Nuclear Power: A Foreword on Three Mile Island

The day was an unexpectedly warm one, but the 15,000 demonstrators who crowded into the wide plaza outside San Francisco’s Capitol-domed city hall April 7 kept cool—partly with half-pint bottles of “organic” fruit juice from the dozens of ad hoc, open-air health food stands which had sprung up amongst the demonstrators like a benign fungus, partly with the newly won self-assurance of a radical minority which believes it has, overnight, become a majority. The 15,000 demonstrators knew, after all, that they were no longer voices in the wilderness in their opposition to nuclear power. Thousands of other Americans were attending dozens of similar rallies all over the country that same day—in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, St. Paul and Concord, New Hampshire, and outside the nuclear power plants at Indian Point, New York and Moscow, Ohio. And public opinion polls taken since the ominous events of late March and early April at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania seemed to show that the American Public’s honeymoon with nuclear power was over. A New York Times/CBS News poll showed that 56 percent of Americans are unwilling to have nuclear power plants located in their communities and only 38 percent are willing to live near such plants. A San Francisco Chronicle poll showed that 56 percent of voters in Northern California believe all existing nuclear power plants should be shut down.

Still, rosy as the prognosis looked for the demonstrators, and gloomy as it looked for the nuclear power industry, there were other signs on that figurative horizon where changes in public opinion first see the light of day. There was the Harris poll reported in Time on April 16 which showed that 52 percent of Americans still favored construction of more nuclear power plants (presumably as long as they were built in someone else’s community). There was the Gallup poll released a few days earlier which showed that 63 percent of Americans believed it was important to have more nuclear power plants (dangerous though they be) in order to meet anticipated demand for energy in the coming years. And there was the calm indifference to their danger exhibited by the workers at Three Mile Island and by many of the families who live in the shadow of that plant’s cooling towers. “Do you think I’d work here if I thought it was dangerous?” one worker demanded of a reporter who solicited his opinion. A 21 year old central Pennsylvania man who runs a nearby family-owned dairy farm was even more explicit when he was questioned by the Los Angeles Times. “This doesn’t bother me at all,” he said.

It does bother millions of other Americans, however—we can be reasonably certain of that, despite the oddly conflicting findings of the polls—and not without good reason. The incident at Three Mile Island proves conclusively that we may not expect our government officials, our power company executives, and our journalists and media moguls (whether their bias be pro-nuclear or anti-nuclear) to be honest with us about the difficulties and hazards of splitting atoms to generate electricity. As the New York Times’s Tom Wicker has recently pointed out, government mendacity about atomic energy has been a fact of American life for more than two decades. The government assured us that its 1953 atmospheric nuclear tests (and those which followed later in the ’50s) were held within safe fallout limits. But according to a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine, leukemia has occurred at more than two times the normal rate among persons who were under 15 and living in Utah in the path of fallout from the tests. Government documents newly released under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that more than 4000 sheep grazing downwind from the tests died during 1953 after absorbing up to 1000 times the maximum amount of radioactive iodine allowed for human beings (see the New York Times, February 15, 1979); the documents are mute on the matter of how much radiation was absorbed by the human beings who cared for the sheep. But more than 230 claims have been filed so far by cancer victims and their families in Utah, Arizona and Nevada with the Department of Energy, charging that those atmospheric tests caused cancer and deaths—a fact which speaks for itself. Other recently declassified documents reveal that President Eisenhower himself ordered a coverup of the truth regarding the tests: according to a report in the April 20 San Francisco Chronicle, Eisenhower instructed the Atomic Energy Commission in 1953 to keep the American people “confused” with its statements about the nuclear fallout to which they were being exposed.

The government assured us in the 1960s that the nuclear reactors then proliferating throughout the Eastern half of the country were perfectly safe from theft and terrorism, as were all the nuclear energy production procedures which came with the nuclear power industry. Yet a recent Freedom of Information suit has disclosed not only that 200 tons of uranium “disappeared” from our “theft-proof” nuclear program in 1968 (apparently to be diverted to Israel), but also that no changes were made in security arrangements after the incident took place. Even more recently, in the April 1979 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, New York Times reporter David Burnham has claimed that by the end of 1976, “taking into account all of the nuclear facilities in the United States, [an additional] 8000 pounds of highly enriched uranium and plutonium could not be accounted for—enough, in theory, to make hundreds of clandestine atomic weapons.”

