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THBT THE AGE OF NUCLEAR ENERGY

MUST COME TO AN END
EDS-UGM Regular Practice, April 2 nd 2011

NOTE FROM THE EDITOR:

Due to recent changes in the board for the Research and Development Department of EDS UGM, I,
Thoriq, will be the main contributor and editor of motions and matter sheets. Y our criticisms,
suggestions, and feedback are always appreciated. Feel free to communicate them to members of RnD
or me personally

CONTEXT
The discov ery of nuclear as both a source of power and a highly destructiv e weapon in the mid 20th
century have sparked endless controversy on its usage. We see that the current crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan has led the world to question once more the benefits and
justifications for nuclear energy. It shows how an earthquake near the nuclear reactor has the possibility
to cause significant danger to surrounding population and the wider world. Ev en remote traces of
radiation in drinking water has forced the Japanese government to supply bottled water to its population.
We saw people's reactions: from rational, irrational, to downright hy steric ov er the dangers of radiation
(ex :" don't step out in the rain! don't eat Japanese food!"). Opponents of nuclear energy hav e used this
ev ent as ammunition to further discredit nuclear as dangerous, costly, and simply unneeded. On the other
hand, proponents of nuclear hav e insisted on its high -output (nuclear is responsible for 1 1 percent of
world's energy), it being cleaner than current sources, and th e false claims on its dangers. They believ e
that the incident in Fukushima was
It is time for us to rev isit yet again the energy debate, this time focusing on nuclear. We urge debaters not
to get stuck in the same tired old paradigms of "Chernoby l this" or "Hiroshima/Nagasa ki that", but
instead analy ze the issue on a deeper lev el. Whether nuclear energy is something that is sustainable,
necessary, and should be continuously pursued; or has the age of nuclear ended in face of costs, nuclear
disaster risks and the dev elopment of other renewable energy ? Happy researching!
EDS-UGM Research and Dev elopment Department.
As a new initativ e of RnD, we will try to make av ailable for all members of EDS UGM soft -copies of the
latest magazines concerning current events, such as T he Economist. Please feel free to ask from me

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READINGS
Nuclear Power Is Worth the Risk
By James M. Acton
Tak en from Foreign Policy
<http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/03/14/nuclear
_power_is_worth_the_risk?page=full>

Until March 1 1 , with the 25th anniv er sary of the

Chernobyl accident approaching -- and memories
of that disaster receding -- safety concerns no
longer appeared to be the killer argument against
nuclear power they once were. Instead, another
fear, of climate change, looked like it might be
driv ing a "nuclear renaissance" as states sought
carbon-free energy sources. But the ongoing crisis
at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power
Station will return safety to the forefront of the
nuclear power debate. Ev en the most ardent
industry adv ocates now recognize that the
unfolding crisis inside two reactors there -- shown
on liv e television and beamed around the world -has left the future of their industry in doubt.
Nev ertheless, the case for nuclear power remains
strong. All forms of energy generation carry risks.
Fossil fuels, which (for the time being at least) are
nuclear energy 's principal riv al, carry the risk of
catastrophic climate change. And as we're seeing in
Japan, we hav en't eliminated all the dangers
associated with nuclear power, ev en t hough
accidents are few and far between.
Good public policy inv olv es balancing these risks.
Persuading the public to accept the risks of nuclear
energy will, howev er, not be easy . To do so, the
nuclear industry will hav e to resist a strong
temptation to argue that the accident in Japan was
simply an ex traordinarily improbable confluence of
ev ents and that ev ery thing is just fine. Instead, it
must recognize and correct the deficiencies of its
current approach to safety .
When it comes to safety , the nuclear industry
emphasizes the concept of "defense in depth."
Reactors are designed with lay ers of redundant
safety sy stems. There's the main cooling sy stem, a
backup to it, a backup to the backup, a backup to

