ML071150313

Comment (1) of Liz Cullington on Shearon Harris License Renewal Environmental Scoping

ML071150313
Person / Time
Site:	Harris
Issue date:	04/18/2007
From:	Cullington L - No Known Affiliation
To:	NRC/ADM/DAS/RDB
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Liz Cullington 390 Rocky Hills Road Pittsboro NC 27312__3~Chief, Rules and Directives Branch POO Division of Administrative Services 7. ..Office of Administration Mail Stop T-6D59 ..-U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission

--A Washington, DC 20555-0001 Re: Federal Register, Vol 72, No. 53 March 20, 2007, Page 13139 Shearon Harris Nuclear Power Plant, license renewal EIS scoping 18 April, 2007 Comments on Shearon Harris License Renewal Environmental Scoping 1. Progress Energy's Environmental Report (Draft EIS)The Environmental Impact Statement is supposed to analyze the effect of the "no action alternative" which means the NRC denying to extend the operating license for the period of 2026 to 2046, or deciding not to do so at this time. Progress energy has not provided any evidence or compelling argument that the operating license needs to be renewed, or more accurately, extended, now, 20 years in advance of when that action might be needed.Progress Energy has rounded up a number of resolutions in favor of license extension from local chambers of commerce, and their glossy brochure might lead you to think that this action is needed now to allow the plant to operate for the next twenty years. However, the company makes it clear in their 476 page "Environmental Report" that, in the unlikely event of the NRC not renewing the operating license, the plant could still operate until 2026.In addition that brochure uses an old technique illustrated in that old but still relevant book"How to Lie with Statistics" in comparing nuclear energy to other sources. Leaving aside for the moment the misleading nature of only considering the fuel component, the figure used to illustrate these costs adds in two misleading features.

One is the reference to a processed uranium pellet rather than the many pounds of raw uranium ore, but the other is that as the height of the little picture grows, so does the width. So you might take away the idea that other sources of large centralized power are seven times as costly, rather than merely slightly higher, were these figures actually total costs, which they are not.Worse,. Progress Energy claims in the material that they are not handing out, but burying within hundreds of pages in the Apex Library, that since the impacts of decommissioning the plant in 2026 would be the same as decommissioning it in 2046 there is no difference, conveniently leaving out the significant and varied additional public health and environmental impacts of 20 years of additional uranium mining, plant releases, and 20 years more worth of high and low-level radioactive waste.The alternative energy sources that Progress considers are limited to those that "meet system needs" based on electricity demand now, not in 2026-2046, saying that energy demand is going to increase "for the forseeable future." 1A1 ,_-w J e eý evi~x Zhr They only consider power generation sources that they consider viable now, a new nuclear or fossil fuel plant, or purchased power from such sources, rather than what might be available and viable in 2026.Progress Energy describes "incentive programs that encourage customers to replace old, inefficient appliances or equipment with new high-efficiency appliances or equipment" as if it were a current program, but there is no such program in the company's NC service area, and there has never been one. If there's one just started in Florida, that's outside this analysis.

Progress Energy actually projects DECREASING impacts of conservation, in spite of national trends favoring more efficiency.

And those trends are used as an argument that there's nothing left to do: "...The adoption of increasingly stringent national appliance standards for most major energy-using equipment and the adoption of energy efficiency requirements in state building codes. These mandates have further reduced the potential for cost-effective utility-sponsored measures." What is this supposed to mean? That governments and states have done so much there's nothing left for a poor utility to do in this area? On the contrary, what remains is the gigantic gap between the brand new appliances and systems and actually getting them into customer's homes, thus reducing their demand, or getting the customers into more energy efficient homes, or upgrading their homes to these new codes.The past, present or future creation of new codes for building and/or appliances create increasing gaps between current use and future use of electricity.

Without some incentive to increase the rate of adoption these standards and requirements don't have a large immediate impact on overall demand. However, they may well have a significant impact by 2026-2046 which is the period this report is supposed to cover.2. Plant aging and effects on public health and the environment Aging of plant systems is the only other area that the NRC considers

-- outside of the EIS process -- in license renewal/extension, but this is the one area that is impossible to predict so far in advance.During the first twenty to thirty years of US power reactor operation numerous systems and components have turned out to age and deteriorate more rapidly than expected, and to be missed by routine inspections.

It seems extremely likely that additional generic aging issues will emerge in the next five, ten and twenty years, if US power reactors continue to operate. It simply is not credible that either Progress Energy or the NRC can predict additional aging effects forty years into the future.Two dangerous examples of such unforseen issues that have emerged in recent years are reactor head corrosion and the PWR problem with butt welds. There are likely to be many more as reactors age.A responsible regulator would not tie its hands so far in advance but would retain the authority to shut down nuclear reactors that can no longer be operated safely. 3. Scoping issues to be included in the supplemental EIS 2 The specific environmental and public health impacts that are supposed to be analyzed in the Environmental Impact Statement seem very hard to predict so far into the future. Instead Progress Energy seems to have prepared a report to justify building an additional reactor now, rather than to actually study the effects of the Harris Plant operating in the decades 2026-2046.(i) Water supply for reactor cooling: There are significant water supply issues with the plant now, with water having to be pumped from the lower reservoir to the upper reservoir during dry months (Progress Energy Application for renewal of NC NPDES permit 2006). Harris Lake has a relatively poor catchment area and is not fed by any major river.To what extent is Progress Energy double-dipping in regards to the possibility of raising the water level in Harris Lake? The company has said that this could be done to serve two additional reactors, but that water supply would not be available for additional reactors if it is needed for the current reactor, and vice versa.Progress Energy has also made statements about supplementing its water supply from the Cape Fear River, which is located some distance from the current reactor, even further from proposed new reactors, and is down gradient, which would require a dependable power source. (In addition to actual water volume, use of a lake for make-up water for a nuclear reactor raises its temperature and so use of a water body can be temperature limited, and affected by increasingly hot summers.)Future periods of higher than normal summer temperature would both decrease water supply due to evaporation and increase water temperature in Harris Lake. Increased evaporation is one of the specific near and long term effects of global warming in consensus studies such as the IPCC reports of recent years.Worse and more prolonged droughts are also predicted for the southeastern US, decreasing the reliability of Harris Lake as a future cooling water resource.All these factors would have to be included in EIS projections for the period 2026-2046.

The availability of Harris Lake as a heat sink not just for routine cooling for the period 2026-2046 would need to be evaluated in light of these water supply factors, and may need to be evaluated for the current term of the operating license.For all this reason alone it is dangerous and unnecessary for the NRC to proceed with considering extending the Harris Plant license at this time.(ii) High level waste storage and water supply: separate analysis would need to be done for future scenarios of climate change on the fuel pools at the Harris plant. As must the possibility of no repository.

Even under a future scenario of only the newest spent fuel (1-5 years) in the spent fuel pool(s) in 2026-2046, the EIS would have to analyze the effect of diminishing rainfall and 3 increased lake temperature on the ability of Harris Lake to provide cooling and a heat sink to the fuel pool(s).This analysis must include the ability of the lake to provide cooling and a heat sink to the fuel pools and reactor simultaneously under the most severe drought conditions and the most catastrophic accident conditions.(iii) Greenhouse gas emissions from entire fuel cycle: Significant quantities of various greenhouse gases are released during the entire fuel cycle, some of which are many times more damaging than CO2, such as those emitted during fuel fabrication.(1)

The plant-specific EIS should consider all the greenhouse gas emissions (not just CO2) associated with extended operation for 20 years beyond 2026.(a) uranium mining (b) fuel fabrication (c) fuel transport (d) repair, replacement manufacture, transport, (e) spent fuel transport (f) LLRW transport, (g) LLRW incineration (1) David Fleming: Why Nuclear Power Cannot Be a Major Energy Source, 2006, Feasta.org.

.(iv) Water impacts and water pathways to humans, and other species: An EIS for an additional 20 years of operation during the period 2026-2046 would have to be able to adequately predict under uncertain climate change scenarios all the water pollution impacts of (3) (iii) (a) through (i) (g) activities (above).Tritium is currently released into Harris Lake and thus into the Cape Fear River downstream which is used as a drinking water source. Harnett County is merely the first intake downstream and water from that intake is currently sold to other water-needy counties and municipalities.

Tritium cannot be filtered out of water and is incorporated into the body of humans and other animals. Analysis would have to include increased emissions of tritium under aging and accident scenarios, to include higher concentration under drought conditions, and the concentration and consequent exposures during simultaneous catastrophic accident and severe drought conditions."As places like the Great Lakes draw down on water, the pollution inside will get more concentrated and trapped toxins will come more to the surface, said Stanford scientist Stephen Schneider" at a press conference of lead authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's climate-effects report.(2)

(2) Global Warming May Put US in Hot Water, Seth Borenstein, April 17, 2007, AP.All exposure analyses to humans would have to be able to predict demographic patterns 20-40 years into the future (currently predicted to be increasing sharply.)4 (v) Additional operational exposures:

An EIS would have to predict accurately the range of the additional future radiation exposures through all pathways from an additional 20 years of plant operation forty years into the future to: (A) nuclear plant workers including contract workers (B) the public near the nuclear plant (C) uranium miners (D) the public near or downstream of uranium mining (E) fuel fabrication workers (F) the public near fuel fabrication facilities (G) spent fuel handling workers (H) the public along spent fuel transportation routes (I) low-level waste transport workers (J) the public along low-level transport routes (K) low-level waste incineration and compaction workers (L) the public near low-level waste incineration and compaction facilities (M) low-level waste disposal workers (N) the public near low-level waste disposal facilities (vi) Air, ingestion, direct and other pathways: An EIS for an additional 20 years of operation during the period 2026-2046 would also have to consider all other exposure pathways to humans.All pathways of radioactive emissions/releases/pollution through food animals and fish to humans would have to be analyzed.

Progress Energy's annual or periodic environmental reports state that there are no food animals impacted by the Harris Plant, but in fact there are deer and ducks that can migrate from Harris Lake to adjacent game land and Jordan Lake and which are seasonally hunted for food. Harris Lake is open to fishing and fish caught in the lake are consumed as food. The EIS should also consider future conditions under various fuel constraint and economic downturn scenarios under which there is an increase in the utilization of these food sources.(vii) Alternatives

Any discussion of available alternative energy generation must be done for a period beginning 20 years into the future not based on currently available technologies, or prices. Reasonable assumptions that are not found in Progress Energys report include: (a) wind, solar and current clean renewable alternatives will be cheaper than at present, and have lower impacts than at present.(b) additional renewable energy options will be developed in future beyond what is considered in Progress Energys draft EIS/environmental report.(c) coal-fired power plants may not be an available or viable option in 2026-2046, natural gas supplies via pipeline may not be available.

