PERFECTLY UNCLEAR

Nuclear power stations are like stars that shine all day long. We shall sow them all over the land. They are perfectly safe!

— Mikail Styrikovich in Ogonyok, 1980

The plants have safe and reliable controls that are protected from any breakdown with three safety lines. The odds of meltdown are one in 10,000 years.

— Ukrainian energy minister in Soviet Life, 1986

I spent my mornings this week reading The Power of Nuclear: The rise, fall and return of our mightiest energy source. (Go get yourself twelve hard copies today and request it at school and your local library!) I was pointed to this text because it is newly published and said to offer an up-to-date, definitive, evidence-based accounting of what we know about nuclear energy.

Though the work acknowledges more than most, it is quick and complete in its disregard, of all things, of the very real and lasting harms of nuclear catastrophes, as attested to by victims and their family members. This, of course, when it’s not disregarding leading researchers and their studies as well as all the publicly available reports and press that offer resounding refutations, or at least something significant worth considering. The book really just puts up strawman after strawman, phalanx after phalanx of them, and then — to everyone’s tremendous shock, doubtless — proceeds to knock them all down with nothing more than a sentence or two…

The book sets out explaining how it relies upon several trusted works from the best possible sources. I’ve written about some of those and pointed out their significant flaws previously. For example, Our World in Data. I love that site and the team does good work generally but with nuclear they miss some critical details and point us to texts arriving prior to more current or holistic work. They also do this while ignoring entirely anything that isn’t perfectly direct and objective (such as all of the totally valid first- and second-hand accounts from survivors and their families or even pertinent details such as the funding governments continue delivering to the spouses of workers who died on site — which, for Ukraine alone, suggests a fatality number not less than 1000X the official total…) Right.

So, I don’t need to rehash all that. I also won’t bring up these specific examples of Chernobyl or Fukushima, which I’ve covered at length before and which the author basically says didn’t happen; or, if they did, they weren't actually all that bad. Though, it must be said, the author rightfully and refreshingly spells out how forced relocations and much public catastrophizing by authorities and the press did tremendous harm. Instead of revisiting the source material or all the details of any specific nuclear catastrophes, I’ll just look at one brief paragraph from a chapter on nuclear waste that I think highlights perfectly how misleading the book and its framing, language, and examples are.

THE QUOTE

Chapter 10, starting on page 215, is titled Hidden Treasure: What should we do with nuclear waste. After offering the example of Onkalo, Finland’s state-of-the-art, 21st century radioactive waste disposal solution* (*a hole in the ground), the author pleads with us that radioactive waste is effectively harmless, so harmless that it is entirely uninteresting. Actually, he goes a little further and tells us that if it weren’t for irrational, wack-job environmentalist types we would just be dumping all our nuclear waste in the sea, just as we used to and just as God (or Nature or the good people at the IAEA or the nuclear power lobby) always intended.

Then we’re offered the opinion, stated as empirical fact, that, regardless of its real or make-believe harmfulness, the world has accumulated extremely little nuclear waste over the decades; so not only is it harmless and uninteresting but it’s not something anyone anywhere should even spend time considering because, like common sense or nuclear energy production, there’s so little of it to be found.

We’re told, on page 222, “Nuclear waste is compact. As a result, it doesn’t take up much space.” Wow. Just wow. The author then offers up the following for scale. (A dime? No. A banana? No. An Olympic-sized swimming pool? No. The Empire State Building? No, none of the above.) He tells us that “If we put together all the spent fuel that has been collected from nuclear reactors around the world since the 1950s … it would fit into a single football stadium. Within the chalk lines of the pitch it would form a block 4m (13ft) high.”

So, what’s wrong with all that? (Aside from being hilarious. ‘The total volume of all nuclear waste is small and therefore not big, or, in fact, as some might say, rather little.’ Yowza!) Well, every part of it is a problem. Though the statement is mostly factual it is deeply misleading, extremely so and in every way possible.

