Between 1950 and 2000 there have been 21 serious incidents or accidents [at Sellafield]involving some off-site radiological releases that merited a rating on the International Nuclear Event Scale, one at level 5, 5 at level 4 and 15 at level 3.
La Hague doesn't have a west that clean either. *Traitor*, n. A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.
Going in reverse:
La Hague doesn't have a west that clean either.
Sellafield neither. Look at the map :)
Part of the answer may be: we know more about what happened there? (On nuclear facility information politics, also see my latest diary.)
Actually no.
Areva and EDF are operating under IAEA and Euratom supervison and they have the same reporting requirements as UKAEA and its descendants (BNFL, NDA, British Energy).
All is not "fine, move along, nothing to see" in the French nuclear program. And no one pretends otherwise. Risks and issues are known. It's simply that people are level and rational about them rather than crying bloody murder at every opportunity.
In La Hague, there was a significant tritium release in 1976 and a level 3 accident with a fire in a storage silo in 1981. There are graphite and zirconium magnesium left-overs of the UNGG process that should be taken care of sooner than later. Also, there are still more than 9,000 cubic meters of high-activity sludge in the STE2/STE3 storages which are still awaiting conditioning. More recently, there was a level 2 issue at the MOX plant in Cadarache last year. France also had a level 4 accident at Saint-Laurent A1 reactor in 1980, the highest level a problem ever went in France. There was ILW dumping at sea in the late 60s (a European "program" ran by the OECD) before France decided to stop the madness in 1969, mostly prompted by its own engineers (activists were completely insignificant at the time).
France's industry also has hundreds of level 0 and level 1 notices each year and no one freaks out.
All of it is reported and documented and there is no particular "secrecy" that needs to be broken into. All of that is known, available, in the open.
Now, why things are going better in France than in the UK or Germany?
I'd love to tell you it's because France is French and as all things French, it's perfect as it's well known that in France, even shit smells of roses, right ?
:>
The real reasons are more far more pedestrian and at some extent, a stroke of historical good luck:
Similarly, the German nuclear industry is divided between many operators, different suppliers in a very hostile political environment. And for the US, well, they started by nuking Hiroshima so, necessarily, that leaves a mark.
The issues with nuclear energy are above all cultural, not technical. That, I think, is the really substantial objection that can be made to nuclear energy.
The issues with nuclear energy are above all cultural, not technical.
This is true also in the mind of the public and the opponents. For instance, when we hear that no insurance will take the liability for nukes, it has nothing to do with rational evaluation of worst-case or averaged liability. There are some 400 reactors worldwide. We have centuries of cumulated operation for various designs. We know the statistics. We know the worst that can happen (Tchernobyl) and we know that counting by loss of life and damage to property, it is bad, but not worst than your average hurricane season over Florida + road fatalities.
Yet insurers won't take it, because they know that in court, a defendant will have a biased audience and will get exhorbitant indemnities, just because a damage was incurred by "the ugly nuclear lobby", when the coal lobby is doing more damage to miners every year and gets away with it. One death by radiation gets a harder punishment than one death by most other means, be they guns, knifes, bombs, mines...
Also think about that: do we hear about the dreadful accidents and release in all the commercial reactors of smaller nations ? Just from the wikipedia list, we have pwoer reactors in Korea, Armenia, Argentina, you name it... And virtually every country in the world has had a toy reactor <10 MW in some research institute. How many have melted and sprayed the world with iodine ? The simple answer is that they have their incidents of course, they have their lot of cover-ups, but the view that nuke is bound for disaster is simply doomsday mythology, and this is popular only in the affluent western nations. Pierre
Unfortunately for your argument, both the statistics and the magnitude of the Chernobyl disaster are hotly contested, with opinions differing in orders of magnitude; I dealt with the Chernobyl numbers game in a rather long diary on the 20th anniversary here on ET. *Traitor*, n. A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.
Of course, you can call me a big nuke puppet (which I'm not) and a despiseful elitist technocrat (which I am) if you wish. Pierre
Is there an obvious summary of the range of estimates available?
What I'd love to see is a range of estimates of the dangers of including nuclear power in the energy generation mix vs. the dangers of not including it, neglecting the bizarro land belief that we will choose to kill technological civilisation and move to some bucolic utopia rather than kill tens of millions of people through global warming and coal fired electrical generation, because we won't - and the transition to that utopia would kill hundreds of millions.