Our nuclear power industry executives have been telling us for ten years or more that if they were only allowed by law to recycle the wastes from nuclear power plants and extract the plutonium for use in breeder reactors, we would have a smaller, more manageable waste problem and even cheaper electricity and it would all be safe, perfectly safe. Yet the only attempt to date in the U.S. to reprocess spent nuclear fuel in this manner—the Nuclear Fuel Services plant in West Valley, New York—was forced to close after only six years of operation because it was unable either to operate at a profit or to control the spread of radioactivity throughout the West Valley area. According to the New York Times’s Richard Severo, “the plant’s legacy [is] 600,000 gallons of liquid radioactive waste that will remain highly toxic for at least 100,000 years, and two million cubic feet of buried radioactive trash that will retain its toxicity for 1000 years.”

Perhaps most important of all, both government and the nuclear power industry have been telling us that nothing serious could go wrong at a nuclear power plant, that the backup systems couldn’t fail, that unanticipated problems couldn’t come up. Yet something serious did go wrong at the nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania during the last week of March and the first week of April, the backup systems did fail (temporarily), and a problem did develop which nobody had ever even dreamed of before: the formation of a potentially explosive bubble of hydrogen gas between the plant’s containment dome and its radioactive fuel. As Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd puts it, “We’ve been assured time and time again by the industry and federal regulatory agencies that this was something that was impossible, that could not happen, but it did happen. There’s going to be great difficulty on the part of the American people to feel absolutely reassured about nuclear power.”

What happened on Three Mile Island

A nuclear power plant generates electricity by submerging an atomic reaction in water, thus heating the water and producing steam; the steam turns turbines which turn a generator. The atomic chain reaction takes place within a steel-reinforced concrete dome called the containment (because it is designed to withstand and contain both the incredible heat and the deadly radiation released by the splitting atoms of the nuclear fuel). The containment will only contain, however, if the temperature of the fuel is kept relatively low (around 600°F is considered a nice low temperature); and this requires that the nuclear fuel be covered at all times by water. Any part of it which became uncovered could heat up to 3000°F or higher and begin to melt. If the entire mass of radioactive fuel became uncovered and began to melt, it could, in principle, melt right through the reinforced concrete floor of the containment building and through whatever earth lay between it and ground water. When it hit ground water, it would send up deadly geysers of radioactive steam which would then be dispersed by the winds to contaminate crops and kill people and animals throughout an area which could be, given proper weather conditions, vast.

No one died at Three Mile Island, of course, and no crops were contaminated. But there was a partial meltdown of the fuel in the nuclear reactor, with the result that it will take months or years and millions upon millions of dollars to clean up the radioactive mess inside the containment dome, and it may be necessary to close the power plant—a multi-billion dollar investment—altogether, seal it shut, and bury it in concrete. In dollars and cents terms (though not, admittedly, in the more precious currency of human life) the Three Mile Island incident was the most disastrous nuclear accident so far in the relative brief history of nuclear power in the United States.

To the credit of the news organizations and individual reporters that covered the Three Mile Island incident, it was presented to the public, generally speaking, with fairness and restraint. There were, here and there, irresponsible banner headlines like the New York Post’s “NUKE LEAK GOES OUT OF CONTROL”; and there was, of course, some amount of mindless kowtowing to the “official” view of the story, as when, at the height of the crisis, the openly pro-nuclear Manchester (New Hampshire) Union Leader ran the headline “NO INJURIES REPORTED IN NUKE MISHAP”, and when ABC television and radio decided never to use any adjectives which had not been used by “authorities” to describe the situation. But by and large, Three Mile Island was presented to the public as it was: as an unnerving series of mishaps which came uncomfortably close to becoming a full scale disaster.

