Small Modular Reactors

“War as Disease”

When I was contacted this past winter about speaking at the CPRA conference in Regina, I said that I had been a keynote when the conference was in Fredericton and I hadn’t really done any further work on my thesis that “War is Disease” but that I had been giving a lot of thought to how that, War, had affected the environment and future generations.

So I offered the topic:

Rights for a Safe Environment for our children – clean air, clean water, clean playgrounds.  It seemed that children were the most affected by their warring parents and they had the least say in the matter.  So what we do with the environment and our behaviour in the world has a lot to do with whether children have clean air, clean water and safe playgrounds.

When I went back to prepare for today, I looked up the UN Convention on the Rights of Children (https://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CRC.aspx). I also asked children and their parents about the future. There didn’t seem to be anything that united my passion for peace, for a clean environment and for children’s rights. An item in the newpaper offered something that did – the sudden federal and Saskatchewan provincial love affair with Small Modular Nuclear Reactors and the vision of sprinkling these all over the country like microwave ovens.

Which segues to a particular type of pollution with which playgrounds of the world are already becoming affected. And what that type of pollution means for our children’s children’s children’s children – and so on.

 

This map was created using the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty monitors and illustrates the spread of Caesium-137 after Fukushima.

Caesium-137 is a radioactive type of cesium, not a naturally occurring element, produced only by nuclear reactions. The presence of caesium-137 indicates that there has been a nuclear power plant accident or a detonated nuclear weapon. It is present in everyone who was born after the 1950’s.

Caesium-137 was picked up by the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty monitors around the world after the Fukushima accident. In a month’s time no place on earth will not have received a dose of Cs-137. Non-radioactive or normal cesium-133 is considered mildly toxic to biological cells where it acts like potassium.

Caesium-137 has a half-life of about 30 years. This means that one half of the caesium-137 will have decayed to barium-137m through to non-radioactive barium in thirty years. Because it acts like potassium biologically, it has a biological half-life which is relatively short, between 50 and 150 days, but during which it emits beta particles and gamma rays to muscles, heart, pancreas and brain – in fact, no organ is unaffected.

Note that barium has no biological function; small amounts dissolved in water are toxic. It will substitute for calcium in bones and in muscle function. A human cell that is using caesium like potassium in ion exchange will have a sudden challenge because the caesium has changed into barium – which cannot perform the same action.

The nuclear industry – whether bombs or nuclear power – has never increased safety levels of radioactive exposure without civilian non-industry intervention.

In the 1950’s and 60’s, over 500 nuclear bomb tests spread caesium-137 and strontium-90 around the world and most heavily in areas referred to as “downwind”. It took the fury of thousands of people collecting the discarded baby teeth of their children to convince governments to shut down atmospheric bomb testing. Baby teeth contained strontium-90.

The human body can’t discriminate between calcium and strontium so strontium-90, once absorbed by the blood stream goes to bones and teeth, becoming part of the structure. Strontium-90 is a new element found only since the atmospheric testing.

Strontium-90 is a “bone seeker” and about 75% of ingested strontium – in cow or goat milk, meat, and vegetables – will simply pass through with feces but the remainder is preferentially deposited in bones and teeth. Its presence can cause bone cancer or leukemia.

As Strontium-90 decays, it becomes first another radioisotope, yttrium-90, and 64 hours later, zirconium-90. Yttrium is medically significant in the treatment of cancer because of its short half-life and high-energy β⁻ decay but this is not a useful attribute in normal cells. In short, strontium-90 has a decay step that is disruptive to normally operating human cells making strontium-90 doubly dangerous. 

The radioactive pollution from nuclear power plants and bombs includes iodine-131. This is probably the most feared and discussed part of the fall-out, everyone wondering whether or when they should take their iodine pills to try to prevent thyroid cancer. That there is a connection there is no doubt. Thyroid cancer sky-rockets wherever there is radioactive fall-out; usually peaking at about five years post-accident.

What does ionizing radiation do within biological structures? It changes them. It makes ions – it splits molecules into pieces. It doesn’t matter whether ionizing radiation is from the sun, from x-rays or from a nuclear power plant, and it doesn’t matter whether it is alpha, beta or gamma radiation. To some extent the ionizing radiation will change enzymes and other structures within the cell.

It has been known since 1927 that ionizing radiation caused mutations in the reproductive cells of fruit flies; Robert Muller received a Nobel Prize in the 1940’s for his discovery.

The scientific community had the opportunity to observe ionizing radiation and capitalism operate on populations as enormous health scam businesses developed in the early 1900’s, many became wealthy on the sale of radium-laced drinks – it glowed greenish in the dark so was attractive. Not until a prominent former athlete suffered a painful death from ionizing radiation-induced bone cancer in the 1930’s – from radium which acts like calcium in the body – did the US government move to try to create safe levels.

Meanwhile the medical community ran rampant with their new toy – x-rays! Which were tried on practically everything – x-rays were even advertised for acne.

Not until the bodies started piling up did the industry in ionizing radiation scramble to apply safety levels.