However, there is a danger on the long term, in phasing out the plants (and henceforth, the operating expertise), and stopping development of new generations. It is a technology with very long lead times. We cannot predict with certainty that we won't need it in 20-30 years. Renewables are on a fast growth curve and can go on like that for 30 years, but we cannot be sure about minimal demand.
What I mean is: even with conservation (and certainly demand destruction), total electricity demand may increase due to a crash switch to PHEV, heat pump heating (now installed in 6% of new houses build in France, so it is really taking off)... And demand for non-fossil heat could come from seawater desalination if we have dramatic changes in rainfall patterns.
We have no guarantee that renewables alone can cope with both nuclear/fossil phase-out, and those new demands. Quite the contrary I think for the 20-30 yrs term. Pierre
I also try to keep my points more limited, e.g. I cast doubt at is your claim that we know the risks well, rather than settle down for a figure or a comparison with the risks of a rival technology. *Traitor*, n. A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.
That makes it very hard to quantify risks accurately.
If the Windscale fire problem hadn't been solved, it's likely that much of the Midlands would now be uninhabitable. You can more or less get a way with an accident like that in Russia. In Europe, population densities are somewhat higher and the prospect of losing large sections of a country aren't appealing.
So it's not just imputed fatalities, clearly. The overall risk has to include the extremely small - but not quite zero - prospect of a more serious accident.
As everyone else has been saying, the sanest way to assess the risks is to look at governmental competence and corporate culture.
From that point of view, nukes are politically demanding. If insurers don't want to insure them, it could be as much because they know that the political stability and oversight required to minimise risks isn't there, as because they're worried that any trial will be railroaded by hordes of angry chanting hippies wearing sunflowers.
Well, for nuclear oversight in all of France, I already mentioned the stonewalling of measurements of Chernobyl fallout -- a rather strong case of "if we don't look for it, it doesn't exist". I also don't think that IAEA and Euratom oversight is different for Brunsbüttel, though Sellafield is another thing, being known to have been in breach of Euratom rules. (But again, check the frequency of Euratom control visits to La Hague.)
There were La Hague issues after those you cite. Not on the level of Sellafield, but still.
There is a leukemia cluster controversy for that site too, in 1997 measurements at a wastewater pipe exit showed radiation levels up to 500 times above background, from not only liquid waste but solid in grains up to twice the permitted diametre, there was controversy about excessive inert gas and increasing iodine release in the air, more recently similar measurements of groundwater contradicted official reports.
What's more, La Hague was also part of the German Castor scandal I passingly mention in my own diary: inproper handling of the containers and bad information flow about external contamination and damage they measured. Also worth to point out that while the French authorities referred to international limits still above the values measured at that pipe, the pipe's contamination was above levels where in Germany they would be considered waste to be disposed of in concrete.
But at least they stopped pouring concrete over highly radioactive material. *Traitor*, n. A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.
At the time of Chernobyl, Pierre Pellerin said what was true - that the Chernobyl cloud was passing over France and was clearly detected - and what his professional judgment was - levels were too low to be a threat and justify public action.
One thing is that his judgment was debatable and Pellerin was problably treating bio-concentration too lightly.
The other thing is that Mamère, who was the chief editor and main anchor of the midday news on Antenne 2, spun Pellerin's words and reported flat-out that government was denying that the Chernobyl cloud was passing over France.
The two, Mamère and France 2, were condemned for defamation in 2001, 2002, 2003 until the European Court of Human Rights decided that lying was a human right in 2006.
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Whose measurements? That CRIRAD joke? Controversy? Sure. There's a controversy between evolution and biblical creationism where I live. So what's the point?
Also worth to point out that while the French authorities referred to international limits still above the values measured at that pipe, the pipe's contamination was above levels where in Germany they would be considered waste to be disposed of in concrete.
And don't worry, it's treated as waste and it shows up in the ANDRA inventory. La Hague, item 6b
Nature des déchets :Concrétions issues du nettoyage de la conduite de rejet (34,7 m3) Radio-nucléides : PF PA Classe : FMA-VC
There again my point. The supposed "secrecy" is a myth.
Nope, the case is not reducible to the Mamère-Pellerin libel case. You conveniently forget about the leaked report by Marie-Odile Bertella-Geffroy and other recent re-evaluations. That was in late 2005. Read here and here. *Traitor*, n. A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.
But again, Criirad is involved and I hold those guys to be first class wankers. So I expect the whole thing to dissolve in a non-lieu.
