wearing nothing but shorts and T-shirts. “We had dosimeters that measured our radiation load. That was it,” says Yoshitake’s former colleague, Ken Hackman, 72, who spent months in the Pacific to photograph the tests. He remembers how reckless the military’s behavior was at the time: “After the detonation, B-57 bombers would always fly directly through the mushroom cloud to collect samples. After the planes had landed again, they were decontaminated by men who were only wearing rubber boots as protection.”
To this day, Hackman sees the bomb tests through the eyes of a photographer. The flash from a nuclear weapon is 10 times as bright as the sun, he says. The photographers had to wear heavily tinted special glasses to prevent burning of the retina. “Everything turns a bright white, and there’s no color at all anymore,” says Hackman. “Once the initial brightness is away, it really is very beautiful to look at.” He has vivid memories of a working trip to Hawaii, where he stood on a volcano and photographed the colorful aurora of an exploding hydrogen bomb. The play of lights in the sky was caused by the strong magnetic field generated by the detonation.
Capturing the Blast
The photographers tried out almost every camera model available at the time and tested completely new photographic techniques. Automatic cameras were placed a few hundred meters from the point of explosion, with thick lead shields protecting the film material from gamma radiation. The most advanced film cameras of the day were capable of recording 15 million images per second. The filmmakers even experimented with 3-D photography.
The US company EG&G was the main source of the inventions. One of the founders of EG&G was Harold Edgerton, who later became world-famous for his photographs of bursting drops of milk. For the nuclear weapons test program, the engineers at EG&G developed a special film with three coatings, each with a different level of sensitivity. The so-called XR film made it possible to photograph the detonations with a single high-speed camera, despite tremendous fluctuations in light intensity.
The XR film enabled the photographers to capture the power of the weapons in brilliant orange, yellow and red tones, creating highly alienating images of “psychedelic quality,” says Kuran. The US space agency, NASA, later used the technology to photograph its moon missions.
Eventually the EG&G engineers even managed to capture the first microseconds of atomic explosions on film, using the “Rapatronic,” a camera developed specifically for this purpose. Because a mechanical shutter would have been much too slow, the device had an electronic “light valve” made of polarized special glass, which could be rendered translucent by means of an electric pulse.
The engineers placed up to 16 of these high-tech cameras near the point of explosion, which allowed them to capture the birth of the atomic hellfire, so to speak. The bubble-like nuclear blast images almost look like living creatures in the photos. The billowing formations of heat and radiation, at temperatures of up to 10 million degrees Celsius, resemble oddly shaped amoeba.
The Dichotemy Between Destruction and Beauty
Most of these images are still under lock and key today. Only military physicists are permitted to analyze the images for the purpose of improving the designs of bombs. The US government is still hesitant to release the photos and films completely. But it is critical, says Kuran, that the material be processed and digitized, “before it turns to dust.”
He has already assembled five documentaries from the film and photographic footage, which he distributes through his website. A sixth film, about the neutron bomb, is in the works. “My goal is to present as realistic an impression as possible of the power of these weapons, but I’m also fascinated by this bizarre dichotemy, how destructive they were and how beautiful they were,” says Kuran.
The filmmaker hopes that his work will serve as a warning against nuclear testing. But the work has also taught him a surprising lesson. “Personally, I have less fear of nuclear weapons than I used to have,” says the documentary filmmaker. “Now I know that if somebody exploded a big hydrogen bomb 30 kilometers away from me, chances are I will probably survive.”
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
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Small Is Beautiful: Nuclear Industry Pins Hopes on Mini-Reactors
By Philip Bethge
In Galena, a town in icy central Alaska, energy is indispensable — but expensive. Although diesel generators provide plenty of electricity, the town’s roughly 600 residents regularly receive monthly electric bills in the hundreds of dollars.
But the future could soon arrive in this tiny town on the Yukon River. “Super-Safe, Small and Simple,” or “4S,” is the name of a machine that could soon be buried 30 meters (98 feet) below the icy soil and placed into service.