Rosalie Bertell & Alice Stewart, two researchers on the two sides of the Atlantic Ocean, independently and using very large populations were able to show that chest x-rays of the mother increased the chances of the baby having leukemia by a factor of two to three times. Prior to 1970, obstetricians used x-rays in pregnancy liberally for pelvimetry – a discredited attempt to determine pelvic size.

With the publishing of BEIR VII, the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation edition in 2007 established that exposure to any increase in Ionizing radiation over background radiation increases the incidences of disease.

One of my heroes is John Gofman, a doctor, a lipidologist, oddly enough studying fat cells. Gofman worked with the Manhattan Project, isolating radioisotopes and, at Oppenheimer’s request, he devised a method for isolating plutonium – and was the first person to isolate enough to see visibly.

He was instrumental in convincing the scientific community that ionizing radiation had risks to human health at much lower doses than before the exposure level reached that leading to death. He popularized the Linear No-Threshold (LNT) model as the foundation of the international guidelines for radiation protection.

Gofman was hired by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC-US) to exam safety measures and became convinced that the guidelines needed to lowered by 90%. He believed that the industry would be horrified and immediately establish lower safety levels.

Instead, the AEC disputed their findings and he and Dr. Tamblin, who worked with him, were the ones who became horrified. He became a reluctant opponent even as he continued to support the development of nuclear power. In 1970, he testified in favor of a bill to ban commercial nuclear reactors in New York City and told the City Council that a reactor in an urban environment would be "equal in the opposite direction to all the medical advances put together in the last 25 years."^[9]

Now our governments are sinking more tax money into supporting the nuclear industry. Paying the industry to spread nuclear power – like toasters throughout the countryside – in Small Modular Reactors! Little – “small” is relative when speaking of nuclear reactors – ionizing radiation emanators producing ionizing radiation waste for which we have no storage – and always the potential for an accident.

I cannot really describe my fury over this latest nuclear industry scam.

We have contaminated enough – the fact is:  we cannot assure that our children and generations of children to come that the future will have less disease, less cancer, safe food and water and safe playgrounds. Fifty years and more than 2000 square miles of severely contaminated, unfit for human habitation for more than 200 years otherwise highly fertile land –is quite enough contamination.

My fury comes from impotence – in the face of knowledge, how can the monetary gain of a few be more important than the health of millions today and unendingly into the future.

Small Modular Reactors?

If you were buying a new car, wouldn't you check it out against its competitors, ask others about their experiences and review accident records of the model? Would you buy something that has never been built before, has no track record and is made by an industry that has never delivered either on time or within budget?

Small Modular Reactors (SMR) are an idea, not a reality. The idea is to create a small nuclear reactor than can be built centrally and transported to the location where it is needed. They could be “popped” down beside rural communities across the countryside. The World Nuclear Association's web site seems to imply that the science is sound and that there are hundreds of them either being built or in service – but also, in fact, “in January 2014, Westinghouse announced that it was suspending work....it could not justify the economics of its SMR without government subsidies.”

The nuclear power industry is the ultimate scam; the government subsidizes the building and commissioning of the power plant and cost of insurance while the industry walks away with the money. Jobs? There are more jobs in almost any other method of producing energy.

Problems are multitude. First of all, “small” is relative and in the realm of nuclear reactors hardly at all. Second: they still need water for coolant, lots of it and so need to be situated near water. Third: they must have a minimum base load electricity demand to work – they are very clumsy at powering up or down in response to needs. Fourth: with an accident record of five meltdowns in thirty years wasting thousands of square miles of farmland for hundreds of years, does it make sense to even enter the field? A “small nuclear” meltdown will still be a meltdown.

The issue of security with all these "little" nuclear power plants planted all over the place is never mentioned.

Is nuclear power green? When all of the input (construction, mining, milling, transporting), after-put (decommissioning) and waste management is taken into account, nuclear power is decidedly “ungreen”. Does it have less impact upon the environment than dirty coal? The people around Fukushima, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island don't think so.

Premier Brad Wall in Saskatchewan has been sold a bill of goods - 

PS.  From the Nuclear Monitor, April 23, 2015: "The term small is used to indicate that the power level is much lower than the average power delivered by currently operating reactors. Modular means that the reactor is assembled from factory-fabricated parts or “modules”. Each module represents a portion of the finished plant built in a factory and shipped to the

reactor site. Modularity is also used to indicate the idea that rather than constructing one large reactor, the equivalent power output will be generated using multiple smaller reactors that allow for greater tailoring of generation capacity to demand.

SMRs such as the SMART are likely to be even more expensive ways of generating electricity than the large nuclear reactors being built today. Small nuclear reactors

are cheaper in absolute terms, but they also generate less electricity. When the two factors − smaller overall cost and smaller generation capacity − are taken together, the cost per unit of electricity for small reactors generated turns out to be higher that for large reactors.

This is why reactors became larger and larger over the 1960s to the 1980s/1990s. Thus, it seems likely that SMRs will lose out on the economies of scale that standard sized (roughly 1000 MW) reactors benefit from.