TL;DR:

The author:

Establishes the premise that there are far too few nuclear reactors in the world then tells us that we should consider them inherently safe because there’s so little waste been produced to date (by so very few reactors)

Confuses global “radioactive waste” inventories with “spent fuel” ones. Then gives us the wrong number for “spent fuel” inventories

Disregards almost all radioactive waste associated with nuclear power generation

Misleads about the process and time associated with spent nuclear fuel use, storage, and disposal

Dramatically inflates the timeframe of waste production to minimize the impact (adding at least 30 years or what amounts to 70% to any sensible figure)

Provides a non-standard reference, and one with no fixed dimensions at that, for the scale of nuclear waste

Pitches that a couple of decades-worth of nuclear waste (a number that looks suspect and might actually be 1,000X higher) from what he says is a small number of reactors is, in his mind, very little; despite that volume (probably a fictional figure) being at least three times that of all the gold extracted across the planet over all of human history

Fails to acknowledge that this (likely false) radioactive waste volume could fill 500 of the largest ships ever built, those giant oil-carrying supertankers; meaning you could park one outside every city in Canada, the United States, and Mexico and still have one left over for every city you can name in Europe. Which, to me, feels way closer to “plenty” than “not much”

THE DEETS

Contradiction

What struck me first when reading this was how proponents of nuclear power commonly complain that virtually no new reactors have been built, particularly over the last 30 years (and how they want to see an energy revolution resulting in an explosion of new builds everywhere that will have them, as quickly as possible and at any cost — for the environment!) That’s nearly the entire present refrain on nuclear. So, to my simple mind, any argument for how safe and good nuclear power is that highlights how little waste exists, due to the total lack of historical production, seems like a very funny starting place. Doesn’t it? Maybe that’s just me. Wouldn’t every one of these people gladly plunk down 5,000 more reactors this instant if they had a magic wand? They would. To me it sounds something like “Everyone should invest their life savings in meme coins because only a few folks have lost everything to date.” Or maybe “Of course we should all rely upon Artificial Intelligence and make it ubiquitous because it has never yet crashed the world economy or set the sky on fire.” I think that (the whole premise) is a pretty serious flaw in the argument. You may not. Don’t worry, it gets worse.

What are we talking about?

The next things worth noting are the wording and numbers on offer. The author starts by framing this about “nuclear waste” but then mysteriously switches to discussing “spent fuel”. That, from where I sit, is like starting a discussion about global beverage consumption but ignoring water, tea, coffee and more and only ever speaking about soda, or something. But I don’t think the author is trying to be sneaky here, not entirely. In some places I think he’s honestly confused. (I make the same honest errors of ignorance or carelessness all the time.)

So, the author validates the above numbers for the volume of “spent fuel” with a specific figure and a reference in an endnote. (I’ll never understand the one-liner endnote that gifts a simple number or citation. Just give me the damn number in-text or at least as a footnote… shakes fist) If you go and find it, the number referenced there is “29,000 cubic metres” and comes from page 50 of an IAEA report from 2022, titled Status and Trends in Spent Fuel and Radioactive Waste Management. Seems like a good source. And the number is indeed found there. (Bold! If you haven’t gone hunting for original sources, you may not know that, rather shockingly, there’s no guarantee even a precise quote from an easily accessed source in a book printed by a major publisher is accurate or, wildly, even exists. This phenomena is not an AI thing.) Here, the trouble is not the quote but what this number actually represents.

The authors offer “…all the spent fuel that has been collected from nuclear reactors around the world since the 1950s.” Given that and the subtitle of the book's chapter, What should we do with nuclear waste, I actually went in assuming we were talking about all the radioactive waste directly associated with the production of electricity at nuclear reactors. (Which, alas, still omits virtually all the pollution and waste that any total accounting would associate with nuclear power…) But that’s not what “29,000 cubic metres” is. Where this number is found is in section six of the IAEA report, titled “Inventories”. That section is divided into five parts:

6.1. Data sources

6.2. Description of data aggregation

6.3. Current inventories of spent fuel

6.4. Current inventories of radioactive waste

6.5. Future forecasts

As you can see, the paper differentiates between “spent fuel” and “radioactive waste.” And page 50, the part referenced, lands in the “Current inventories of radioactive waste” section — not under “…spent fuel.” If you then endeavour to go to the page, you find a graph labelled, “FIG. 19. Summary of reported global solid radioactive waste inventories (m^3). HLW [high-level waste] storage volume is 29 000 m^3.” That there is the author’s number.