If an EIS were to include as alternatives such antiquated alternatives as new nuclear, coal, or natural gas generation, then their environmental impacts would have to be evaluated thoroughly for the period 2026-2046 for the entire fuel cycle, not just utility operation, from 5 exploration and mining, through transportation and up to disposal of wastes. It would also have to include all the resources committed and used, those that would be impacted, and the full range of air and water emissions resulting at each stage.(viii) Conservation:

Conservation options should consider what might be feasible 20 years from now, and not based on what is available today, under various adoption rate scenarios, including with incentives, and what could be developed in future. (ix) Uranium Supply: Analysis of remaining global uranium supply does not support the feasibility of operating the Harris Plant for an additional 20 years under current assumptions regarding fuel availability or price.(1)Uranium prices are projected by industry analysts to continue to rise with global scarcity (1) and increasing global demand for uranium for both fuel fabrication and nuclear weapons feedstock, until they reach $500/lb.(3)

The price advantage cited by Progress Energy and the nuclear industry generally over other alternatives relies on old uranium prices (several years ago $8/lb). Now it is $113/lb (April 10, 2007)(4) having risen 57% since the start of 2007 (5)(3) www.stockinterview.com 2005 (4) 'Uranium price jumps after mines flood' 4/10/2007 http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200704/s1893812.htm (5) http://www.stockinterview.com/News/04072007/Uranium-Price-Over-Hundred.html (x) Uranium mining and water supply: The EIS would have to consider the effects of uranium mining using realistic water supply assumptions for a period far into the future. Uranium mining using in situ methods is dependent on available water; the EIS should project the effects of global warming on rainfall, drought and aquifers in areas of known uranium reserves.

Industry analysts project that many declared global uranium reserves may not be able to be mined now using in situ recovery which is water-dependent.

(6) " If the water is not in the right place, ISR mining can not take place. A companys pounds in the ground are nearly worthless or may have to be extracted through other means."One of the purposes of the Advanced ISR series is to finally bury the misleading Pounds in the Ground mantra. Some uranium companies have given the wrong impression about their resource estimates by championing the number of their historical pounds. Some of those pounds might never be mined or even permitted for mining." (6)The EIS would have to project the environmental effects of alternative methods of uranium mining, in the 2026-2046 period, and its effects on price of uranium mining/operational cost factors of HNP compared to alternative sources under futuristic pricing scenarios.

(6) 'Water the Key to Uranium Mining" April 9, 2007. http://www.stockinterview.com/News/04092007/Water-ISR-Uranium-Mining.html 6

4. Adequacy of Generic Environmental Impact Statement The GEIS is not adequate to address EIS issues in this case if it is not updated to reflect actual forseeable conditions for the 2026-2046 period, including recent confirmed findings regarding global warming, uranium supply, water supply, etc. The GEIS was issued May 31, 1996 and was therefore based on rulemaking and comment in the early 90s.Significant new mechanisms have been discovered since that time, which have drastically altered both projected impacts and timelines of climate change effects. Any issue that was not covered by the GEIS but which involves future environmental impacts must be allowed into the scope of the plant-specific EIS.5. Adequacy of This Scoping Process To adequately comment on this process a person would have to both know about, obtain, and read 1680 pages. While PEs 476 page Environmental Report is located in two Wake libraries, the GEIS is unlikely to be available there. The GEIS is not available through the NRC website in html form, but only as two downloads, which would take 8 or more hours for those rural internet users who can only get dial up service, and not at all for those without.The vast majority of the public only had a few days notice (News and Observer Sunday April 15th, or a week (one or more local papers) or none.The NRC is urged to allow another 60 days to allow for adequate comment. We also request that the GEIS be provided to the Cary Library and Eva Perry Library. Without these documents it is impossible for interested members of the public to know what environmental impacts are supposed to be considered in which process, the adequacy of current scoping plans, or how the process affects the future of their environment.

6. Premature Action Unwise and Unnecessary What's the hurry? The Harris Plant operating license is good for another twenty years and does not need to be renewed at this time. To rule on aging and safety issues 20 years into the future is not merely risky, but absurd. To attempt to anticipate environmental impacts at a time when climate, weather, hydrology, population and ecology are on the verge of new paradigms is to attempt the impossible.

However, the licensee has not attempted to even bother to frame these issues in the required future years of 2026-2046.

Instead, they have prepared a report that could be quickly adapted for other purposes since (such as to support a COL application for one or two new reactors at the Harris site) since it covers conditions in the year 2006 not 2026, let alone 2046. Progress Energy's Environmental Report is an arrogant insult to the public that pays their bills, drinks their radioactive water, and has to put up with their legitimate concerns being routinely 7

dismissed as scaremongering, attacks on the workers, or sheer ignorance.

It is clear that Progress Energy assumes that no one will read the report, a pretty fair assumption, but also that no one at the NRC will either. That is how low an opinion they have of the NRC. They apparently believe that they can submit any sort of document, as long as it is of suitable thickness, to support any new decision they are asking for. I urge the NRC to reject Progress Energys application for a license extension at this time. If the NRC insists on proceeding along this relicensing track, then I urge the NRC to reject the companys draft EIS and require them to attempt to meet their legal requirements for the future period in question.Secondly, the NRC must not begin consideration of an application for one or two new reactors at the Harris site until the relicensing process is finalized, and all the water supply and other issues described above are resolved.The NRC must not allow a separate track process under which the company could allocate the same resource to several different safety and environmental impact analyses, without the left hand counting what the right hand is doing.8 Figures 1 - 3 on following pages

[in digital format, attachment 1]

Figure 1: Location of Harris Plant and intake structures, upper reservoir dam, difference between upper and lower reservoirs 50 feet (?)

Source: Progress Energy application for renewal of NC NPDES permit Feb. 10, 2006, filed with NRC as MC060520153, page 84.Figure 2: Location of Harris Plant and Harris Lake upper and lower reservoirs.

Source: Progress Energy application for renewal of NC NPDES permit Feb. 10, 2006, filed with NRC as MC060520153, page 85.Figure 3: Location of two new additional power reactors at the Harris Nuclear Plant Site.

Source: Progress Energy Harris Site Status. NuStart-NEI Workshop, March 1, 2007. ML070670331 9

10 11 12 Global meltdown Scientists fear that global warming will bring climatic turbulence, with changes co ming in big jumps rather than gradually Fred Pearce Wednesday August 30, 2006 Guardian Richard Alley's eyes glint as we sit in his office in the University of Pennsylvania discussing how fast global warming could cause sea levels to rise. The scientist sums up the state of knowledge: "We used to think that it would take 10,000 years for melting at the surface of an ice sheet to penetrate down to the bottom. Now we know it doesn't take 10,000 years; it takes 10 seconds." That quote highlights most vividly why scientists are getting panicky about the sheer speed and violence with which climate change could take hold. They are realising that their old ideas about gradual change - the smooth lines on graphs showing warming and sea level rise and gradually shifting weather patterns - simply do not represent how the world's climate system works. Dozens of scientists told me the same thing while I was researching my b ook The Last Generation. Climate change did not happen gradually in the past, and it will not happen that way in the future. Planet Eart h does not do gradual change. It does b ig jumps; it works by tipping points. The story of research into sea level rise is typical of how perceptions have changed in the past five years. The conventional v iew - you can still read it in reports from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - holds that sea levels will start to rise as a pulse of warming works its way gradually from the surface through the 2km- and 3km-thick ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica, melting them. The ic e is thick and the heat will penetrate only slowly. So we have hundreds, probably thousands, of years to make our retreat to higher ground. Recent research, however, shows that idea is wholly wrong. Glaciologists forgot about crevasses. What is actually happening is that ice is melting at the surface and forming lakes that drain down into the crevasses. In 10 seconds, the water is at the bas e of the ice sheet, where it lubricates the join between ice and rock. Then the whole ice sheet starts to float downhill towards the ocean. "These flows completely change our understanding of the dynamics of ice sheet destruction," says Alley. "Even five years ago, w e didn't know about this."

This summer, lakes several kilometres across formed on the Greenland ice sheet, and drained away to the depths. Scientists measured how, within hours of the lakes forming, the vast ice sheets physically rose up, as if floating on water, and slid towa rds the ocean. That is why Greenland glaciers are flowing faster, and there are more icebergs breaking off into the Atlantic Ocean.

That is why average sea level rise has increased from 2mm a year in the early 1990s to more than 3mm a year now. Soon it could be a great deal more. Jim Hansen of Nasa, George Bush's top climate modeller, predicts that sea level rise will b e 10 times faster within a few years, as Greenland destabilises. "Building an ice sheet takes a long time," he says. "But destroy ing it can be explosively rapid."

Alarmist? No. It has happened before, he says. During the final few centuries of the last ice age, the sea level rose 20 metres in 400 years, an average of 20 times faster than now. These were sudden, violent times. And the melting was caused by tiny wobbles in the Earth's orbit that changed the heat balance of the planet by only a fraction as much as our emissions of greenhouse gases are doing today.

Violent change There is more evidence of abrupt and violent change, most of it culled from ice cores, lake sediments, tree rings and other natural archives of climate. We now know that the last ice age was not a stable cold era but near-permanent climate change. Towards the end, around 11,000 years ago, average temperatures in parts of the Arctic rose by 16C or more within a decade. Alley believes i t happened within a single year, though he says the evidence in the ice cores is not precise enough to prove it.

All this comes as a surprise to us because, in the 10,000 or so years since the end of the last ice age, the climate has been, relatively speaking, stable. We have had warm periods and mini ice ages; but they were little compared with events before. It is arguable that this rather benign world has been the main reason why our species was able to leave the caves and create th e urban, industrial civilisation we enjoy today. Our complex society relies on our being able to plant crops and build cities, kn owing that the rains will come and the cities will not be flooded by incoming tides. When that certaint y fails, as when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans last year, even the most sophisticated society is brought to its knees. But there is a growing fear among scientists that, thanks to man-made climate change, we are about to return to a world of climatic turbulence, where tipping points are constantly crossed. Their research into the workings of the planet's ecosystems suggests why such sudden changes have happened in the past, and are likely again in future. One driver of fast change in the past has been abrupt movements of carbon between the atmosphere and natural reservoirs such as the rainforests and the oceans. Hundreds of billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide can burp into the atmosphere, apparently at the flick of a switch. That is why the Met Office's warning that the Amazon rainforest could die by mid-century, releasing its stored carbon from tree s and soils into the air, is so worrying. And why we should take serious note when Peter Cox, professor of climate systems at Exe ter University, warns that the world's soils, which have been soaking up carbon for centuries, may be close to a tipping beyond which they will release it all again.

Other threats lurk on the horizon. We know that there are trillions of tonnes of methane, a virulent greenhouse gas, trapped in permafrost and in sediments beneath the ocean bed. There are fears this methane may start leaking out as temperatures warm. It seems this happened 55m years ago, when gradual warming of the atmosphere penetrated to the ocean depths and unlocked the methane, which caused a much greater warming that resulted in the extinction of millions of species.

All this suggests that, in one sense, the climate sceptics are right. They say the future is much less certain than the climate models predict. They have a point. We know less than we think. But the sceptics are wrong in concluding that the models have been exaggerating the threat. Far from it. Evidence emerging in the past five years or so suggests the presence of many previously unknown tipping points that could trigger dangerous climate change. Can we call a halt? Hansen says we have 10 years to turn things round and escape disaster. James Lovelock, author of the Gaia theory, which considers the Earth a self-regulated living being, reckons we are already past the point of no return. I don't buy that. For one thing, there is no single point of no return. We have probably passed some, but not others. The water may be lapping at our ankles, but I am not ready to head for the hills yet. I'm an optimist.