“The China Syndrome”

It remained, then, for the distortion and misrepresentation ordinarily undertaken for the amusement of their audiences by the news media to be undertaken instead by the popular entertainment industry, specifically by the moviemakers of Hollywood. The China Syndrome, a slick thriller about an accident at a nuclear power plant, opened in theatres all over the country a matters of days before the accident happened at Three Mile Island. And word quickly got around that the film bore striking resemblance to real life—as, indeed, it does. The accident in the film is aggravated by a stuck guage which fools the plant operators into stopping the flow of cooling water into the enclosed space around the nuclear fuel; a nearly identical sequence of events unfolded at Three Mile Island. The utility officials in the film insist throughout the duration of the emergency that there is absolutely no danger to the public—just as the utility officials did at Three Mile Island. A plant engineer in the film discovers that certain of the plant’s X-ray welding records have been falsified, presumably to hide serious defects. Early in April, the Los Angeles Times reported discovery of unspecified “irregularities … in X-ray inspection reports on 63 welds in the containment vessel at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant’s ‘twin sister’ reactor.” The accident in the film is touched off by a failed pump in the nuclear plant’s generating system—just like the accident at Three Mile Island. Most ominous of all, a nuclear critic in the film ventures the opinion that a full scale meltdown at a nuclear plant could “render an area the size of Pennsylvania permanently uninhabitable.”

Such a string of coincidences can hardly help but make true anti-nuclear believers out of thousands—maybe even hundreds of thousands—of the film’s viewers, especially given the high professionalism of the cast and crew. Jane Fonda, arguably the best English speaking film actress now working, is completely convincing as a “soft news” TV reporter who inadvertently stumbles onto the biggest nuke story of her (or anybody else’s career)—as are Jack Lemmon as the dedicated nuclear engineer who discovers to his horror that the plant he loves really isn’t safe, and Michael Douglas (the film’s producer) as a hotheaded young cameraman who helps Jane uncover the awful truth. The China Syndrome was written under the watchful eye of three disillusioned nuclear engineers who quit General Electric in 1976, set up their own private nuclear consulting firm, and joined the anti-nuclear movement. The result of their input is the film’s extremely high level of technical verisimilitude—which, as has been noted, can only assist all those mysterious coincidences in making a lot of new anti-nuclear converts.

That the film is designedly anti-nuclear is really too obvious for discussion, despite Jane Fonda’s disingenuous (and widely quoted) statement that “the movie’s intended as an attack on greed, not on nuclear energy. If I intended to attack nuclear energy, I would have made a documentary.” The China Syndrome is, in fact, so patently a tract, a manifesto, a political allegory, that were it not for the consummate skill of its principals, both on and off screen, it would probably be offputting on that score alone.

Clearly, however, it is not offputting for most audiences. And the success it had already begun to enjoy in March has grown a thousandfold since the events at Three Mile Island. Within days of the first murmurs of trouble at the reactor site, the film had returned a 500% profit on its multi-million dollar cost, and the stock of Columbia Pictures had taken off on the New York Stock Exchange (while nuclear issues, predictably, were slumping). In a sense, all this was encouraging: as the events at Three Mile Island had mutely proved, the film’s protrayal of the nuclear energy question was, by and large, an accurate one. It was inaccurate, however, with respect to one major issue, an issue which thousands of those now taking to the streets in anti-nuclear demonstrations also misunderstand—the issue of who is to blame. Who is it who has forced the hazards of nuclear power on an increasingly suspicious and hostile public? Jane Fonda and many of her supporters at rallies around the country answer that it is big businessmen—greedy capitalists—who are the culprits. In fact, they’re wrong. It is not greedy capitalists but power hungry politicians who have led us to Three Mile Island, and who may, if we are not wary, lead us beyond that troubling pass to a future more grim than most of us have yet imagined.

The growth of atomic energy

It was a quarter-century ago, in 1954, that President Eisenhower signed the Atomic Energy Act and authorized the Atomic Energy Commission (which had been set up in 1946, shortly after the first atomic bomb fell on Japan) both to regulate and to promote the commercial use of nuclear power. And promote it the AEC did. First there were the generous government research grants which encouraged companies that might otherwise have been investigating the feasibility of shale oil or solar energy to investigate the feasibility of nuclear power instead.

Research occupied the infant nuclear industry for most of a decade, but by the early 1960s the power companies were ready to begin construction. To be more exact, they were ready to begin construction if they could get somebody else to foot the bill. Accommodatingly, governments passed laws enabling utility companies—government franchised monopolies—to charge their customers for the cost of constructing nuclear power plants. And construction began with a vengeance. In 1964, no one had ordered a nuclear power plant. Two years later, nuclear plants accounted for nearly half of the new generating capacity ordered by U.S. utility companies. By 1968, voluminous, highly technical construction permit applications for nuclear power reactors were pouring into the offices of the Atomic Energy Commission at the rate of 25 per year. And by 1975, 54 of the reactors were in operation, supplying electricity to major metropolitan areas like New York and Chicago.