The most minor issue is that “radioactive waste” isn’t “spent fuel.” As the report notes of “radioactive waste”:

During the operation of a reactor, different types of radioactive waste are generated. This waste includes filters used in water and air treatment, worn out components and industrial waste that has become contaminated with radioactive substances. This waste has to be conditioned, packaged and stored prior to its disposal. Most of this waste (by volume) has low levels of radioactivity (VLLW [very low-level waste] or LLW [low-level waste]). At the end of its operating life, a reactor is shut down and eventually dismantled. During dismantling, contaminated and activated components are separated, treated and if necessary managed as radioactive waste. The largest volumes of radioactive waste generated are in the VLLW or LLW classes. Smaller volumes of ILW [intermediate-level waste] are also generated. The majority of the waste (by volume) from dismantling is, however, not radioactive and can be handled as industrial waste, in accordance with the country’s regulations. (p13)

Okay. And the report clearly differentiates those materials from “spent fuel”, explaining:

After its use in a reactor, spent fuel is highly radioactive, emits significant radiation and heat, and is typically transferred to wet storage in a fuel pool for several years. After this period (sometimes referred to as a cooling period), the spent fuel can be safely transferred to storage facilities, either wet or dry, or reprocessing facilities. The length of time that spent fuel stays in various types of storage depends on its characteristics and intended disposition. For example, spent fuel intended to be reprocessed may spend very little time in storage (a few years), while spent fuel intended for direct disposal may spend several decades in storage. (p.14)

So the author is under the wrong category if what he wants to talk about is “spent fuel.” If that wasn’t bad enough, notice that the author is laser focussed on only the tiny fraction of radioactive waste from nuclear power generation that is both “solid” and “high-level”. Without clearly specifying, the author is ignoring all of the huge volumes of requisite liquid waste, which is the overwhelming majority of the waste associated with spent fuel and nuclear power production, as I understand from the report he offers. And then he pairs that curious sort of cherrypicking with disregarding the overwhelming volume of radioactive waste that isn’t the most radioactive and falls below the “high-level” threshold.

You: “Well, what’s wrong with that?”

That reads to me as a systematic disregard for what is effectively the entire problem. Certainly the IAEA, even in the author’s chosen report, agrees with me. They don’t imply anywhere that it’s only the high-level waste that is the stuff needing serious consideration, careful handling and containment, and long periods of time for reduction in heat and radioactivity allowing for eventual disposal.

On page 10 of the IAEA report, for example, on dealing with radioactive waste classifications, they spell out that what is termed “very short-lived waste,” (waste falling into the lowest inclusion criteria) is “Waste that can be stored for decay over a limited period of up to a few years and subsequently cleared … for uncontrolled disposal, use or discharge.” Right. So the stuff that we’re least concerned about may need to be specially stored, maybe for “a few years”, to allow for sufficient decay in radioactivity before being considered benign. Of course, they don’t spell out what they mean by “a few” Three? Nine? To me, 50 or 100 years would seem a small period of time relative to the 10,000 or more required for higher level radioactive waste… Right.

As for liquid waste, on page 51 of the IAEA report, they spell out that, “While most States process liquid radioactive waste into solid form within a short time of it being generated, a few — notably, the USA and the Russian Federation — have large volumes of liquid waste in long term storage.” What are “large volumes”? On the following page they tell us, “The volume of liquids to be processed is very high, in the range of 60 million m^3, including 6.7 million m^3 of high level liquids, located mainly in the Russian Federation and in the USA. The volume of liquid waste that has been disposed of by injection into deep wells, based on data provided in the National Profiles of the Russian Federation and the USA, is around 62 million m^3.”

What am I missing here? Even just looking at the “high-level” liquid waste (still ignoring virtually all the radioactive waste produced by nuclear reactors), you’re talking about an accumulation of many millions of cubic metres needing to be dealt with. This is hundreds of times more, a whole different order of magnitude greater, than the volume of “high-level” waste on offer from the author.

If you wanted to talk about all “solid radioactive waste,” (ignoring the liquid but capturing all the contaminated material of all levels of radioactivity needing to be kept, treated, and/or specially disposed) the IAEA report begins with an introductory summary spelling out how “The current total global inventory of solid radioactive waste is approximately 38 million m^3…” Right. So, again, “29,000” and “38,000,000” are, to me, as different as two numbers can be. Why am I having to spell out that the discrepancy would be tremendous. If the difference was just between 29 and 38 that would be huge; but tacking on three zeros to one figure and the difference, whether by deliberate omission, simple oversight, or error seems super-extravagant. And, again, this figure for waste is the volume produced within a scenario in which there are virtually no reactors in the world — a reality these folks are passionate about transforming.