2
the backup to the backup, and so on. A major
accident can only occur if all these sy stems fail
simultaneously . By adding ex tra lay ers of
redundancy, the probability of such a catastrophic
failure can -- in theory at least -- be made too small
to worry about.
Defense in depth is a good idea. But it suffers from
one fundamental flaw: the possibility that a
disaster might knock out all of the backup sy stems.
A reactor can have as many layers of defense as you
like, but if they can all be disabled by a single
ev ent, then redundancy adds much less to safety
than might first meet the ey e.
This kind of failure occurred at Fukushima Daiichi
on March 1 1 . As soon as the earthquake struck, the
reactors scrammed: The control rods, used to
modulate the speed of the nuclear reaction, were
inserted into the reactor cores, shutting off the
nuclear reactions. So far so good. Nev ertheless, the
cores were still hot and needed to be cooled. This
in turn required electricity in order to power the
pumps, which bring in water to cool the fuel.
Unfortunately, one of the ex ternal power lines that
was designed to prov ide electricity in just such a
contingency was itself disrupted by the earthquake.
This shouldn't hav e mattered because there was a
backup. But, according to a news release issued by
the power-plant operator, the malfunc tion in one
ex ternal supply somehow caused off-site power to
be lost entirely .
Once again, this shouldn't hav e been too much of
an issue. There was a backup to the backup in the
form of on-site diesel generators. And, sure
enough, they kicked in. Fifty -fiv e minutes later,
howev er, they were swamped by the tsunami that
followed the earthquake. From that moment on,
plant operators were in a desperate struggle to
prev ent core melting.
Japanese regulators are certainly aware of the
danger of earthquakes; they take safety ex tremely
seriously . Like other buildings in Japan, nuclear
reactors must be able to withstand earthquakes.

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The problem, as we now know, is that there is a

significant chance of them falling v ictim to ev ents
more ex treme than those they were designed to
withstand.
This problem was highlighted by the earthquake
centered near the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear
power plant in 2007 . The earth mov ements
generated by that quake were larger than the
plant's design limit. Fortunately , there was not a
major accident; the safety sy stems worked as
designed in spite of the quake's phy sical impact.
Before the plant could reopen, however, new safety
features had to be added to ensure that it was
capable of withstanding bigger earthquakes.
Of course, the issues raised by the 2007 and 201 1
earthquakes are relevant to the whole world -- not
just Japan. What is needed now is a sober and
careful assessment of what engineers call the
"design basis" for all nuclear power plants
worldwide -- those already in operation, those
under construction, and those being planned.
Specifically, we need to determine whether they are
truly capable of withstanding the whole range of
natural and man-made disasters that might befall
them, from floods to earthquakes to terrorism.
Ev en after the ongoing disaster in Japan, the
nuclear industry is unlikely to welcome such an
ex ercise. It is almost certain to argue that a whole scale reassessment is unnecessary because existing
standards are adequate. But after two earthquakes
in less than four y ears shook Japanese reactors
bey ond their design limits, this argument is simply
not credible. It is also self-defeating.
For nuclear energy to expand, the public must trust
the nuclear industry . It must trust reactor
operators to run their reactors safely. It must trust
regulators to ensure there is adequate ov ersight.
And, most importantly perhaps, it must trust
reactor designers to create new reactors that do not
share the v ulnerabilities of older ones.
This last point is crucial. New reactors, wit h
enhanced safety features, would almost certainly
not hav e befallen the same fate as those at
Fukushima Daiichi, which is four decades old.

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Conv incing the public of this argument will b e

ex tremely hard now, howev er.
After Chernobyl, the nuclear industry argued that - as far as safety was concerned -- Sov iet RBMKty pe reactors, like the one inv olv ed in the 1 986
accident, had about as much in common with
modern Western reactors as an inflatable dinghy
does with an ocean liner. And they were right. But
their argument made very little impact because the
nuclear industry had lost the public's trust.
It is v ital the nuclear industry does not make the
same mistake now. It must not try to sweep safety
issues under the carpet by telling people that
ev ery thing is OK and that they should not worry .
This strategy simply won't work. What might work
is to acknowledge the problem and work to fix it.