• Fred Pearce is author of The Last Generation - How Nature Will Take Her Revenge for Climate Change, Eden Project Books, £12.99. To order a copy for £11.99 with free UK p&p call 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007 info@neweconomics.orgwww.neweconomics.org3 Jonathan Street, London, SE11 5NH, UKWHYNUCLEARPOWERCANNOTBEAMAJORENERGYSOURCEDAVID FLEMINGNuclear power promises much. It is based on a processwhich does not produce carbon dioxide. It is produced in a relatively small number of very large plants, so that it fits easily onto the national grid. And there is even the theoreticalprospect of it being able to breed its own fuel. So, whats theproblem?The form of nuclear power available to us at present comesfrom nuclear fission, fuelled by uranium. Uranium-235 is an isotope of uranium with the rare and useful property that, when struck by a neutron, it splits into two and, in theIt takes a lot of fossil energy to mineuranium, and then to extract and prepare

the right isotope for use in a nuclear reactor. It takes even more fossil energy to build the reactor, and, when its life is over, to decommission it and look after its radioactive waste. As a result, with current technology, thereis only a limited amount of uranium ore

in the world that is rich enough to allow more energy to be produced by the whole nuclear process than the process itself consumes. This amount of ore

might be enough to supply the worlds total current electricity demand for about

six years. Moreover, because of the amount of fossil fuel and fluorine used in the enrichment process, significant quantities of greenhouse gases are released. As a result, nuclear energy is by no means a climate-friendly technology.

April 2006climate@feasta.orgwww.feasta.org10A Lower Camden Street, Dublin 2, Ireland A quick guide to nuclear termsA proton is a particle with a positive electrical charge,found in the nucleus (centre) of every atom. A neutron is a particle with a neutral charge (that is, nocharge at all) found in the nucleus of every atom exceptthat of the simple form of hydrogen. The atomic number of an element is the number ofprotons in the nucleus of an atom: this is what gives anelement its characteristic properties. The atomic mass of an atom is the sum of neutrons andprotons in the nucleus. Isotopes of an element are atoms which have the sameatomic number as each other, but different numbers of neutrons and therefore different atomic masses. They are identified by the sum of protons and neutrons, so that, for instance, uranium-235 has 92 protons and 143 neutrons, whereas uranium-238 has 92 protons and 146 neutrons. Radioactive isotopes are isotopes whose nuclei areunstable. This means that at a random moment thenucleus may release energy in the form of radiation, and decay (change) into a different element.The half-life is the time it takes, statistically, for half the atoms of a given radioactive isotope to decay. Radioactivity is the ionizing radiation which has theability to break up and rearrange cellular DNA, and even the atomic structures of elements. It is a property ofminute and mobile particles in the dust, food and waterwhich we take into our bodies every day. Some is natural background radiation, released by local rocks or byparticles, and in most cases our bodies have had millionsof years practice in coping with them or secreting them; but some is quite new, released from elements which areexceedingly rare - in some cases they did not even existbefore being made by accident or design, beginning in the 1940s. These are live, radioactive materials which animal and plant life has never had to cope with before.

1 process, produces more neutrons which then proceed to splitmore atoms of uranium-235 in a chain of events which produces a huge amount of energy. We can get an idea of how muchenergy it produces, by looking at Einsteins famous equation, E=mc 2, which says that the energy produced is the massmultiplied by the square of the speed of light. A little bit of mass disappears in the process - we can think of this as the material weighing slightly less at the end of the process than at thebeginning - and it is that missing mass which turns into energywhich can be used to make steam to drive turbines and produce electricity. Neutrons from the reaction which strike one of the other isotopes of uranium: uranium-238, are more likely to be absorbed by the atom which transforms it into plutonium-239.Plutonium-239 shares with uranium-235 the property that it, too,splits when struck by neutrons, so that the plutonium-239 then

begins to act as a fuel as well.

2The process has to be controlled; otherwise, it would be a bomb.

The control is provided by a moderator, in the form of large quantities of, for instance, water or graphite, whose presence means that the neutrons cannot so easily find the next link in the chain, so the sequence slows down or stops. Eventually, however, the uranium gets clogged with radioactive impurities such as thebarium and krypton produced when uranium-235 decays, alongwith transuranic elements such as americium and neptunium, and a lot of the uranium-235 gets used up. It takes a year or two

for this to happen, but eventually the fuel elements have to be removed, and a fresh ones inserted. The used fuel elements are very hot and radioactive (stand closeto one for a second or two and you are dead), so there are sometricky questions about what to do with them. Sometimes they are recycled (reprocessed), to extract some of the remaining uranium

and plutonium to use again, although you dont get as much fuel back as you started with, and the bulk of the impurities remains.Alternatively, the whole lot is disposed-of - but there is more tothis than just dumping it somewhere, for it never really goes away. The half-life of an element is the time it takes for half of it to decay; the half-life of uranium-238, which is the largest constituent of the waste, and which keeps the whole thing radioactive, is about the same as the age of the earth: 4.5 billionyears.3Those are the principles. Now for a closer look at what nuclearpower means. It is quite important that we should do this, because nuclear power cannot be sensibly discussed on the basis of popular misconceptions such as the one about nuclear energy producing almost no carbon dioxide. The principal source for the discussion that follows is the work ofJan Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Smith, but theinterpretation of their work, and its application in the context ofcurrent energy options, is the authors. The paper relies centrally,but not exclusively, on work from this one source, and the implications of this are discussed in the concluding section.

41. WHAT IS REALLY INVOLVED IN NUCLEAR POWER?

Mining and milling Uranium is widely distributed in the earths crust but only inminute quantities, with the exception of a few places where it has accumulated in concentrations rich enough to be uses as an ore.The main deposits of ore, in order of size, are in Australia,Kazakhstan, Canada, South Africa, Namibia, Brazil, the Russian Federation, the USA, and Uzbekistan. There are some very rich ores; concentrations as high as 1 percent have been found, but 0.1 percent (one part per thousand) or less is usual. Most of the usable soft (sandstone) uranium ore has a concentration in the range between 0.2 and 0.01 percent; in the case of hard (granite) ore, the usable lower limit is 0.02 percent. The mines are

usually open-cast pits which may be up to 250m deep. The deeper deposits require underground workings and some uranium

is mined by in situleaching, where hundreds of tonnes ofsulphuric acid, nitric acid, ammonia and other chemicals are injected into the strata and then pumped up again after some 5-25 years, yielding about a quarter of the uranium from the treatedrocks and depositing unquantifiable amounts of radioactive and toxic metals into the local environment and aquifers.

5When it has been mined, the ore is milled to extract the uranium oxide. In the case of ores with a concentration of 0.1 percent, the milling must grind up approximately 1,000 tonnes of rock toextract just one tonne of the bright yellow uranium oxide, calledyellowcake. Both the oxide and the tailings (that is, the 999 tonnes of rock that remain) are kept radioactive indefinitely by, forinstance, uranium-238, and they contain all thirteen of itsradioactive decay products, each one changing its identity as it decays into the next, and together forming a cascade of heavymetals, with spectacularly varied half-lives (box 1). Once these radioactive rocks have been disturbed and milled,they stay around to cause trouble. They take up much more space than they did in their undisturbed state, and their radioactive products are free to be washed and blown away intothe environment by rain and wind. These tailings ought thereforeto be treated: the acids should be neutralised with limestone and made insoluble with phosphates; the mine floor should be sealedwith clay before the treated tailings are put back into it; theoverburden should be replaced and the area should be replanted with indigenous vegetation. In practice, all this is hardly everdone. It is expensive, and it also requires approximately four times 2As old as the earthThe decay sequence of uranium-238The sequence starts with uranium-238. Half of it decays in 4.5 billion years, turning as it does so into thorium-234 (24 days), protactinium-234 (one minute), uranium-234 (245,000 years), thorium-230 (76,000 years), radium-226 (1,600 years),

radon-222 (3.8 days), polonium-218 (3 minutes), lead-214 (27 minutes), bismuth-214 (20 minutes), polonium-214 (180 microseconds), lead-210 (22 years), bismuth-210 (5 days), polonium-210 (138 days) and, at the end of the line, lead-206 (non-radioactive).Box 1 the amount of energy that was neededto extract the ore in the first place.

6Preparing the fuel The uranium oxide then has to be enriched. Yellowcake contains only about 0.7 percent uranium-235; the rest ismainly uranium-234 and -238, neither of which directly support the needed chain reaction. In order to bring the concentration of uranium-235 up to the required 3.5 percent, the oxide is reacted with fluorine to form uranium hexafluoride (UF 6), or hex, a substance with the usefulproperty that it changes - sublimes - from a solid to a gas at 56.5°C, and it is as a gas that it is fed into an enrichment plant.About 85 percent of it promptly comes out again as waste in the form of depleted uranium hexafluoride. Some of that waste is chemically converted into depleted uranium metal, which is then in due course distributed back into the environment via its use inarmour-piercing shells, but most of it is kept as uraniumhexafluoride in its solid form. It ought then to be placed in sealedcontainers for final disposal in a geological depositary; however,owing to the cost of doing this, and the scarcity of suitable places for it, much of it is put on hold: in the United States, during thelast fifty years, 500,000 tonnes of depleted uranium haveaccumulated in cool storage (to stop it subliming), designated as temporary.

7The enriched uranium is then converted into ceramic pellets ofuranium dioxide (UO

2) and packed in zirconium alloy tubes whichare finally bundled together to form fuel elements for reactors.

8Generation The fuel can now be used to produce heat to raise the steam togenerate electricity. In due course the process generates waste in the form of spent fuel elements and, whether these are thenreprocessed and re-used or not, eventually they have to bedisposed of. But first they must be allowed to cool off, as thevarious isotopes present decay, in ponds for between 10 and 100years - sixty years may be taken as typical. Various ideas about how to deal with them finally are current, but there is nostandard, routinely-implemented practice. One option is to packthem, using remotely-controlled robots, into very secure containers lined with lead, steel and pure electrolytic copper, in which theymust lie buried for millions of years in secure geologicaldepositaries. It may turn out in due course that there is one best solution, but there will never be an ideal way to store wastewhich will be radioactive for millions of years and, whatever least-bad option is chosen, it will require a lot of energy: it is estimated that the energy cost of making the lead-steel-copper containersneeded to package the spent fuel produced by a reactor is aboutthe same as the energy needed to construct the reactor.

9A second form of waste produced in the generation process consists of the routine release of very small amounts ofradioactive isotopes such as hydrogen-3 (tritium), carbon-14,plutonium-239 and many others into the local air and water. The significance of this has only recently started to be recognised and

investigated.

10A third, less predictable form of waste occurs in the form of accidental emissions and catastrophic releases in the event of accident. The nuclear industry has good safety systems in place; it has to have them, because theconsequences of an accident are so extreme. However, it is not immune to accident. The work is routine, and the staff at some reactors have been

described by a nuclear engineer as asleep at the wheel. There is also the prospect, rising to certainty with the increase in numbers and the passage of time, of sabotage by staff, of the flooding of reactors by rising sealevels, and poor training and systems, particularly if a nuclearprogramme were to be developed in haste by governments eagerto produce energy as fast as possible to make up for the depletion of oil and gas. Every technology has its accidents. Therisk never goes away; society bears the pain and carries on but, in the case of nuclear power, there is a difference: the consequences of a serious accident - another accident on the scale of Chernobyl, or greater, or muchgreater. It is accepted thatthe damage could be so great that it was far beyond the capacityof the worlds insurance industry to cover. It has therefore beenagreed that governments should step in and meet the costs of anuclear accident once the damage goes beyond a certain limit. InBritain, the Nuclear Installations Act of 1965 requires a plants operator to pay a maximum of £150 million in the ten years afterthe incident. The government would cover any excess and pay forany damage that arose between ten and thirty years afterwards.