But what if you’re just trying to be sensible and want to talk about estimating all the radioactive waste from nuclear reactors, which is what I assumed the chapter was about? (Doing so would still ignore all the waste and pollution associated with uranium mining, shipping, and processing, or the building and decommissioning of power plants. Oh yeah, and the contamination resulting from mishaps at power plants and nuclear waste facilities that spread across entire districts, states, countries, and even continents— you know, SOME of the world’s radioactive waste…) Well, then you would add 62 million for the liquid waste to the 38 million estimate for solid waste, landing you in the 100 million cubic metre range… Right. To me, a hundred million anything is closer to “a whole bunch of something” than “not so much of anything”. But I’m probably mad…

Timeline

Pretend we agree about what we’re talking about and the volume. From there, go and look at the 75-year timeline the author presents for waste generation: “since the 1950s.” What’s wrong with that? Well, the author knows very well that very few nuclear reactors were built or came online in the first decade and a half after we first split the atom, so through the 1950s. We all agree that the first reactor came into being in 1954 and by 1957 the whole world only had three more built, turned on, and connected to the energy grid. Over the following decade, we built many more reactors and by 1970 there were 85 in existence. However, still almost no spent fuel waste (or “radioactive waste”) had been produced in that time. In the next two decades, by 1990 (and despite Chernobyl), we wound up with 391 functioning nuclear reactors. Those took us from generating around 500 terawatt hours of nuclear energy globally at the end of the 1970s up to 2,000 by 1990. And yet, as the author would decry, between then and now, over thirty years, the rate of reactor builds stalled. The planet added only another 51 reactors, to a total of 440, generating only an additional 700 tWh of annual global nuclear energy. So what am I getting at? Well, to my eye, what is framed as 75 years of nuclear waste production looks like far less, if we were trying to be honest. Add to that picture above what we just learned about radioactive waste and spent fuel. Nuclear fuel rods take years to go from fuel to waste (out of the reactor core, either stored or finally disposed of.) We all know, certainly the author knows, nuclear fuel rods aren’t quickly burned through, removed from a reactor, and disposed of. Right. As the IAEA explains in a document titled, Storage and Disposal of Spent Fuel and High Level Radioactive Waste:

The useful life of a fuel element in the core of an operating reactor is usually 3–7 years. By the time it is removed from the core it is highly radioactive and generates both heat and radiation, primarily gamma radiation and neutrons. The fuel elements are therefore handled and stored under water, which provides both the necessary cooling and necessary radiation shielding. Over time both the radioactivity and the cooling requirements decrease. The minimum period for storing spent fuel under water is 9–12 months, after which cooling requirements have usually dropped enough that dry storage can be considered. Shielding requirements, however, remain for thousands of years. (p1)

So you’ve gotta cut an unknown period, maybe a decade, from both the start and the end of this 75-year timeline the author proposes. Or that is what I would do. The question is not when nuclear reactors produced electricity and how much. The question is about the waste. Right? That doesn’t seem too controversial or difficult. And yet the offering is far worse than that.

If you go back to the source cited by the author, the IAEA report, you’ll find that, though the report was published in 2022, that’s not when the numbers were gathered. As the IAEA authors clearly spell out, “Different reporting dates will affect the accuracy of a ‘snapshot’ for a given date. However, most of the reporting dates are within a year or two of the selected reference date for this publication (31 December 2016).”

That being so, it’s safe to say what is presented (“all the spent fuel that has been collected from nuclear reactors around the world since the 1950s” or, to paraphrase, “75 years of waste”) is at most 1965 to 2009 or maybe 2013, or a total of about 45 years or so. In what universe is that not drastically less time than what’s presented?

Why does that matter? Aside from being inflated by 70%, which seems hugely excessive? Well, because the author wants you to divide his wee little “29,000 cubic metres” of radioactive waste by this inflated 75 year figure (and then believe what you have there is a very small number). I want you to see that every part of that looks fraudulent. And I think, just to be conservative and coherent, you should divide 100,000,000 cubic metres by only 45 years and see just how enormous this number is. If you don’t find my argument compelling or don’t feel the author is in error (or knowingly offering fraudulent numbers) then just look at the scale he gave us.

Scale

The author, very weirdly, provides us with “a single football stadium” to think about. Of course, he doesn’t tell us if he means NFL or FIFA. But then, just as weirdly, he clarifies that he’s not at all talking about the total volume of a sports “stadium” (which is exactly what I thought we were talking about); instead, he wants us to think of the playing surface and a four metre high block of nuclear waste the width and length of that [unknown game’s] playing surface. What? Why not a more standard metaphor? Why not just tell us what you mean? Why send us to an endnote to discover your hidden meaning that no one could infer?