Nuclear Energy Isn't Needed

By Kumi Naidoo
Tak en from the New York Times :
<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/23/opinion/23ihtednaidoo23.html?_r=4>

Twelv e day s are not nearly enough to comprehend

the magnitude of the catastrophes that hit Japan
starting March 1 1 . From the children who lost
parents in the crush of the earthquake, to those
whose lov ed ones are still missing aft er the
tsunami, to the scores of workers risking their
health by heroically attempting to stabilize the
Fukushima nuclear complex there is no end to
the tragic stories.
Y et in addition to the grief and empathy I feel for
the Japanese people, I am beginning to dev elop
another emotion, and that is anger. As we
anx iously await ev ery bit of news about the
dev elopments at Fukushima, hoping that radiation
leaks and discharges will be brought to an end, that
the risk of further catastrophe will be av erted, and
that the Japanese people will hav e one less
nightmare to cope with, gov ernments across the
world continue to promote further inv estment in
nuclear power. Just last week, for ex ample, the

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gov ernment of my home country of South Africa

announced that it was adding 9,600 megawatts of
nuclear energy to its new energy plan.
There are two dangerous assumptions currently
parading themselv es as fact in the midst of the
ongoing nuclear crisis. The first is that nuclear
energy is safe. The second is that nuclear ener gy is
an essential element of a low carbon future, that it
is needed to prevent catastrophic climate change.
Both are false.
Nuclear technology will alway s be v ulnerable to
human error, natural disaster, design failure or
terrorist attack. What we are seeing at Fukushima
right now are failures of the sy stems. The reactors
themselves withstood the earthquake and tsunami,
but then the v ital cooling systems failed. When the
back-up power sy stems also failed, the reactors
ov erheated, ev entually causing the spr ead of
radiation. This is only one ex ample of what can go
wrong.
Nuclear power is inherently unsafe and the list of
possible illnesses stemming from ex posure to the
accompany ing radiation is horrify ing: genetic
mutations, birth defects, cancer, leukemia a nd
disorders of the reproductiv e, immune,
cardiov ascular and endocrine sy stems.
While we hav e all heard of Chernoby l and Three
Mile Island, the nuclear industry would hav e us
believ e these are but isolated ev ents in an
otherwise unblemished history . Not so. Ov er 800
other significant ev ents hav e been officially
reported to the International Atomic Energy
Agency May ak, Tokaimura, Bohunice, Forsmark
to name just a few.
The argument that nuclear energy is a necessary
component of a carbon-free future is also false.
Greenpeace and the European Renewable Energy
Council hav e put together a study called Energy
[R]ev olution, which clearly shows that a clean
energy pathway is cheaper, healthier and deliv ers
faster results for the climate than any other option.
This plan calls for the phase -out of ex isting

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reactors around the world and a moratorium on

construction of new commercial nuclear reactors.

Furthermore, an energy scenario recently produced

by the conserv ativ e International Energy Agency
highlights the fact that nuclear power is not
necessary for lowering greenhouse gas emissions.
It shows that ev en if ex isting nuclear power
capacity could be quadrupled by 2050, the
proportion of energy that it provided would still be
below 1 0 percent globally . This wou ld reduce
carbon diox ide emissions by less than 4 percent.
The same amount of money , inv ested in clean,
renewable energy sources such as wind and solar
could hav e a much greater impact on lowering
global warming.
Nuclear energy is an ex pensiv e and deadly
distraction from the real solutions. Fuel-free
sources of energy do not generate international
conflicts (as I write I cannot help but think of
Liby a), they do not run dry and they do not spill.
There are initial financial inv estments to be made,
but in time the price of renewables will decline as
technological adv ances and market competition
driv e the costs down. Furthermore, implemented
wisely , a green, nuclear and fossil-free future will
create a host of safe, new jobs.
As international organizations like Greenpeace join
Japans Citizens Nuclear Information Center in an
appeal to the Japanese gov ernment for improv ed
ev acuation plans and other protective measures for
people still within the 30 -kilometer exclusion zone;
as the issue of food and water c ontamination
continues to grow in Asia; as iodine tablets
continue to sell out around the globe and people in
places as far away from Japan as Los Angeles are
on high alert for radioactiv e plumes it is
imperative that as citizens of the world we continue
to v oice our opposition to further inv estment in
nuclear energy . We need a truly clean energy
rev olution now.