Under international conventions, the government would also coverany cross-border liabilities up to a maximum of about £300million. These figures seem to grossly understate the problem. If Bradwell power station in Essex blew up and there was an eastwind, London would have to be evacuated. Perhaps even the whole of southern England. The potential costs of a nuclear accident could be closer to £300 trillion rather than £300 million,six orders of magnitude greater. A fourth type of waste is the plutonium itself which, whenisolated and purified in a reprocessing plant, can be brought up to weapons-grade, making it the fuel needed for nuclear proliferation. This is one of two ways in which the nuclear industry is used as the platform from which the proliferation of nuclear weapons can be developed; the other one is by enrichingthe uranium-235 to around 90 percent, rather than the mere 3.5 percent required by a nuclear reactor.The reactor The maximum full-power lifetime is 24 years, but most reactors fall short of that. During that time, they require regular maintenance and at least one major refurbishing; towards the endof their lives, corrosion and intense radioactivity make reliablemaintenance impossible. Eventually, they must be dismantled, but experience of this, particularly in the case of large reactors, islimited. As a first step, the fuel elements must be removed andput into storage; the cooling system must be cleaned to reduce radioactive CRUD (Corrosion Residuals and Unidentified Deposits).These operations, together, produce about 1,000 m 3 of high-levelwaste. At the end of the period, the reactor has to be dismantled and cut into small pieces to be packed in containers for final disposal. The total energy required for decommissioning has been estimated at about double the energy needed in the original

construction.

11 3Once radioactive rocks have been disturbed and milled, they stay around to cause trouble.

Their radioactive products are free to be washed and blown away by rain and wind.

2. GREENHOUSE GASES AND ORE QUALITYThe presentEvery stage in the process of supporting nuclear fission usesenergy, and most of this energy is derived from fossils fuels.

Nuclear power is therefore a massive user of energy and a verysubstantial source of greenhouse gases. In fact, the delivery of electricity into the grid from nuclear power produces, on average,roughly one third as much carbon dioxide as the delivery of the same quantity of electricity from gas...

12... or, rather, it shoulddo so, because the calculation of the energycost of nuclear energy is based on the assumption that the high standards of waste management outlined above, including theenergy used in decommissioning, are actually carried out.

Unfortunately, that is not the case: the nuclear power industry isliving on borrowed time in the sense that it is has not yet had to find either the money or the energy to reinstate its mines, bury its wastes and decommission its reactors; if those commitments are simply left out of account, the quantity of fossil fuels needed by nuclear power to produce a unit of electricity would be, on average, only 16 percent of that needed by gas. However, theseare commitments which must eventually be met. The onlyreasonable way to include that energy cost in estimating the

performance of nuclear power is to build

them into the costs of electricity that is being generated by nuclear power now.

13 Another assumption contained in the

calculation of the carbon emissions of nuclear power is that the reactors last for the practical maximum of 24 full-poweryears. For shorter-lived reactors, thequantity of carbon dioxide emissions per

unit of electricity is higher; when the energy costs of construction and decommissioning are taken into account, nuclear reactors, averaged over their lifetimes, produce more carbon dioxide than gas-fired power stations (per unit of electricity generated), until they have been in full-power operation for about seven years.These estimates of carbon dioxide emissions understate theactual contribution of nuclear energy to greenhouse gas emissions, because they do not take into account the releases of other greenhouse gases which are used in the fuel cycle. The stage in the cycle in which other greenhouse gases are particularly implicated is enrichment. As explained above, enrichment depends on the production of uranium hexafluoride, which of course requires fluorine - along with its halogenated compounds - not all of which can by any means be preventedfrom escaping into the atmosphere. As a guide to the scale ofproblem: the conversion of one tonne of uranium into an enriched form requires the use of about half a tonne of fluorine; at the end of the process, only the enriched fraction of uranium is actually used in the reactor: the remainder, which contains the great majority of the fluorine that was used in the process, is left as waste, mainly in the form of depleted uranium. It is worth remembering here, first, that to supply enough enriched fuel for a standard 1GW reactor for one full-power year, about 160 tonnesof natural uranium has to be processed; secondly, that the globalwarming potential of halogenated compounds is many times that of carbon dioxide: that of freon-114, for instance, is nearly 10,000 times greater than that of the same mass of carbon dioxide.

Moreover, other halogens, such as chlorine, whose compounds are potent greenhouse gases, along with a range of solvents, areextensively used at various other stages in the nuclear cycle, notably in reprocessing.

14There is no readily-available data on the quantity of these hyper-potent greenhouse gases regularly released into the atmosphereby the nuclear power industry, nor on the actual, presumably variable, standards of management of halogen compounds among the various nuclear power industries around the world.

There has to be a suspicion that this source of climate-changing gases substantially reduces any advantage which the nuclear power industry has at present in the production of emissions of carbon dioxide, but no well-founded claim can be made aboutthis. It is essential that reliable research data on the quantity offreons and other greenhouse gases released from the nuclear fuel cycle should be researched and made available as a priority. The futureThe advantage of nuclear power in producing lower carbon emissions holds true only as long as supplies of rich uranium last.

When the leaner ores are used - that is, ores consisting of lessthan 0.01 percent (for soft rocks such as sandstone) and 0.02 percent (for hard rocks such as granite), so muchenergy is required by the millingprocess that the total quantity of fossil

fuels needed for nuclear fission is greater than would be needed if those fuels were used directly to generate electricity. In other words, when it is forced to use ore of around this quality or worse, nuclear power begins to slip into a negative energy balance: moreenergy goes in than comes out, andmore carbon dioxide is produced by nuclear power than by thefossil-fuel alternatives.

15There is doubtless some rich uranium ore still to be discovered,and yet exhaustive worldwide exploration has been done, and the evaluation by Storm van Leeuwen and Smith of the energy

balances at every stage of the nuclear cycle has given us a summary. There is enough usable uranium ore in the ground tosustain the present trivial rate of consumption - a mere 2 1/2percent of all the worlds final energy demand - and to fulfil itswaste-management obligations, for around 45 years. However, to make a difference - to make a real contribution to postponing or mitigating the coming energy winter - nuclear energy would have to supply the energy needed for (say) the whole of the worldselectricity supply. It could do so - but there are deep uncertainties as to how long this could be sustained. The best estimate (pretending for a moment that all the needed nuclear power

stations could be built at the same time and without delay) is that the global demand for electricity could be supplied from nuclear power for about six years, with margins for error of about two years either way. Or perhaps it could be more ambitious than that:

it could supply all the energy needed for an entire (hydrogen-4There will never be an idealway to store waste which will be radioactive for millions of years. Whatever least-bad option is chosen will require a lot of energy.

fuelled) transport system. It could keep this up for some threeyears (with the same margin for error) before it ran out of rich ore and the energy balance turned negative.

16If, as an economy measure, all the energy-consuming waste-management and clean-up practices described above were to be put on hold while stocks of rich ore last, then the energy needed by nuclear energy might be roughly halved, so that globalelectricity could be supplied for a decade or so. At the end of thatperiod, there would be giant stocks of untreated, uncontained waste, but there would be no prospect of the energy being available to deal with it. At the extreme, there might not even be the energy to cool the storage ponds needed to prevent the waste from being released from its temporary containers. But it is worse than that. There is already a backlog of high-levelwaste, accumulated for the last sixty years, and now distributed around the world in cooling ponds, in deteriorating containers, in decommissioned reactors and heaps of radioactive mill-tailings.

Some 1/4million tonnes of spent fuel is already being stored inponds, where the temporary canisters are so densely packed that they have to be separated by boron panels to prevent chain reactions. The task of clearing up this lethal detritus will require a great deal of energy. How much? That is not known, but here is avery rough guideline. Energy equivalent to about one third of the totalquantity of nuclear power produced - in the past and future- will be required to clear up past and future wastes. And the whole of this requirement will have to come from the usable uranium ore that remains, which is not much more than half the entire original endowment of usable ore.

17This means that, if the industry were to clear up its wastes, only about one third of the present stock of uranium would be left over as a source of electricity for distribution in national grids. To put it another way, the electricity that the industry would haveavailable for sale in the second half of its life - if at the sametime it were to meet its obligation to clear up the whole of its past and present wastes - would be approximately 70 percent less than it had available for sale in the first half of its life. On that

calculation, the estimates given earlier for the useful contribution that nuclear power could make in the future must be revised:nuclear energy, if it cleared up all its wastes, could supply enoughpower to provide the world with all the electricity it needed for some three years. And remember that this is no mere thought-experiment: those wastes do have to be cleared up; the energy required for this will reduce the contribution that can be expected from nuclear power from the trivial to the negligible.And we should not forget the cost of this. If the nuclear industryin the second part of its life were to commit itself to clearing up its current and future wastes, the cost would make the electricityit produced virtually unsaleable. Bankruptcy would follow, but thewaste would remain. Governments would have to keep the clear-up programme going, whatever the other priorities. They would also have to keep training programmes going in a College of Nuclear Waste Disposal so that, a century after the nuclear industry has died, the skills they will require to dispose of our waste will still exist. And yet, Government itself, in an energy-strapped society, would lack the funds. The disturbing prospect is already opening up of massive stores of unstable wastes which no one can afford to clear up.

The implication of this is that nuclear power is caught in adepletion trap - the depletion of rich uranium ore - at least as imminent as that of oil and gas. So the question to be asked is:

as the conventional uranium sources run low, are there alternative sources of fuel for nuclear energy?3. ALTERNATIVE SOURCES OF FUELEarlier this year, James Lovelock, the originatorof the Gaia Hypothesis, argued in his book

The Revenge of Gaiathat the threat of climatechange is so real, so advanced and potentially so catastrophic that the risks associated withnuclear power are trivial by comparison - and that there really isno alternative to its widespread use. Nuclear power, he insisted, isthe only large-scale option: it is feasible and practical; a nuclear renaissance is needed without delay. He robustly dismissed the idea that the growth of nuclear power was likely to be constrained by depletion of its raw material. This is how he put it:

5 Million pounds U 38 160 140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0656871747780838689929598 Production RequirementsThe worlds annual production of uranium oxide has been laggingbehind its use in nuclear reactors for the past twenty years.

The shortfall has been made up from military stockpiles.

Source: http://www.ux c.com/co ver-stories/uxw_1 8-34-co ver.htmlUranium production failing to meet demand

$40.00$35.00

$30.00

$25.00$20.00$15.00

$10.00$5.00Dec-94Dec-95Dec-96Dec-97Dec-98Dec-99Dec-00Dec-01Dec-02Dec-03Dec-04Dec-05The rise in the price of uranium oxide (yellowcake) has soaredrecently. One reason is the higher cost of the fossil energy needed to mine and concentrate it.

Source: www.uex-corpor ation.com/s/Ur aniumM ark et.asUranium prices triple in two years Another flawed idea now circulating isthat the world supply of uranium is sosmall that its use for energy would lastonly a few years. It is true that if thewhole world chose to use uranium as its

sole fuel, supplies of easily-mineduranium would soon be exhausted. Butthere is a superabundance of low-grade uranium ore: most granite, for example,contains enough uranium to make its fuel

capacity five times that of an equal mass of coal. India is already preparing to use

its abundant supplies of thorium, an alternative fuel, in place of uranium.