The hot core of the device, developed by the Japanese company Toshiba, measures only 2 meters by 0.7 meters (6 feet 7 inches by 2 feet 4 inches). But despite its diminutive size, it is expected to deliver 10 megawatts of electricity. “4S” is a nuclear reactor, and Galena could become a test case for a new kind of electricity generation.
The nuclear power industry hopes to secure its future with miniature reactors for civilian use. The concept of mini nukes that could produce up to 300 megawatts of electricity has been remarkably well received, particularly in the United States. Nine designs are competing for the attention of electric utilities and the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the government agency that regulates nuclear power plants.
The Nuclear PR Machine
Critics, like physicist Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists, are convinced that the projects are all in the “stage of fantasy.” Jim Riccio, a nuclear expert with the environmental organization Greenpeace, blames the “hype” on the “well-oiled PR machine of the nuclear industry.”
But the movement has prominent supporters. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, for example, has invested in a company called TerraPower, which plans to build innovative small reactors. US President Barack Obama has pledged to provide $54 billion (€40 billion) in loan guarantees for the nuclear industry.
And for Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who is a winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, it goes without saying that a portion of these loan guarantees will be available for miniature reactors of what he calls the “plug and play” variety. Small modular reactors are “one of the most promising areas” in the nuclear industry, Chu wrote recently in an enthusiastic opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal.
Proponents of nuclear power present the following arguments in favor of the idea:
- Small reactors could become available in the future at bargain prices of less than $600 million, and they would only take two to three years to build. By comparison, reactors in the gigawatt range cost more than $5 billion, and financing is often a challenge. Some projects, such as the current construction of a new reactor in Olkiluoto, Finland, are years behind schedule and vastly over budget.
- Because they are delivered pre-assembled, mini-reactors could also be used in countries without domestic nuclear experts. The plants produce about as much energy as gas or coal power plants and could therefore simply replace them. Existing power grids and turbines could still be used.
- The miniature reactors unleash their fissile power from locations deep underground, which would make it difficult for terrorists to steal fissile material.
“Small nuclear reactors are cheaper, safer and more flexible,” raves Tom Sanders, president of the American Nuclear Society. Sanders wants to mass-produce nuclear power plants, just as Henry Ford did with cars in his time, and make them available around the world, particularly in developing countries.
‘Global Interest’
“There is certainly a global interest in these kinds of systems,” says Chris Mowry of Babcock & Wilcox, a producer of nuclear power plants based in Lynchburg, Virginia. In the past, the company earned much of its revenue with reactors that power nuclear submarines, but now it has developed one of the most promising mini-reactors for civilian energy use.
The mPower reactor is a conventional, 125-megawatt pressurized water reactor. Once it has been buried underground, it is expected to continue producing electricity for 60 years. One of the device’s most appealing features is that spent fuel assemblies are stored in the reactor shell, making them virtually inaccessible. The steam generator is also integrated into the unit.
“All key components can be manufactured in one single factory,” Mowry says enthusiastically. Three large US electric utilities have shown interest in the technology. The utilities are particularly attracted to the idea of building nuclear power plants in modular fashion in the future. When one reactor has run its course, the next one can be ordered. However, the mPower reactor has yet to obtain NRC approval, which could take years.
A consortium led by US nuclear power producer Westinghouse is pursuing a similar approach. Its Iris reactor would produce 335 megawatts of power and is one of the leading candidates for the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP).
Since 2006, the US government has championed the GNEP project, which it hopes could meet the growing energy demands of developing countries. Under GNEP, the nuclear powers would ship complete mini-reactors with sealed reactor cores to developing countries. The plants would be designed to operate without maintenance for close to 30 years. After that, they would simply be returned, like empty deposit bottles, to the country where they were manufactured.
The United Kingdom, France, Canada, China and Japan are among the GNEP donor nations. Countries like Jordan, Kazakhstan and Senegal have shown interest in the small reactors. In return for receiving the plants, they would pledge not to engage in reprocessing or uranium enrichment.