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Catastrophes happen.

A big part of the problem at Japans Fukushima

Daiichi power station are the highly radioactiv e
spent fuel rods kept in storage pools at the plant.
What to do, ultimately, with such dangerous waste
material is the nuclear power question without an
answer. Nuclear adv ocates and public officials
dont talk about it much. Denial is the default
position when it comes to nuclear waste.

No one thought the Interstate 35W bridge across

the Mississippi Riv er in Minneapolis would
collapse. No one thought the Gulf of Mex ico would
be fouled to the horrible ex tent that it was by the
BP oil spill. The awful conv ergence of disasters in
Japan a 9.0 earthquake followed by a tsunami
and a dev astating nuclear power emergency
seemed almost unimaginable.

In New Y ork, Gov . Andrew Cuomo said again this

week that the 40-y ear-old Indian Point nuclear
power plant in Westchester County, 35 miles north
of New Y ork City , should be closed. Try to imagine
the difficulty , in the ev ent of an emergency , of
ev acuating such an area with its millions of
residents. This plant in this prox imity to New
Y ork City was nev er a good risk, said the governor.

Worst-case scenarios unfold more frequently than

wed like to believ e, which leads to two major
questions regarding nuclear power that Americans
hav e an obligation to answer.

There are, blessedly , v ery few catastrophic

accidents at nuclear power plants. And there hav e
not been many deaths associated with them. The
rarity of such accidents prov ides a comfort zone.
We can look at the low probabilities and de clare,
It cant happen here.

A Price Too High?

By Bob Herbert
Tak en from the New York Times : <
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/19/opinion/19herbert.html
?s cp=8&sq=nuclear&st=Search>

First, can a disaster comparable to the one in

Japan happen here? The answer, of course, is y es
whether caused by an earthquake or some other
ev ent or series of ev ents. Nature is unpredictable
and human beings are fallible. It could happen.
So the second question is whether it makes sense
to follow through on plans to increase our reliance
on nuclear power, thus heightening the risk of a
terrible problem occurring here in the United
States. Is that a risk worth taking?
Concern ov er global warming has increased the
appeal of nuclear power, which does not produce
the high lev els of greenhouse gases that come from
fossil fuels. But there has been a persistent
tendency to ignore the toughest questions posed by
nuclear power: What should be done with the
waste? What are the consequences of a
catastrophic accident in a populated area? How
safe are the plants, really ? Why would tax pay ers
hav e to shoulder so much of the financial risk of
ex panding the nations nuclear power capacity , an
effort that would be wildly ex pensiv e?

But what if it did happen here? What would the

consequences be? If Indian Point blew, how wide
an area and how many people would be affected,
and what would the cleanup costs be? Rigorously
answering such questions is the only way to
determine whether the potential risk to life and
property is worthwhile.
The 1 04 commercial nuclear plants in the U.S. are
getting old, and many hav e had serious problems
ov er the y ears. There have been dozens of instances
since 1 97 9, the y ear of the Three Mile Island
accident, in which nuclear reactors hav e had to be
shut down for more than a y ear for safety reasons.
Building new plants, which the Obama
administration fav ors, can be breathtakingly
ex pensiv e and requires gov ernment loan
guarantees. Banks are not lining up to lend money
on their own for construction of the newes t
generation of Indian Points.
In addition to the inherent risks with regard to
safety and security , the nuc lear industry has long