18Lovelock added that we have a readily-available stock of fuel inthe plutonium that has been accumulated from the reactors thatare shortly to be decommissioned. And he might also have added that another candidate as a source of nuclear fuel is seawater. So, if we put the supposed alternatives to uranium ore in order, this is what we have: (1) granite; (2) fast-breeder reactors using (a) plutonium and (b) thorium; and (3) seawater.1. GraniteIt has already been explained above that granite with a uranium content of less than 200 parts per million (0.02%) cannot be used as a source of nuclear energy, because that is the borderline at which the energy needed to mill it and to separate the uraniumoxide for enrichment is greater - and in the case of even poorer ores, much greater - than the energy that you get back. But Lovelock is so insistent and confident on this point that it is worth revisiting.Storm van Leeuwen, basing his calculations on his joint publishedwork with Smith on the extraction of uranium from granite,considers how much granite would be needed to supply a 1 GW nuclear reactor with the 160 tonnes of natural uranium it would need for a years full-power electricity production. Ordinary granite contains roughly 4 grams of uranium per tonne of granite. Thats four parts per million. One years supply of uranium extracted fromthis granite would require 40 million tonnes of granite. So, Lovelocks granite could indeed be used to provide power for anuclear reactor, but there are snags. The minor one is that it would leave a heap of granite tailings (if neatly stacked) 100 metres high, 100 metres wide and 3 kilometres long. The major snag is that the extraction process would require some 530 PJ (petajoules = 1,000,000 billion joules) energy to produce the 26 PJelectricity provided by the reactor. That is, it would use up some20 times more energy that the reactor produced.

192. Fast breeder reactors (a) Plutonium, Lovelocks proposal that we should use plutonium as the fuel forthe nuclear power stations of the future can be taken in either of two ways. He might be proposing that we could simply run the reactors on plutonium on the conventional once-through system which is standard, using light-water reactors. This can certainly be done, but it cannot be done on a very large scale. Plutonium does not exist in nature; it is a by-product of the use of uranium in reactors and, when uranium is no longer used, then in the normal course of things no more plutonium will be produced. There is enough reactor-grade plutonium in the world to provide fuel for about 80 reactors. That is just about realistic, but there areanother two theoretical but highlyunrealistic possibilities. The first is that allweapons-grade plutonium could be converted into enough fuel for about 60 more reactors; the second is that all the spent fuel produced by all nuclear power

stations in the world could be successfully reprocessed (despite thesubstantial failure and redundancy ofreprocessing technology at present) and used to provide the fuel for the reactors of the future. That would provide fuel for another 600 reactors - making a total of 740 operating with plutonium alone.

20But since were trying to be realistic here, let us concentrate on what could actually be done, and stay as close as we can to what Lovelock seems to be suggesting: we could, using the plutoniumthat we actually have, build 80 reactors worldwide. At the end of their life (say, 24 full-power years), the plutonium would have been used up, though supplemented by a little bit over from the final generation of ordinary uranium-fuelled reactors, but soon allreactors would be closed down and not replaced, because at thattime there will be no uranium to fuel them with, either. This would scarcely be a useful strategy, so it is more sensible to suppose that Lovelock has in mind the second possibility: that the plutonium reactors should be breeder reactors, designed not just to produce electricity now, but to breed more plutonium for the future.Breeders are in principle a very attractive technology. In uraniumore, a mere 0.7 percent of the uranium it contains consists of the useful isotope - the one that is fissile and produces energy -

uranium-235. Most of the uranium consists of uranium-238, and most of that simply gets in the way and has to be dumped at the end; it is uranium-238 which is responsible for much of theawesome mixture of radioactive materials that causes the waste problem. And yet, uranium-238 does also have the property ofbeing fertile. When bombarded by neutrons from a start-up fuel like uranium-235 or plutonium-239, it can absorb a neutron and eject an electron, becoming plutonium-239. That is, plutonium-239 can be used as a start-up fuel to produce more plutonium-239,more-or-less indefinitely. Thats where the claim that nuclear powerwould one day be too cheap to meter comes from.But there is a catch. It is a complicated technology. It consists ofthree operations: breeding, reprocessing and fuel fabrication, all of which have to work concurrently and smoothly. First, breeding: thisdoes not simply convert uranium-238 to plutonium-239; at thesame time, it produces plutonium-241, americium, curium, rhodium, technetium, palladium and much else. This mixture tends to clog up and corrode the equipment. There are in principle ways round these problems, but a smoothly-running breeding process on a commercial scale has never yet been achieved.

21Secondly, reprocessing. The mixture of radioactive products that comes out of the breeding process has to be sorted, with the plutonium-239 being extracted. The mixture itself is highly radioactive, and tends to degrade the solvent, tributyl phosphate.

Here, too, insoluble compounds form, clogging up the equipment;there is the danger of plutonium accumulating into a critical mass,setting off a nuclear explosion. The mixture gets hot and releases radioactive gases; and significant quantities of the plutonium and uranium are lost as waste. As in the case of the breeder operation itself, a smoothly-running reprocessing process on a commercial

scale has never yet been achieved.

6 Every technology has itsaccidents but, in the case of nuclear power, there is a difference: the consequences

of a serious accident -

another accident on the scale of Chernobyl, or greater, or much greater.

The third operation is to fabricate the recovered plutonium as fuel.The mixture gives off a great deal of gamma and alpha radiation, so the whole process of forming the fuel into rods which can then be put back into a reactor has to be done by remote control. This,too has yet to be achieved as a smoothly-running commercialoperation.And, of course, it follows from this, that the whole fast-breedercycle, consisting of three processes none of which have ever worked as intended, has itself never worked. There are three fast-breeder rectors in the world: Beloyarsk-3 in Russia, Monju in Japan and Phénix in France; Monju and Phénix have long been out of operation; Beloyarsk is still operating, but it has never bred.But let us look on the bright side of all this. Suppose that, with 30years of intensive research and development, the world nuclear power industry could find a use for all the reactor-grade plutonium in existence, fabricate it into fuel rods and insert it into newly-built fast-breeder reactors - 80 of them, plus a few more, perhaps, to soak up some of the plutonium that is beingproduced by the ordinary reactors now in operation. So: they start breeding in 2035. But the process is not as fast as the name suggests (fast refers to the

speeds needed at the subatomic level, rather than to the speed of the process).

Forty years later, each breeder reactor would have bred enough plutonium toreplace itself and to start up another one.By 2075, we would have 160 breeder reactors in place. And that is all we would have, because the ordinary, uranium-235-based reactors would by

then be out of fuel.

22 (b) ThoriumThe other way of breeding fuel is to use thorium. Thorium is ametal found in most rocks and soils, and there are some rich ores bearing as much as 10 percent thorium oxide. The relevant isotope is the slightly radioactive thorium-232. It has a half-lifethree times that of the earth, so that makes it useless as a directsource of energy, but it can be used as the starting-point from which to breed an efficient nuclear fuel. Heres how:Start by irradiating the thorium-232, using a start-up fuel -plutonium-239 will do. Thorium-232 is slightly fertile, and absorbs a neutron to become thorium 233.The thorium-233, with a half-life of 22.2 minutes, decays toprotactinium-233.The protactinium-233, with a half-life of 27 days, decays intouranium-233.The uranium-233 is highly fissile, and can be used not just asnuclear fuel, but as the start-up source of irradiation for a blanket of thorium-232, to keep the whole cycle going indefinitely.

24But, as is so often the case with nuclear power, it is not as good as it looks. The two-step sequence of plutonium breeding is, as we have seen, hard enough. The four-step sequence of thorium-breeding is worse. The uranium-233 which you get at the end ofthe process is contaminated with uranium-232 and with highly-radioactive thorium-228, both of which are neutron-emitters, reducing its effectiveness as a fuel; it also has the disadvantage that it can be used in nuclear weapons. The comparatively long half-life of protactinium-233 (27 days) makes for problems in thereactor, since substantial quantities lingeron for up to a year. Some reactors -

including Kakrapar-1 and -2 in India -

have both achieved full power usingsome thorium in their operation, and it may well be that, if there is to be a very long-term future for nuclear fission, it will

be thorium that drives it along. However, the full thorium breeding cycle,working on a scale which is large-enough and reliable-enough to be commercial, is a long way away.

25For the foreseeable future, its contribution will be tiny. This is because the cycle needs some source of neutrons to begin.Plutonium could provide this but (a) thereisnt very much of it around; (b) what there is (especially if we are going to do what Lovelock urges) is going to be busy as the fuel for once-through reactors and/or or fast-breeder reactors, as explained above; and (c) it is advisable, wherever there is an alternative, to keep plutonium-239 and uranium-233 - an unpredictable and potentially incredibly dangerous mixture - as separate as possible. It follows that thorium reactors must breed their own start-up fuel from uranium-233. The problem here is that there is practically no uranum-233 anywhere in the world, and the only way to get it is to start with (say) plutonium-239 to 7The safety/cost trapThe complexity of in-depth defence against accident can make the system impossibleThere is a systemic problem with the design of breeder reactors. The consequences of accidents are so severe that the possibili ty hasto be practically ruled out under all circumstances. This means that the defence-in-depth systems have to be extremely complex, andthis in turn means that the installation has to be large enough to derive economies of scale - otherwise it would be hopelessly uneconomic. However, that means that no confinement dome, on any acceptable design criterion, can be built on a scale and structural strength to withstand a major accident. And that in turn means that the defence-in-depth systems have to be even mor ecomplex, which in turn means that they becomes even more problem-prone than the device they were meant to protect. A study for the nuclear industry in Japan concludes: A successful commercial breeder reactor must have three attributes: it mu stbreed, it must be economical, and it must be safe. Although any one or two of these attributes can be achieved in isolation by properdesign, the laws of physics apparently make it impossible to achieve all three simultaneously, no matter how clever the design.

23Box 2 The nuclear power industry is living on borrowed time in

the sense that it is has not yet had to find either the money or the energy to reinstate its mines, bury its wastes and decommission its reactors.

8get one reactor going. At the end of forty years, it will have bredenough uranium-233 both to get another reactor going, and toreplace the fuel in the original reactor. So, as in the case of fast-breeders, we have an estimated 30 years before we can perfect the process enough to get it going on a commercial scale, followed by 40 years of breeding. Result: in 2075, we could have just two thorium reactors up and running.

26SeawaterSeawater contains uranium in a concentration of about thirty parts per billion, and advocates of nuclear power are right to say that, if

this could be used, then nuclear power could in principle supply us with the energy we need for a long time to come. Ways of extracting those minute quantities of uranium from seawater and concentrating them into uranium oxide have been worked out in some detail. First of all, uranium ions are attracted - adsorbed - onto adsorption

beds consisting of a suitable material such as titanium hydroxide, and there are also some polymers with the right properties. These beds must be suspended in the sea in huge arrays, many kilometres in length, in places where there is a current to wash theseawater through them, and where thesea is sufficiently warm - at least 20°C.

They must then be lifted out of the sea and taken on-shore, where, in the first stage of the process, they are cleansed to remove organic materials and organisms. Stage two consists of desorption - separating the adsorbed uranium ions from the beds. Thirdly, the solution that results form this must be purified, removing the other compounds that have accumulated in muchhigher concentration than the uranium ions. Fourthly, the solutionis concentrated, and fifthly, a solvent is used to extract the uranium. The sixth stage is to concentrate the uranium and purify it into uranium oxide yellowcake, ready for enrichment in the usual way.

27But the operation is massive and takes a lot of energy. Very roughly, two cubic kilometres of sea water is needed to yield enough uranium to supply one tonne, prepared and ready for action in a reactor. A 1 GW reactor needs about 160 tonnes of natural uranium per annum, so each reactor requires some 324cubic kilometres of seawater to be processed - that is, some32,000 cubic kilometres of seawater being processed in order to keep a useful fleet of 100 nuclear reactors in business for one (full-power) year.