Having financed the research to develop the nuclear technology, having made construction of nuclear plants economically feasible by forcing taxpayers to cough up the money (and by perpetrating an insurance fraud known as the Price-Anderson Act, but more of that in a moment), the government proceeded to give the new nuclear utilities another helping hand by tackling their waste problem for them. Nuclear reactors produce radioactive wastes which are dangerous to handle and expensive to safely dispose of. In October of 1977, President Carter announced that the federal government would accept and take title to all spent nuclear fuel produced thus far by the power plants it had willed into being, and store that spent fuel in government owned and operated storage sites. The government is charging the utilities for this service, of course, but the charge is less than the actual cost. The difference is being picked up by the taxpayer. And the new federal budget contains a 38 percent increase in waste disposal funds.

The reason for all this government assistance of the nuclear power industry is quite simple: without it there is no money to be made out of atomic energy; without it the nuclear power plants which now dot the American landscape like poisonous mushrooms would be unbuildable, uninsurable and unprofitable. Martin Brown, the former West Coast coordinator of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, has recently described the situation which would confront a businessman interested in building a nuclear power plant without government assistance:

Some 90 percent of the electric generating costs of a nuclear plant are accounted for in the construction of the plant itself. Conventional power plant construction costs only 50 to 60 percent of the electric generating cost. As a results … nuclear power plants mean long-term bank financing—enormous loans that must be paid off whether or not the plant ever generates electricity and profit.

This “front end loading” of the cost of nuclear power, compared to conventional power, means that nuclear plants are normally much less flexible in their operating schedule. Any shutdown, even a short-term one for inspection or repairs, is costly because the lost production value counts mainly against the cost of the plant construction. The monthly or quarterly bank payments become due whether the plant is operating or not.

The same is true, of course, for conventional power plants, but less so. When a conventional power plant is temporarily shut down, the value of the lost production is largely counted against fuel that isn’t burned. A much smaller portion of the loss counts against the plant construction cost.

And this situation, unfavorable as it already is for the would-be operator of a nuclear plant, is only becoming more unfavorable. A recent study by National Economic Research Associates indicates that nuclear power plant construction costs are rising at 15 percent annually. They now average a little more than $400 per kilowatt of generated power, and they’re expected to be closer to $1000 per kilowatt by 1985.

But construction costs, awesome as they are, aren’t the only costs the would-be investor would have to face were it not for the government. There’s also the cost of insurance. Current estimates are that the cost of a full scale meltdown at a nuclear power plant could exceed $17-billion in property damage alone, with around 27,000 deaths and 73,000 injuries. Needless to say, insurance companies aren’t interested in assuming such a risk. But government has given the nuclear power industry the Price-Anderson Act, which limits the accident liability of nuclear utilities to $560-million and funds a healthy portion of the resulting skimpy insurance policies with taxpayer money.

Even if the mushrooming construction costs or the impossibility of arranging adequate insurance weren’t enough in themselves to make nuclear power impractical, there’d still be the problem of waste disposal. It is worth remembering that the owners of the nuclear industry’s one attempt to recycle its waste (the aforementioned experiment in West Valley, New York) were relieved of any liability for the effects of their operations, by special contract with the state of New York.

The fact is that the cost and risks of nuclear energy are too high for it to be a profitable business. Ask the manufacturers of the plants. According to Inquiry magazine, General Electric has lost $600-million building 13 commercial reactors; Westinghouse, the industry giant, stands to lose as much as $2-billion; Babcock and Wilcox (of Three Mile Island fame) has lost nearly $200-million; Combustion Engineering figures to lose $150-million; and Atomic General saw the writing on the wall and quit the business four years ago. And all this is with the government subsidies and grants and tax breaks and special privileges. The utilities, it’s true, do make money, but only because they’re guaranteed a fixed percentage of profit over and above their costs. If their costs go up, as they have year after year since they allowed government to lead them down the garden path to the nuclear reactor, they just get government to approve another increase in their rates, and let their customers either pay or burn wood in their fireplaces as an alternative. There are now people in the United States who get the electricity in their homes from nuclear power plants and who pay more for it (not counting the subsidies built into their taxes) than those whose current is generated by oil or natural gas. And this is the technology which we were once told (by government, of course) would produce electricity so cheaply it wouldn’t even have to be metered. Significantly, Metropolitan Edison of Reading, Pennsylvania, which owns the crippled Three Mile Island reactor, says it will be forced into bankruptcy unless it is allowed by government to pass the cost of the March 28 accident on to its customers.