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been notorious for sky -high construction costs,

fev erish cost-overruns and projects that eventually
are abandoned. The Union of Concerned Scientists,
in a 2009 analy sis of the costs associated with
nuclear plant construction, said that once a plant
came online it usually led to significant rate
increases for customers:
Ratepay ers bore well over $200 billion (in today s
dollars) in cost ov erruns for completed nuclear
plants. In the 1 990s, legislators and regulators also
allowed utilities to recover most stranded costs
the difference between utilities remaining
inv estments in nuclear plants and the market value
of those plants as states issued billions of dollars
in bonds backed by ratepay er charges to pay for
utilities abov e-market inv estments.
The refrain here is familiar: The total cost to
ratepayers, taxpayers and shareholders stemming
from cost ov erruns, canceled plants and stranded
costs ex ceeded $30 0 billion in today s dollars.
Nuclear power is hardly the pristine, e conomical,
unambiguous answer to the nations energy needs
and global warming concerns. It offers benefits and
big-time shortcomings. Ultimately , the price may
be much too high.

The proliferation of nuclear panic is

politics at its most ghoulish
The risk from radiation is exaggerated. Worstcase scenario fantasies are used to justify w ars
that cause many more deaths
By Simon Jenkins
Tak en from guardian.co.uk
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/07/nu
clear-power-weapons-radiation-defence>

Some books are written to be read, others to be put

in a cannon and blasted at the seat of power. Two
such blasts hav e just crossed my desk, from
academics on either side of the Atlantic. Both are
on the same subject, the consequence of the
irrational fear of radiation.

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6
The first book, Radiation and Reason, is by an
Ox ford professor of phy sics, Wade Allison. It
narrates the history and nature of nuclear
radiation, culminating in an attack on the
obsessive safety lev els gov erning nuclear energy .
These ov erstate the true risk, in Allison's v iew, by
up to 500 times, thus rendering nuclear
prohibitiv ely ex pensiv e and endangering the
combat of global warming.
The second is Atomic Obsession by John Mueller,
professor of political science at Ohio State
Univ ersity . Mueller describes the tox ic fear
associated with radiation from nuclear weapons. It
distorts the balance of international relations and
senselessly makes enemies of friends. The books
jointly undermine conventional wisdom on the two
greatest political challenges of the day, in the fields
of energy and defence. As such, they are
sensational.
Radiation, say s Allison, is nothing like as
dangerous as the anti-nuclear lobby and its
paranoid regulators claim. The permitted radiation
lev el in the waste storage hall at Sellafield is so low
(1 mSv per hour) as to be negligible, a figure
achiev ed at v ast cost in construction and
inspection. This compares with the 1 00 mSv
threshold for ev en remote cancer risk and 5,500
for radiation sickness. According to Allison,
someone would hav e to liv e for a million hours in
Sellafield to absorb the same radiation as is
administered in a hospital radiotherapy suite.
Higher doses are permitted in food processing and
ev en in medicinal resorts, with supposed beneficial
or at least harmless effects. Only y esterday
research suggested that mobile phone rad iation
may reliev e Alzheimer's.
Allison analy ses successiv e studies into the only
serious nuclear accident since Hiroshima, the
Chernoby l fire, which killed no more than 60
people, all in c lose contact with the fire. Other than
some thy roid cancers caused chiefly by a failure to
distribute iodine tablets, long-term cancers in
surv iv ors were below the regional av erage. The
truth is that low-dose radiation effects wear off

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quickly . In some parts of India and Brazil people