28And what is the energy balance of all this? One tonne of uranium, installed in a light water reactor, is taken as a rule-of-thumb also to produce approximately 162 TJ (1 terajoule = 1,000 billion

joules), lessthe roughly 60-90 TJ needed for the whole of theremainder of the fuel cycle - enrichment, fuel fabrication, waste disposal, and the deconstruction and decommissioning of thereactor - giving a net electricity yield of some 70-90 TJ. The energy needed to supply the uranium from seawater, ready for entry into that fuel cycle, is in the region of 195-250 TJ. In other words, the energy required to operate a nuclear reactor using uranium derived from seawater would require some three times as much energy as it produced.4. PUTTING NUCLEAR ENERGY IN CONTEXT It is now decision-time for many nations, confronting the fierce certainty of climate change, the depletion of oil and gas, and theageing of its electricity generators. Why should the decision-makers take any notice of this analysis, written from a globalperspective? A decision by, say, Britain to build one or two token reactors, doubtless presented as a contribution to our energy mix along with a vigorous programme to develop renewables and to reduce the demand for energy - certainly isnt going to deplete uranium ores sufficiently to require any consideration of breeders or seawater - so what are the problems? Well, one of the problems is that it is not a decision that can bemade in isolation. Nuclear power could in theory be adopted by a few individual nations: they could perhaps export their wastes,and the absence of competition for rich ores would mean that thesupply of uranium could be spun out for a

long time. So, for an individual nation

looking at the choice in isolation, the nuclear option may seem to be attractive.

But there is a fallacy of composition here:

an option that is available to one cannot be supposed to be available to many; on the contrary, it may only be available to

one becauseit is not adopted by many -

and if it isadopted by many, then everyoneis in trouble, deep trouble.

The priority for the nuclear industry nowshould be to use the electricity generated by nuclear power to clean up its own pollution and to phase itself out before events force it to close down abruptly. Nuclear power is a solution neither to the energy famine brought on by the decline of oil and gas, nor to the need to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. It cannot provide energy solutions, however much we may want it to do so. But the conclusion that nuclear power cannot provide the energywe need over the next three of four decades means that we havea problem. An energy gap - an energy chasm - lies before us, fortwo reasons. First the damage done to the self-regulating systems of the climate is already so great that we are at or near the tipping point at which global heating will get out of control, moving relentlessly but quickly towards a new equilibrium state probably

lethal to the majority of the inhabitants of the planet and to its civilisations. Secondly, we are at or near the "oil peak" at which

supplies of oil and (slightly later) gas will turn down into a relentless decline whose consequences will be on a scale comparable to those of climate change. In this situation, we havelittle choice. If there is any energy source at all which could operateon the scale and in the time needed to fill this energy gap, then we must take it, even if it comes with enormous disadvantages.Nuclear power certainly has disadvantages, quite apart from theclincher problem of fuel depletion. It is a source of low-level radiation which, as is now beginning to be recognised, may be incomparably more damaging than was previously thought. It is a source of high-level waste which has to be sequestered. Every stage in the process produces lethal waste, including the mining and leaching processes, the milling, the enrichment and the decommissioning. It is very expensive. It is a terrorist target and its enrichment processes are stepping stones to the production of

nuclear weapons.

29 Nuclear power could supplyall the energy needed for an entire (hydrogen-fuelled) transport system for some three years before it ran out of rich ore and the energy

balance turned negative.

9NUCLEAR ELECTRICITYGENERATION 2004REACTORS OPERABLE Jan 2006REACTORS underCONSTRUCTION Jan 2006REACTORS PLANNED Jan 2006REACTORS PROPOSED Jan 2006 URANIUM REQUIRED 2006 billion kWh

% e No.MWe No.MWe No.MWe No.MWe tonnes UArgentina7.3 8.2 2 935 1 692 0 0 0 0134 Armenia 2.2 39 1376 0 0 0 0 0 0 51 Belgium 44.9 55 75728 0 0 0 0 0 01075Brazil11.5 3.0 21901 0 0 11245 0 0 336 Bulgaria15.6 42 42722 0 0 21900 0 0 253Canada*85.3 15 1812595 0 0 21540 0 01635 China47.8 2.2 9 6587 21900 9 8200 19150001294 Czech Rep 26.3 31 63472 0 0 0 0 21900 540 Egypt 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 600 0 Finland21.8 27 42676 11600 0 0 0 0473France 426.8 78 5963473 0 0 0 0 1160010146 Germany158.4 32 17 20303 0 0 0 0 0 0 3458 Hungary11.2 34 41755 0 0 0 0 0 0251 India15.0 2.8 15 2993 8 3638 0 0 24131601334 Indonesia 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 4 4000 0Iran 0 0 0 0 1 950 21900 3 2850 0Israel 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 11200 0 Japan273.8 29 5547700 1 866 1214782 0 08169Korea, Nth 0 0 0 0 1 950 1 950 0 0 0Korea, Sth124.0 38 2016840 0 0 8 9200 0 0 3037 Lithuania13.9 72 11185 0 0 0 0 11000134Mexico10.6 5.2 21310 0 0 0 0 0 0 256 Netherlands 3.6 3.8 1 452 0 0 0 0 0 0112Pakistan1.9 2.4 2 425 1 300 0 0 21200 64 Romania 5.1 10 1 655 1 655 0 0 31995176 Russia133.0 16 3121743 4 3600 1 925 89375 3439Slovakia15.6 55 62472 0 0 0 0 2 840 356 Slovenia 5.2 38 1676 0 0 0 0 0 0144South Africa14.3 6.6 21842 0 0 1165 24 4000 329 Spain 60.9 23 97584 0 0 0 0 0 01505 Sweden75.0 52 10 8938 0 0 0 0 0 01435 Switzerland 25.4 40 5 3220 0 0 0 0 0 0575Turkey 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 4500 0Ukraine81.1 51 1513168 0 0 21900 0 01988 U.K.73.7 19 2311852 0 0 0 0 0 02158 USA788.6 2010397924 11065 0 0 131700019715 Vietnam 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 2000 0WORLD**2618.6 16441 368,386 2418,816 4142,707113 82,22065,478 billion kWh

% e No.MWe No.MWe No.MWe No.MWe tonnes USources:Reactor data: WNA to 28/11/05.IAEA- for nuclear electricity production & percentage of electricity (% e) 7/7/05.WNA: Global Nuclear Fuel Market (reference scenario) - for U. Operating = Connected to the grid; Building/Construction = first concrete for reactor poured, or major refurbishment under way; Planned = Approvals and funding in place, or construction well advanced but suspended indefinitely; Proposed = clear intention but still without funding and/or approvals.

TWh = Terawatt-hours (billion kilowatt-hours), MWe = Megawatt net (electrical as distinct from thermal), kWh = kilowatt-hour.World Nuclear Power Reactors and Uranium Requirements As at 4 January 2006 10As readers will of course be aware, there are risks in relying heavilyon a single source in any field, and particularly in a subject in which the debate is as polarised as it is in nuclear power. There is no doubt that the ground-breaking work of Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Smith (SLS) needs to be examined in detail and replicated. Unfortunately, that has not yet happened. However, the work is evidently of high quality; it is deeply-rooted in the expert literature of nuclear technology; all ground-breaking work comes from pioneering individuals or teams who break ranks with the received vision; and there is in any case no alternative but to rely heavily on this single source. And there are other good reasons for taking their work seriously.First, the data they use is entirely standard. It comes from the World Nuclear Association (WNA) and the Atomic Energy Agency (AEA). That is not to say that the data supplied by these agencies

is infallible, but it is the best we have. The purpose of these agencies work is broadly in support of confident, even bullish, expectations of the future of the industry; if SLS is biased, therefore, it is unlikely to be biased in the direction of under estimating thequantity of uranium that will be available in the future. Secondly, there is not in fact an enormous disagreement betweenthe conventional, broadly-agreed expectations of uranium supplyproduced by the industry, and the conclusions produced by SLS.For instance, a paper has recently been produced by Future Energy Solutions (FES), an operating division of AEA Technology plc, as part

of the Sustainable Development Commissions submission to the U.K. Energy Review. It cites widely-shared industry expectations of the supply of uranium in the future: Institutions across the nuclear industry are confident that reserves are sufficient to meet the needs of the next 100 years. Fine - so the next question is: how much will the industry have expanded in that time? Well, one useful forecast for expansion comes from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), which foresees nuclear generation growing by 17 percent by 2025. It now accounts for about 2 1/2percent of global final energy consumption, so the scale of expansion foreseen for it suggests that by 2025 it may account for slightly under 3 percent (assuming that final energy demand does not grow over that time).

33So, what does SLS say about this? They say that there are very substantial uncertainties around their numbers, but they conclude that there is enough uranium to continue at the present rate (2 1/2percent of total final demand) for roughly 75 years. Not much difference there, then. Is there a consensus beginning to emerge here? It looks rather like it: Mr Neville Chamberlains long and distinguished record as chief executive of British Nuclear Fuels Limited (BNFL) entitles him to be listened-to as a trusted spokesperson for the industry. He estimates that there are sufficient supplies of uranium to carry on roughly as we are for another 80 years, an estimate which is practically identical with that of SLS.

34SLSs critical contribution is that they point out the significance of this. If the nuclear power industry were to produce the electricity for a really useful, grown-up purpose, such as all electricity or alltransport, it could only keep going for half a dozen years or so. But no one, least of all, spokesmen for the industry itself, is really claiming that it can do any better than that. You would think, given the heat of the debate, that there is real disagreement about this but - except in terms of the rhetoric - there is no real dispute about the fact that the industry is, and will remain, marginal in terms of the global mixture of energy supplies, ineffective as aA NOTE ON SOURCESAnd yet, so great is the need for some way of closing downdemand for fossil fuels and filling the energy gap, and so serious are the consequences of not doing so, that Lovelock can argue that it would be better to develop nuclear power, even with all these disadvantages, than to fail to stop carbon emissions - or else fall into the energy gap and take the consequences. Lovelock writes: We need emission-free energy sources immediately, and there is no serious contender

to nuclear fission.

30 He suggests that the decision is muchclarified for us if we recognise the risk of climate change for what it is, and he adds that we will not succeed in doing this if we do not in the process move beyond the intellectual analysis and, instead, feel the fear:Few, even among climate scientists and ecologists, seem yetto realise fully the potential severity, or the imminence, ofcatastrophic global disaster; understanding is still in theconscious mind alone and not yet the visceral reaction of fear. We lack an intuitive sense, an instinct, that tells uswhen Gaia is in danger.

31Lovelocks argument is persuasive. But there are three grounds on which it is open to criticism.

1. The nuclear fuel cycle. Uranium depletion is not a flawed idea; it is a reality that isjust a little way ahead. As we he seen, Lovelocks otherwise

brilliant analysis of climate change displays no knowledge of the

nuclear fuel-cycle. His optimism about the feasibility of nuclear power in the future is simply a case of whistling in the dark. 2. Alternative energy strategiesLovelock may underestimate the potential of the fourfoldstrategy which can be described as Lean Energy: 1.a transformation in standards of energy conservation and efficiency; 2.structural change to build local economic and energy systems; and 3.renewable energy; all within 4.a framework, such as emissions permits or tradableenergy quotas (TEQs), leading to deep reductions in energy demand.