You do have to go to the endnote to find that he spells out what he really means by “a football field”. And he doesn’t mean anything anyone means by “football field”, whether you’re in Boston or Barcelona. He means exactly “105 x 68m (340 x 220ft).” What? I had to look up what that was. An NFL “football field”, commonly used as a unit of measure, is almost always understood as “100 yards long” (so excluding the endzones), making the “football field” 91.44 x 48.8m. That’s nothing like the above number and not at all what the author means. And it’s not that same “football field” inclusive of the endzones: which would make it 109.7 x 48.8m. So what he means is a “soccer field”, but not ANY soccer field because, just like baseball, according to FIFA rules there’s no standard field dimensions in soccer. Instead, regulation permits a broad spectrum of lengths and widths ranging between 100.6 and 109.7m long and 64 and 73.2m wide. In this way, a “football field” for scale is a lot like offering an “automobile” or “fruit” for scale and tells us almost nothing.

Is there any doubt you would only do this if you were trying to be vague and mislead people? (And why no picture or diagram?) I mean, why not “an Air Jordan filled with almond butter towering to the median distance to the moon from the peak of Everest”? My mind can resolve such a thing with the same ease as a non-standard “football field [of unstated dimensions, but only the play space, and to a height of 4 metres…]” Gah!

Still, what does this volume amount to? If you wanted to fill a football stadium (American football) with a hundred million cubic metres of waste like it’s a bowl of cereal, as I assumed was the author’s proposal, well, you couldn’t. As a matter of fact, you couldn’t stick all that waste in all the professional football stadiums in all of America. AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, (the largest in the league by volume), would only take about 1.3 million cubic meters as far as I can tell. And all of the professional football stadiums in the United States only number 32. You’d need something like 80 to do the job. Regardless, football stadium remains a weird measure because, of course, we don’t fill stadiums in this way with anything but sound and most folks couldn't even guess at the dimensions. For a more consistent and recognizable container than “football stadium”, why not supertankers, those largest sea-going vessels ever constructed used to move large volumes? Well, all of that radioactive waste would fill roughly 500 of those. That means you could park one giant supertanker of radioactive waste in every city in Canada, the United States, and Mexico and still have one left over for every city you can name in Europe. That, to me, seems like “loads”, not “little”.

Okay, but this volume may still feel arbitrary to you. I can hear you. “Some boatloads or stadiumloads? Over decades? Who cares? Like, compared to what?” What I did to decide whether the author’s proposed volume of “29,000 cubic meters” is only a little amount of waste (a number I think is far too small, likely less than 1/1,000th any sensible number), I considered gold.

For me, the critical difference between gold and things like uranium, spent fuel, or all nuclear waste is that gold is a substance humans have been acquiring not for a few decades but more than 10,000 years. (There are grave sites in modern-day Bulgaria, at the Varna Necropolis dated to approximately 4500BCE containing the oldest examples we have. These are intricate gold works like necklaces of gold beads, a polished axe with gold-wrapped handle, gold appliqué cow figures, and a gold penis sheath. Clearly these were not anywhere near humanity’s first attempt at mining, processing, and working the metal but are closer to something you might find in a craft market today.) Gold has also been extracted in nearly every nation historically, with more than 90 countries around the world today still having significant industrial-scale gold mining operations (compared with 32 nations who have nuclear reactors.) And, though there are just 440 reactors in operation globally, individual gold producing countries have that many gold mines. Right. Too, by stark contrast to uranium or the waste product of nuclear power production, of course, people everywhere really want to get at gold and as much of it as they can as quickly as possible. As such, it seems to me like if somehow the volume of gold extracted over 1,000 centuries all over planet earth is less than what is said to be a tiny amount of radioactive waste (and that being just the high-level, solid stuff and only the spent fuel portion of that, produced in "not nearly enough" nuclear reactors in mere decades) that would really frame the author’s argument.

Sure enough, due to its longstanding high value we do have pretty good estimates for gold inventories. Mined throughout every continent but Antarctica and from deepest antiquity to the 21st century, we’ve extracted roughly 200,000 metric tons of gold (or 10,350 cubic metres). This means that from long before ancient Egypt, Sumeria, and China, since long before the earliest known writing, all humans have extracted from the planet gold to a volume just 35% that of the highly radioactive solid waste produced (by virtually no one and only in a fraction of countries) at nuclear reactors in one lifetime… As such, it’s hard for me to see how this volume, 29,000 cubic meters, is effectively nothing, as so casually presented.

Just think, all the above nonsense came out of a handful of sentences or just one page in this text. I promise the rest of this work, and so much like it, is no better.

…and I would ask, just once again, who is trying to have a real discussion about any of this? And where do I find them?