Critics are horrified. They fear that fissile material could end up in the wrong hands all too easily. “Anyone who ships this stuff all over the world shouldn’t be surprised if it comes back in the form of dirty bombs,” says Greenpeace expert Jim Riccio.
Physicist Edwin Lyman agrees, saying that it is preferable to concentrate the technology in only a few places. “I am concerned about exporting these plants to countries that have no experience with nuclear energy and where there are security concerns and corruption.”
Reusing Old Reactors
Critics are also concerned about the plans of Akme, a Russian company. The firm, which was established in December 2009, engages in the typically Russian practice of reusing old equipment: It intends to convert a reactor used in Soviet nuclear submarines into a civilian reactor.
The project is extremely controversial. The reactors operate with relatively highly enriched uranium, which is more easily used to build bombs. In addition, they are cooled in a toxic lead-bismuth alloy.
In addition to safety and security concerns, there are doubts about the mini-reactor’s economic efficiency. In the United States, the costs of licensing a nuclear power plant alone range from $50 million to $100 million. In addition, strict safety requirements make small reactors disproportionately more expensive than larger plants.
This leads physicist Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado to believe that small reactors will “never be competitive.” Reactor manufacturers expect to see costs of between $3,500 and $5,000 per kilowatt of installed power for the dwarf nuclear power plants. The same value ranges from $900 to $2,800 for coal power plants and $520 to $1,800 for natural gas power plants. Even wind turbines can be built for $1,900 to $3,700 per kilowatt.
‘Not a Sign of Economic Health’
The nuclear industry expects CO2 emissions trading to make nuclear technology, which is largely climate-neutral, more competitive soon. “But the same also applies to hydroelectric power, wind and solar energy,” says Lovins.
“The nuclear industry is desperately trying to make itself look vital,” says the professor. “But government loan guarantees are not a sign of economic health, just as blood transfusions are not a sign for medical health.”
Fans of the new miniature reactor world aren’t allowing the grumblers to spoil their mood. Instead, they are developing bolder and bolder projects for the future. For example, nuclear scientist Tom Sanders and a team at the Sandia National Laboratory are developing a reactor that would cost only about $250 million at a planned production rate of 50 reactors per year. Liquid sodium cools the uranium core of the plant, which resembles a sort of replaceable cartridge.
TerraPower, the company Bill Gates has invested in, is working on a so-called traveling-wave reactor. In this type of reactor, the fission zone travels slowly through an elongated fuel core. Plutonium is bred from depleted uranium and then immediately burned off. The engineers rhapsodize over the system, saying that this “wave of fission” could generate electricity continuously “for 50 to 100 years without refueling or removing any used fuel from the reactor.”
Is it the holy grail of nuclear engineering? The traveling-wave reactor still doesn’t exist outside supercomputers. TerraPower has just entered into a joint venture agreement with Toshiba. The two companies plan to move forward together with the development of a mini-nuke future.
Renewable Energy
The Japanese might already be finding proof of their capacity for innovation in Galena, the town on Alaska’s Yukon River, if only they hadn’t run into problems with approval for their “4S” reactor.
For now, the residents of Galena have turned to another innovative energy source, paid for with subsidies from Alaska’s renewable energy fund: wood-burning stoves.
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
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Nuclear Renewal: Siemens Seeks to Cash In on Russia’s Atomic Adventure
Olga Kurochkina can hardly hide her delight at making her German guests squirm. She has just served them caviar and pirogies and is now triumphantly waving a document in their faces. “Our students recently debated whether Germany needs nuclear energy,” says Kurochkina, a teacher at an elite Moscow high school. “The arguments, of course, favor electricity from nuclear energy.”
Kurochkina insists that there are “significant disadvantages” to all other energy sources. Wind turbines? “They produce infrasound, which causes depression.” Solar cells? “They cause local cooling of the air.”
It is hard to believe, but … More