32 It cannot beexpected that this strategy would fill the energy gap completely, or neatly, or in time, but nor is Lovelock suggesting that nuclear power could do so. Even if there were nouranium-supply problem to restrain the use of nuclear power,and even if it were the overriding priority for governments around the world, it would still fall well short of filling the gap.

It would be impossible to build all the nuclear power stations needed in time, and the energy required would mean that a rapidly-growing nuclear-power industry would be using more Nuclear power is caught in a depletiontrap at least as imminent as that of oil and gas. So the question to be asked is: as the conventional uranium sources run low, are there alternative sources of fuel for nuclear energy?

continued on back page 11means of reducing carbon emissions, and just as dependent onsustained gas supplies to keep the electricity grid functioning as are gas power stations themselves. The only things that are big about nuclear power are its problems and, above all its effect in stopping people thinking clearly about the coming energy chasm, since at the back of their minds there is the sense that if all else fails, we can always fall back on nuclear. Well, we cant. Not even the industry thinks so.Thirdly, SLS make the major contribution of bringing the energy-costof waste-disposal into the frame. At present, the industry is notmaking the large investment that is required to clear up current and future wastes to a standard required by any reasonable understanding of sustainability. If those standards were followed, all high-, medium- and low-level waste, including the vast stores of depleted uranium, would be sequestered; reactors would in duecourse be dismantled and sequestered; the tailings produced bythe mining and milling of uranium would be stabilised, and the land rehabilitated. SLS have pioneered an analysis of the energy cost of the comprehensive waste-treatment that lies ahead; this work, as we have seen, needs to be replicated and analysed indetail, but a conservative and provisional estimate is that if fullwaste management were to be sustained by the industry, the energy-cost of this would amount to almost one third of the energy delivered to the grid, plus another one third to deal with the backlog. Any dissent from this needs to be based on research into the detail of the nuclear fuel cycle as exhaustive as the workdone by SLS themselves.Of the need for further research there is no doubt. For instance,there are some stages in the nuclear fuel life-cycle on which there is no data at all - such as the global warming potential of the halogen compounds and solvents released by the nuclear energy industry. So far, all estimates of greenhouses gases released by thenuclear fuel cycle, including until very recently that of SLSthemselves, have simply overlooked the contribution of escaping halogens compounds - and overlooked has generally meant pretending they dont exist. Just the fact of studying this questionwill immediately start to raise estimates of the climate impact ofnuclear power out of the bath of ignorance and fudge in which it has luxuriated so far. The absence of a definitive, replicated judgment on the whole fuelcycle and climate impact of nuclear power at present does not mean no judgment at all is possible. We know enough to say decisively that nuclear power can never come anywhere near fillingthe energy gap that is opening in front of us. Unless the industryfocuses first of all on dealing with its past and present wastes -

while supplying to the grid whatever energy it has left over after it has done that - then we will soon be left with the nightmare ticket: an inheritance of 75 years of untreated, unstable nuclearwaste, and a lack of the energy and the money to deal with it.That prospect is real; thanks to the work of SLS, we can now clearly recognise it. It is the aim of this paper, in the light of all this, to encourage everyone who is thinking about, talking about or deciding on nuclear power to see it as the energy source that claims significance and causes trouble far beyond the scale of theenergy it produces. It is a distraction from the need to face up tothe coming energy chasm and to fill it as much as possible and as quickly as possible with pragmatic and practical solutions of the kind described in this paper as Lean Energy. NOTES AND REFERENCES1. For instance, radium-226 is naturally-occurring, and our bodies can repair the DNAdamage it causes in small doses. Plutonium-239 is man-made; there is no safe dose.

See Chris Busby (1995), Wings of Death, Aberystwyth: Green Audit, chapters 6-7.2. See Gordon Edwards (2004), Health and Environmental Issues Linked to the NuclearFuel Chain, Section A: Radioactivity, at www.ccnr.or g/ceac_B.html. For a concise citizensintroduction to the basics of nuclear fission, see Chemistry for Dummies

the chapterheading of the on-line version is (unfortunately) Gone (Nuclear) Fission. 3.See Ian Hore-Lacy (2003), Nuclear Electricity, World Nuclear Association (WNA) website,Nuclear Electricity, http://www.w orld-nuclear.or g/education/ne/ne.htm , chapter 4(referenced below as WNA).4.Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen. and Philip Smith (2004), Nuclear Power

The Energy Balance, at www.stormsmith.nl(referenced bellow as SLS).5.WNA, chapter 3, and SLS, chapter 2, pp 8-9.

6.For more detail on the decay products of uranium-238, see Edwards (2004), Section A.Treatment of tailings: SLS, chapter 4, p 5; chapter 2, p 9.7.See WNA, chapter 4, SLS, chapter 4, p 5; chapter 2, p 9.

8.WNA, chapter 4; SLS, chapter 2, pp 11-12.

9.A variant is GeoMelt, which melts a mixture of nuclear waste and soil at 3000°C toform a solid block with the properties of exceedingly hard glass, which is then placed in a secure container for burial. However, there is controversy as to whether this is a suitable treatment for nuclear waste. The case for the treatment is made in

www.geomelt.com. Disposal of high-level waste: See WNA, chapter 5; SLS, chapter 4, p6. For a description of the latest thinking on the disposal on high-level nuclear waste,see Rolf Haugaard Nielsen (2006), Final Resting Place, New Scientist, No 2541, 4March, pp 38-41.10.See Report of the Committee Examining Radiation Risks of Internal Emitters (Cerrie), (2004), at www.cerrie.or g11.SLS, chapters 3; 4. WNA chapter 5.12.This summary relies substantially on SLS. Their work is based on exhaustive reference tooriginal research in nuclear energy; nonetheless, it is clear that it should be independently assessed and replicated. The criticism it has received so far has not

evidently damaged their case (see http://www.stormsmith.nl/Rebuttal_WNA.PDF

). It is infact a typical pattern: decisively-important work, strongly at variance with the received wisdom, is produced by a small number of (often vilified) pioneers. The work of Storm van Leeuwen and Smith is similar in many ways with that of Colin Campbell on oil depletion. In both cases, the pioneers have pointed out a depletion problem; the response is that there is much more of the resource yet to be discovered, and that thewhistle-blowers are being alarmist. 13.16 percent: this is easily calculated from SLS figures, and is confirmed by Jan WillemStorm van Leeuwen, personal communication. 14.For a listing of the global warming potential of freon and other gases, see US.Department of Environment Protection, Greenhouses gases and their global warming potential relative to CO2 at http://www.state.me.us/dep/air/emissions/ghg-equiv.htm15.SLS, Summary, and chapter 2, pp 12-17. Storm van Leeuwen (2006), Energy fromUranium, Appendix A, in Evidence to the IPCC Working Group III, Fourth Assessment Report First Order Draft for Expert Review (referenced below as WSL/IPCC).16.As previous note.

17.Storage ponds: see Rolf Haugaard Nielsen (2006).

18.Lovelock (2006), p 103.

19.e.g. S. Huwyler, L Rybach and M Taube (1975), Extraction of uranium and thorium andother metals from granite, EIR-289, Technical Communications 123, Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule, Zurich, September, translated by Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, LA-TR-77-42, 1977). Cited and discussed in Storm van Leeuwen (2006), UraniumResources and Nuclear Energy, Appendix E, in WSL/IPCC.20.Storm van Leeuwen (2006), Breeders, Appendix C, in WSL/IPCC.

21.Ibid.22.Ibid.23.Lawrence M. Lidsky and Marvin M Miller (1998), Nuclear Power and Energy Security: ARevised Strategy for Japan, at www.nautilus.or g/ar chives/paper s/ener gy/LidskyP ARES.pdf24.Uranium Information Council (2004), Briefing Paper 67, Thorium, at www.uic.com.au/nip67.htm 25.Ibid.26.Storm van Leeuwen (2006), Breeders, Appendix C, in WSL/IPCC.

27.Storm van Leeuwen (2006), Uranium from Seawater, Appendix E2, in WSL/IPCC.

28.Ibid.29.Low-level waste: see note 11.

30.Lovelock (2005), p 99.

31.Lovelock (2005), p 103.

32.See David Fleming (2006), Energy and the Common Purpose, London: The Lean Economy Connection. 33.Future Energy Solutions, an operating division of AEA Technology plc (2006), Paper 8,Uranium Resource Availability, in Sustainable Development Commission, The Role ofNuclear Power in a Low Carbon Economy, p 3. The US. Energy Information Administration(2005), International Energy Outlook, is cited on p 20.34.Neville Chamberlain (2005), in a Today Programme debate with the author, 21 May.

1. Nuclear energy could sustain its present minor contribution of some 2 1/2percent of global final energy demand for about75 years, but only by postponing indefinitely the expenditure of energy that would be needed to deal with its waste.2. Each stage in the nuclear life-cycle, other than fission itself,produces carbon dioxide. 3. The depletion problem facing nuclear power is as pressing asthe depletion problem facing oil and gas. 4. The depletion of uranium becomes apparent when nuclearpower is considered as a major source of energy. For instance, if required to provide all the electricity used worldwide - while clearing up the new waste it produced - it could (notionally) do so for about six years before it ran out of usable rich uranium ore. 5. Alternative systems of nuclear fission, such as fast-breedersand thorium reactors, do not offer solutions in the short/medium term.6.The overall climate impact of the nuclear industry, including itsuse of halogenated compounds with a global warming potential many times that of carbon dioxide, needs to be researched urgently. 7.The option that a nation such as the United Kingdom has ofbuilding and fuelling a nuclear energy system on a substantial and useful scale is removed if many other nations attempt to

do the same thing.8..The response must be to develop a programme of LeanEnergy. Lean Energy consists of: (1) energy conservation and efficiency; (2) structural change to build local energy systems; and (3) renewable energy; all within (4) a framework, such as tradable energy quotas (TEQs), leading to deep reductions in energy demand.9.That response should be developed at all speed, free of thefalse promise and distraction of nuclear energy.continued from page 10Acknowledgements: Feasta would like to thank Comhar, Ireland's National Sustainable Development Partnership, for a grant toward s the cost of publishing of thispaper. Comhar would like us to state that it does not necessarily share David Fleming's opinions but has provided the funding to encourage debate on animportant issue. David Fleming would like to thank Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen who commented on drafts of this paper. He would also like to thank MichaelBuick, Lucy Care, Richard Starkey and several referees with careers in the practice or teaching of nuclear physics who wished to remain anonymous. energy than it provided throughout most of the period of growth -the more rapid the growth, the deeper the energy deficit it would produce. There are good reasons to believe that Lean Energy could dobetter. The delay that elapsed before it began to get results would be shorter. It would be able to call on the skill and cooperation of the entire population of the world. It is reasonable to expect that it would be cheaper, per unit of energy-services produced, by an order of magnitude or so. It would be flexible and responsive to local sites, conditions and skills. And it would be integral to a new environmental and practical ethic, in which reduced transport, environmental protection and local self-reliance come together as a joined-up programme.

3. The oil peak Lovelock may not give enough weight to the significance of the oil peak. As this weighs in, it will establish conditions in which there is no choice but to conserve energy, whether the urgency ofclimate change is recognised or not. Without the oil peak toconcentrate the mind, action to save the climate could be leisurely at best. With the oil peak reminding us, by repeatedly turning out the lights and stopping us filling up our cars, we have anincentive to follow the one available option with all the will and determination we can find. What appears to follow from this is a best-of-both-worlds strategy:to develop nuclear power as far as the uranium supply allows,and at the same time to develop Lean Energy. There is clearly adiscussion to be had about this, but here again there is a catch.