liv e happily with ambient radiation of 200 -300
mSv .
Y et the mere word, Chernobyl, induces such terror
in regulators as to lead to the unnecessary
sterilisation of thousands of acres (with now
thriv ing wildlife) and the continued slaughter of
Cumbrian sheep, despite the risk to lamb -eaters
being negligible. The trouble is that nobody makes
money by downplay ing risk. Nuclear inspectors
need work, and contractors can claim astronomical
safety costs, assuming that gov ernments will pay .
The losers are the public and life on earth.
Meanwhile, ov er in Ohio, Mueller describes the
same terror infecting reaction to nuclear weapons.
He points out that nuclear bombs are ex tremely
hard to make, let alone deploy , and their
destructiv e power and radiological aftermath are
grossly ov erstated. The dev astation of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki was largely the result of the buildings
bombed being made of wood. Numbers killed were
similar to those dy ing in conv entional bomb
attacks at the time. Y et we memorialise Hiroshima
but not Toky o, where 1 00,000 were killed in March
1 945. Subsequent diseases from ex posure to lowlev el radiation were harder to detect. Modern
nuclear weapons are obviously more powerful, but
again their blast areas would remain limited and
their likely contamination, say s Mueller, much
ex aggerated.
I used to believ e that, for all their horror, atom
bombs brought an end to the war in Japan which
other bombs had failed to do. After that war, they
stabilised the nervous confrontation betwee n east
and west, deterring Sov iets and Americans from
going jointly berserk at such flashpoints as Berlin,
Hungary or Cuba. Deterrence sort of worked.
History may be moot on those points, but what is
surely clear is that nuclear weapons are now
v irtually useless. Like Allison, Mueller goes beyond
the two iconic incidents of Hiroshima and
Chernoby l to show how special interests hav e
hijacked the nuclear my stique to ex ploit public
fear.

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The risk of any one ex ploding a nuclear weapon,

ev en in politically charged regions such as the
Middle East, is infinitesimally small. Whoev er did
so would be too mad to be deterred by an enemy
possessing nuclear weapons, any more than Ho Chi
Minh's V ietnam, Argentina's Galtieri or Iraq's
Saddam Hussein were deterred by America and
Britain. Nor, say s Mueller, would the consequence
of ev en a serious bomb attack be as horrible as is
claimed. Cities recover with remarkable alacrity, as
ev en Hiroshima did from contamination. The
second world war and many American bombing
campaigns since hav e shown that human
settlements are resilient to aerial bombardment.
As for the much-v aunted risk of a terrorist getting a
nuclear weapon the "1 % chance" that kept poor
Dick Cheney awake at night Mueller points out
that the chance must be not one in a hundred but
one in millions. Cheney would hav e done better
worry ing about the proliferation of AK47 s. Ev en
were a "dirty " bomb somehow to be assembled and
deploy ed, its radiological contamination is
ex aggerated by defence contractors and lobby ists
frantic for contracts.
The billions of dollars being devoted to countering
"catacly smic" terrorism, in Iraq, Afghanistan and
now Y emen, and to confronting such proto-nuclear
states as Iran or North Korea, is not just
disproportionate to the risk. The money would be
better spent on other way s of reducing terrorism.
In a futile pursuit of nuclear non-proliferation,
America and Britain are combing the world
accusing states of threatening somehow to destroy
their civ ilisations when the risk of this happening
is near meaningless.
As Mueller notes, it is not only ghoulish science
and ghoulish journalism that sells, ghoulish
politics does too. He has nothing against
negotiating nuclear non-proliferation, but pleads
"to av oid policies that can lead to the deaths of
hundreds of thousands of people under the
obsessive sway of worst-case scenario fantasies", as
is the case in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is these
fantasies that line the streets of Wootton Bassett
each week.

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It is a monumental irony that rightwing politicians

who rearm against the tiny risk to humanity from
nuclear weapons are often the same as deny the
risk to humanity from global warming. Both are
risks. Both may be improbable, but the risk from
radiation is minimal and containable, while the
worst-case scenario from global warming is truly
cataclysmic. Nor is such hy pocrisy confined to the
right. Many of those who claim global warming as
the "greatest threat to the planet" tend also to be
those who oppose nuclear energy as "too risky ", or
ev en too ex pensiv e.
This is all a massiv e failure of science to pierce the
carapace of public ignorance. As Allison and
Mueller argue, nothing is as potent as the politics
of fear, and there is no fear as blind as that which
comes from a bomb and a death ray . So what is
science doing? The world is in the grip of a
prejudice from which nothing seems able to free it.
At least these books try .

BE ENV IRONMENT A LLY -FRIENDLY ! PRINT T WO PA GES ON ON E SHEET OF PA PER A ND

USE T HE REV ERSE SIDE OF T HIS MA T T ER -PA PER T O JOT DOWN YOUR NOT ES FOR T HE DEBA T E.