Government’s concern for safety

To repeat, it is government, not business, which has forced this boondoggle upon us. And, perversely, it is also government which has worked to make sure the nuclear industry we have is about as dangerous as it could possibly be. The old Atomic Energy Commission, which had (absurdly) been charged with promoting and regulating nuclear power plants, never allowed its duty to regulate to get in the way of its duty to promote. As Inquiry magazine has recently pointed out, “evidence is surfacing that the Atomic Energy Commission neglected potential hazards pointed out by its own safety researchers.” The Commission also saw to it that research grants were limited to a single nuclear technology—the light-water reactor—while ignoring evidence that the heavy-water reactor subsequently developed in Canada and the gas graphite reactors now in use in Europe might have posed fewer safety hazards. (See Light Water: How the Nuclear Dream Dissolved, by Irvin C. Bupp and Jean-Claude Derian, Basic Books, 1978).

But even before the evidence of this malfeasance began to crop up, the obvious conflict of interest built into the Commission’s design promoted Congress to create a separate agency to handle regulation. In 1974 President Ford signed the bill creating that new agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Today, ostensibly, the AEC promotes, and the NRC regulates. But, from the beginning, the government has put more money into the AEC than into the NRC, more money into promotion, that is, than into regulation. And there are those who feel the NRC is no more a genuine stickler for safety than the old AEC used to be. When it does close nuclear plants for reasons of safety, it often focuses its attention on plants which would seem to be among the safer, rather than the more dangerous, of their kind. Early in March, for example, before the events at Three Mile Island, the NRC closed five nuclear plants on the East Coast because of fears over their ability to safely withstand earthquakes. The New York Times commented bemusedly that “the East Coast of the United States is not in a known earthquake zone.” Senator J. Bennett Johnston of Louisiana was more direct; he called the shutdown order “absolutely asinine.” But Daniel Ford of the aggressively anti-nuclear Union of Concerned Scientists sees it as typical of the nuclear watchdog agency. “The public sees the NRC like a technological FBI,” he says, “ferreting out safety defects. In fact, it’s just another Federal bureaucracy.”

Opponents of nuclear power are often characterized as former anti-war activitists whose lives have ceased to have meaning now that we’ve disengaged ourselves from Southeast Asia and who are now in search of a new cause; or as 20th century Luddites who oppose all new technology on principle. The reality is far different, however. A significant number of the new anti-nuclear opposition is made up of Americans who simply wish to live in a clear, healthful environment, and who don’t understand why such an alternative as solar power, which seems clear, healthful, and abundant in supply, isn’t developed instead of nuclear energy. According to a Harris poll taken in early February—before the frightening events at Three Mile Island—94 percent of Americans favor accelerated solar development. And the only rationale they are given by their government and their power company executives and their media people for not developing solar technology is that solar technology is not competitive economically with nuclear power or even fossil fuels. Yet, as we have seen, nuclear power is economically competitive, if at all, only because of government subsidies. If they were removed, the nuclear industries’ competitive advantage over solar power would be removed simultaneously. Much the same can be said for fossil fuels—and has been by Daniel Yergin of Harvard, who claims that simply lifting federal controls from oil prices will “enable energy alternatives such as conservation and solar power to compete fairly and in a timely way with oil.” (Los Angeles Times, April 15, 1979.)

Many of the new anti-nuclear opponents wish merely to live in a clean and healthful environment, and a constantly growing number of them are beginning to realize that they can only do so by working to get government out of the energy business. These opponents of the atomic power industry have studied the record and realized that it is government tampering and government bungling which have brought us to our present state of energy crisis, and that the elimination of government—the creation of a free market in energy—would mean the elimination of the unacceptable risks of nuclear power. Nuclear apologist Samuel McCracken of Boston University, who has defended atomic energy in the pages of such journals as Commentary and the National Review, has recognized this strain in the opposition to nuclear power, but seems to believe its advocates are guilty of inconsistent thinking. The argument against nuclear power is sometimes based, he writes, “on the implied assumption that the government ought never to subsidize the development of a new technology…. [But] those who make this charge have not been heard to object [for example] to the government subsidy of mass transport through Amtrak and the Urban Mass Transit Administration.”

Better listen again, Professor McCracken.