The problem is that the two strategies are substantiallyincompatible. A dash for nuclear power would reduce the fundsand other resources, and the concentrated focus, needed for Lean Energy. Nuclear power depends on the centralised grid system,which depends on a reliable flow of electricity from gas-poweredstations if it is to function at all; Lean Energy is organised around

local minigrids. Nuclear power inevitably brings a sense ofreassurance that, in the end, the technical fix will save us; Lean Energy depends on the recognition that we shall need, notonly the whole range of technology from the most advanced to the most labour intensive, but the whole range of opportunities afforded by profound change - in behaviour, in the economy, and in society. Nuclear power, even as only a short-term strategy, is about conserving the bankrupt present; Lean Energy is aboutinventing and building a future that works. For these reasons, the best-of-both-worlds strategy of backingboth nuclear power and Lean Energy could be expected to lead to worst-of-both-worlds consequences. Lean Energy would be

impeded by nuclear power; nuclear power would be hopelessly ineffective without Lean Energy. Result: paralysis. This should not be overstated: a few token nuclear power stations to replace some of those that are about to be retired would make it harder to develop Lean Energy with the single-minded urgency and resources needed, without necessarily ruling out progress towards Lean Energy entirely. But the defining reality of the energy future -

equivalent to the reality of oil in the Oil Age - has to be an acknowledgment that no large-scale technical fix is available.

Energy cannot any longer be delegated to experts. The future will have to be a collective, society-transforming effort.

David Fleming David Flemingdelivered the 2001Feasta Lecture. He is an independent writer in the fields of energy, environment, economics, society and culture and lives in London. He first published proposals for TEQs (formerly Domestic Tradable Quotas - DTQs) in 1996. TEQs are set in their context in his two forthcoming books, The Lean Economy: A Survivors Guide to aFuture that Works , and Lean Logic: The Book of Environmental Manners.He is founder of The Lean Economy Connection, an extended conversation between people who are thinking ahead.NUCLEAR ENERGYA Lean Guide April 9, 2007, By James Finch Stock Interview.com Water: The Key to ISR Uranium Mining ISR Valuations Require Water Factor When Appraising Pounds in the GroundThe Advanced ISR Series Part FOUR of a Six-Part Series COPYRIGHT © 2007 by StockInterview, Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this article may be redistributed or published without permission from the editor of StockInterview.com.

As part of our efforts to better educate not only uranium stock analysts and investors, but also the media and environmental groups, we have expanded upon last years introduction to In Situ Recovery uranium mining with our Advanced ISR Series.

Water plays an integral role for In Situ Recovery (ISR) uranium mining. If the water is not in the right place, ISR mining can not take place. A companys pounds in the ground are nearly worthless or may have to be extracted through other means.

One of the purposes of the Advanced ISR series is to finally bury the misleading Pounds in the Ground mantra. Some uranium companies have given the wrong impression about their resource estimates by championing the number of their historical pounds. Some of those pounds might never be mined or even permitted for mining. Having NI 43-101 compliant resources does not necessarily confirm whether companies have economic deposits in which the extraction process can take place. Water could be the issue.

Our interview with Glenn Catchpole of Uranerz Energy explains what investors should know about waters role in ISR uranium mining. Companies with an ISR project may disappoint shareholders because of the water location, or lack of water, in relation to the ore body. Many analysts have assigned values to an ore body without taking water into consideration. We hope this interview will help shed new light on these valuations.StockInterview:

Lets start with the basics. What is the first requirement for an In Situ Recovery uranium mine?

Glenn Catchpole:

The uranium ore body itself must or should be in a confined aquifer. What you are looking for is that the uranium-mineralized sandstone is in this aquifer. If theres no water in the formation and its dry, then you cant solution mine (also known as ISR).

StockInterview:

26 What do you mean by a confined aquifer?

Glenn Catchpole:

A confined aquifer is one that is confined between two impermeable geologic strata.

In Wyoming, typically they would be either mud, stone, shale or some type of clay which forms an impermeable barrier above and below the sandstone hosting the uranium. Over time, water has moved down the sandstone strata. As it moves, the water comes under pressure and becomes confined.

StockInterview:

Why is this important?

Glenn Catchpole:

If you complete a water well in a sandstone strata that is under pressure and encase it in cement, the water will actually rise in that casing to some level based on the pressure in the aquifer. In some cases, there could be enough pressure or head, where the well will actually flow onto the surface on its own. You want the water under pressure because the more pressure in the formation, or in the sandstone unit, then the more oxygen you can put in the solution. In the United States, you either add CO2 or sodium bicarbonate plus an oxidant, such as oxygen, to the groundwater.

Then you re-inject the solution into the sandstone host formation to dissolve the uranium off the sandstone. The more oxygen you can put into the solution, the more effectively you can dissolve or oxidize the uranium.StockInterview:

How do you find out how much pressure you have in the aquifer?

Glenn Catchpole:

Lets assume youve got good uranium values from the results of your exploration program, and that you may have an economic ore body using the ISR method. You then need to confirm that the ore body is in an aquifer or that the sandstone is saturated with water. To do that, you would install hydrologic testing wells.

Assuming there is water in those wells, you would then do a pump test to determine the hydrologic properties of this aquifer.

StockInterview:

How do you know if your properties have mineralized sandstone formations which are saturated with water?

Glenn Catchpole:

There are deposits in Wyoming that are good in terms of grade, but they are 27 completely above the water table. They are not saturated. In our case, we focused our acquisition activities in the Powder River Basin, which we know from our previous work. Most of those sands that are hosting uranium are indeed saturated with water.

There are some that are not. From our experience we pretty much know those deposits that may be sitting above the water table. In other words, they are not saturated with water. If uranium went to $500/pound, maybe some day you could put a conventional mine on them.

Sufficient water pressure is required to recover uranium mineralization from the water-saturated ore body to make an ISR project economic.

Courtesy of Uranerz Energy StockInterview:

What about those in the exploration stage?

Glenn Catchpole:

If you were working in a new area doing raw exploration, and you did come across good mineralization that looked like you had an ore body there, you might not know for sure about the hydrology and what the water levels are like. You could get into a situation where either the sandstone is dry, or it is only partially filled with water. Or 28 its filled with water, but it doesnt have much head or pressure on it. Youve got to do some test work and nail that down.

StockInterview:

Is there any way of detecting the problem in advance, before you discover youve got an inadequately saturated formation?

Glenn Catchpole:

When you are drilling an exploration hole, the driller knows when he encounters any water at all. If he doesnt get any water, you know right away, youve got a problem very early on. When the driller starts out, he can start drilling with air. If he encounters water in his drilling, then hes going to switch over to drilling mud to carry the cuttings. As hes drilling a hole, he is creating cuttings. He has to have a mud slurry in order to carry those cuttings out of the hole. An experienced driller will have a good feel for how much water hes encountered. These drillers have worked all over Wyoming; theyve got some feel for the local geology and what the water situation might be.StockInterview:

Once youve established the saturation and pressure, whats next on your checklist?

Glenn Catchpole:

Assuming the mineralization is not tied up in clay streaks in the sandstone unit, then you want to know the permeability of the aquifer. How readily can you move water through the formation? To do that, you have to do a pump test, or aquifer test to calculate the value of the permeability of that aquifer. The higher the permeability, the more helpful its going to be in your mining process. You have to be able to move the solution through the formation in order to leach uranium off the sandstone grains. The more permeable the formation, the more fluid you can move through it; the more effective you can be in extracting uranium.

StockInterview:

How do you determine your rate of production?

Glenn Catchpole:

Two things determine your ISR mining production rate. Thats the concentration of the uranium in the fluid coming out of your recovery wells and the flow rate. Theres an equation you can use to determine the rate of production in pounds. You multiply 29 your flow rate by your concentration, also known as head grade.

StockInterview:

Is this how companies conclude how many pounds they will annually produce on their ISR project?

Glenn Catchpole:

Generally, you have a production rate you are trying to achieve. For example, if I want to produce one million pounds per year, and my head grade is 80 milligrams per liter (a typical number used for U.S. projects) and my hydrologist tells me Ive going to recover 10 gallons per minute, I will need 400 recovery wells. Based upon these hypothetical calculations, I will need 4,000 gallons per minute, or 400 recovery wells each recovering 10 gallons/minute, to produce one million pounds. As a side comment, when people say Im going to have a solution mine that produces three million pounds per year, it turns out to be a lot of wells. Your major cost in a solution mining operation, once youve got the plant built, is putting in your wells. (Editors Note: Discussing costs to put in wells with others in the uranium mining sector, we found a range of $20 to $30/foot for each well.)

Conclusion In a separate information sheet, Glenn Catchpole provided us with a hypothetical approximation of an ISR wellfield in Wyoming. He wrote, Production at an ISR uranium mine is directly related to the flow rate (FR) coming from the recovery wells and the concentration of the uranium or head grade (HG) in the recovery solution.

In this theoretical calculation, Mr. Catchpole assumed a head grade of 65 milligrams per liter, a flow rate of 10 gallons per minute for each recovery well, and an ore bodys average depth below surface of 500 feet. In order to produce one million pounds U3O8, this would require 350 production wells, 420 injection wells and 20 monitor wells. Using these assumptions, the theoretical well field would cost approximately $12 million to construct. Amortized over two years for the life of the well field, the cost for the well field construction using annual production figures of one million pounds would be about $6/pound U3O8. By lowering cost/foot for each well, a company could reduce their construction cost to about $4/pound U3O8.

Mr. Catchpole cautioned these are simplistic and very rough approximations of an ISR wellfield cost in Wyoming. He also wrote, These are presented for illustrative purposes only and the numbers generated should not be used in financial calculations or project evaluations.

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30 April 7, 2007 By Julie Ickes Stockinterview.com Mestena Auction Blows Uranium Price Past $100 Mark New Spot Uranium Price Reaches $US113/Pound The shot heard around the uranium world comes from Corpus Christi, Texas. A modest lot of 100 thousand pounds U3O8, offered by tiny privately owned Texas-based Mestena Uranium LLC, drove bidders to establish a new record spot uranium price. The spot uranium price rose dramatically this week, jumping $18 to

$113/pound U3O8, following the results of the sealed-bid auction, according to Nuclear Market Review (NMR) editor Treva Klingbiel. This is the largest single increase since uranium prices were first reported. The spot uranium price jumped by nearly 19 percent this past week.

Since the beginning of the year, the spot uranium price has risen by 57 percent. By comparison, nickel has only increased by about 35 percent year to date. Nickel leads all metals traded on the London Metal Exchange (LME). In January 2001, spot uranium could be purchased for as little as US$6.40. Since then, yellowcake, industry slang for the processed nuclear fuel, has jumped by more than 1700 percent! According to Gene Clark, chief executive of TradeTech, which publishes Nuclear Market Review, We are about $2 short of the all-time high in inflation-adjusted dollars.

Bidders hoping to purchase the Mestena uranium came from all market groups, according to NMR. Uranium producers, traders, investors and utilities bid for the 100 thousand pound lot. Klingbiel gave three reasons for the aggressive bidding: ERAs recent mine flooding, continued interest from speculators and utilities seeking significant quantities for near-term delivery. New demand from a U.S. utility also emerged in the long-term uranium market this week. The long-term uranium price remains unchanged at US$85/pound. TradeTech posts the weekly spot and long-term uranium price on the consulting services website at www.uranium.info.

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