Chernobyl was definitely a worst-case scenario--worst reactor design, worst operators, politically-appointed managers who were ignorant in regard to nuclear engineering and safety, worst management of the disaster by government. And yet the actual toll regarding death and disease is surprisingly low. The horrible fact is that not one death or one exposure to radio-iodine ever had to happen.
The radioactivity in the Exclusion Zone of Chernobyl is lower than natural background radioactivity in La Belle France, Spain, and Finland.
The anti-nuclear-power propaganda machine has greatly exaggerated the threat regarding Chernobyl radioactivity. The propaganda has relied on sensationalistic predictions that were not based on data and that came out shortly after the accident. Since then, international medical teams doing double-blind, randomized health studies have produced very sound data that has been analyzed by the Radiation Effects Research Foundation in Japan as well as a similar agency in Britain. They came to identical conclusions regarding health effects.
There are two ways to supply baseload, 24/7 electricity: fossil-fuel combustion or nuclear power. Coal-fired plants burn the uranium embedded in coal and therefore release into the environment, along with particulates and greenhouse gases, about one hundred times as much radioactive material as a nuclear plant. This is especially true in the Four Corners area of the US, a place rich in uranium deposits. If the coal-fired plants there were nuclear instead, the population of the area would be exposed to much less radioactivity.
Uranium miners who worked in unventilated shafts were exposed to radon. When this exposure was understood, shafts were ventilated and incidences of cancer went down. By the 1970s the incidence of cancer in uranium miners was the same as it is for other hard-rock miners. If you mine coal you are also exposed to radon. Today in the US uranium is not mined--rather it is extracted by separating it out from water that has accumulated in closed mines.
The mines are closed because the price of uranium dropped. The US has acquired many tons of highly-enriched uranium that used to be in nuclear warheads aimed at us by the USSR. This is being blended down and used in US reactors that supply most of the emissions-free electricity in the US.
Apart from uranium and plutonium from weapons, there is enough uranium and thorium to run reactors for hundreds of years. Reprocessing spent nuclear fuel would reduce the volume of waste, and uranium can be recycled through a reactor many times.
The total volume of nuclear waste per year in the US is 2000 tons. Uranium is an extremely dense metal, so that tonnage takes up very little space.
Nuclear waste is being safely stored around the world in dry casks, spent fuel pools, and in a salt bed. Sweden and Finland are preparing repositories in deep granite. Concrete a foot thick prevents particles and rays from escaping into the environment. If coal waste were as strictly regulated, its radionuclides and toxic heavy metals would not be leaking into the environment.
I apologize for the long post. So many wrong ideas, so little time....
Just one small comment - the Soviet operators of nuclear plants were actually pretty good. I remember when I was in Kiev in 1994, the people from EDF, who were there on a long term mission to help the Ukrainians improve the safety of their reactors (knowing full well that another accident there would doom the industry in the West) were very impressed by the ability of their counterparts to manage and fine tune their plants. Of course, the problems were that the design was substantially less safe, and that it had little tolerance for human error, but there was still deep admiration for what their colleagues, as individuals, were doing with limited means and constraining designs.
That's not the way to run a nuclear industry, obviously - the problems were systemic, not just some local errors. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
But according to Piers Paul Read's book, "Ablaze," which an UNSCEAR scientist told me is quite accurate, outlines the politics that were going on at Chernobyl, and the appointment of the head guy because he was a party functionary whose knowledge of nuclear plants was limited to a single correspondence course. He was an arrogant SOB who ignored the warnings of engineers.Then as the accident was in progress the coverup had already begun. That's what I meant by worst case on the human engineering side.
As you no doubt know, there are still old graphite reactors operating in Bulgaria. A nuclear engineer friend with EDF told me that they are a matter of concern.
All that said, I am glad that the countries of the former Soviet Union continue to use nuclear power and to spare the environment the deadly waste from coal combustion. And I am grateful to EDF for their guidance worldwide. Including in the US.
