Study: Nuke plants unsafe

Tuesday, April 9, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.

U.S. efforts to build a large nuclear power plant before the Soviets resulted in unsafe designs that persist to this day, according to a study released today.

"Promises of an energy paradise driven by atomic power had no engineering foundation," said Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research and principal author of the report.

Makhijani said as the two countries raced to develop nuclear bombs and nuclear power plants, they made unsound engineering choices in the process.

"An exhaustive search of archival material revealed that officials were engaging in baseless propaganda and perhaps also in self-deception when they made fantastic prognostications about nuclear energy," he said.

The report, "The Nuclear Power Deception," criticizes the nuclear industry's current use of the term "inherently safe" for some newer reactor designs.

"These reactors are not accident-proof, as implied by the term 'inherently safe,'" said Scott Saleska, a physicist and co-author of the study. "This is just the 1990s version of the 1950s 'too cheap to meter' sales pitch for nuclear power."

Nuclear power was born of compromises on safety questions, government subsidies and a decision to take huge losses on initial orders on the part of General Electric and Westinghouse, the study found.

"Even the hardiest private entrepreneurs wanted government-subsidized insurance and limitations on liability far below potential losses," Saleska said.

There is no private insurance likely to cover nuclear power accidents for the losses on the scale of the 1986 Chernobyl tragedy in the Soviet Union, the study said.

Congress set liability limits for nuclear accidents in 1957 at slightly more than $500 million. That limit was raised to $7 billion in 1988, but is still grossly inadequate, the study concluded.

Nuclear power's high costs became more apparent in the 1970s and 1980s under reduced government subsidies and imposed safety restrictions. Electricity ratepayers, utility bondholders and stockholders paid a high price.

"In the 1980s disillusionment with nuclear power spread from Main Street to Wall Street," Makhijani noted.

Operating, maintenance and fuel costs of nuclear power were higher than coal every year from 1987 to 1993, the study reported.

The nuclear industry boasted in March that the U.S. nuclear power performance had reached record levels. Nuclear power contributed 22.5 percent of domestic power, according to the Energy Information Administration, an independent statistical agency with the U.S. Department of Energy.

There is no mention of the costs of providing this power from the EIA.

In its search for new subsidies, the nuclear industry has proposed to reprocess excess plutonium from nuclear weapons, the study said.

In addition to increasing risks from nuclear proliferation, reprocessing would raise waste management costs from an estimated $25 billion now to between $130 billion and $250 billion, according to calculations in the study.

Other findings:

* The public was misled about the promise of nuclear power. Officials records show industry and government leaders clearly understood that nuclear power would be expensive and difficult to develop.

* Spreading nuclear technology and growing commercial reprocessing are increasing the global stocks of plutonium.

* Outstanding safety issues related to nuclear power cannot be resolved fast enough to allow it to contribute to reducing greenhouse gases that may contribute to global warming. Energy efficiency, natural gas and renewable energy sources are better ways to reduce greenhouse gases.

Most funding for the study was provided by a special grant from the C.S. Fund. Additional funding came from the Public Welfare Foundation, anonymous donors through Rockefeller Financial Services and the Steward R. Mott Charitable Trust.