The nuclear power fuel cycle is a producer of carbon dioxide. I will reference a section of Code Red Alert: Confronting Nuclear Power in Georgia (published by Southern Alliance for Clean Energy May 2004). I have included the end notes for the section on the uranium fuel cycle that I am posting here. I have placed the section that references the CO2 emissions from two plants in bold, (It is the fifth paragraph under the conversion & enrichment section).
In addition to all of its waste and pollution, please note that the nuclear power industry engages in environmental racism as well. If you think that you are someone who can tolerate the CO2 emissions, are you someone who can tolerate the environmental racism? Please read the next section entitled The Uranium Fuel Chain from Code Red Alert: Confronting Nuclear Power in Georgia in its entirety. The complete document can be downloaded for free on the internet.
THE URANIUM FUEL CHAIN
The production of uranium fuel is highly energy and waste intensive, requiring uranium mining, milling, conversion, enrichment and fabrication. In fact, uranium enrichment has been the largest contributor of wastes to the DOE’s materials inventory.287 Though these fuel operations do not occur in Georgia, several facilities in the southeast do engage in these activities (see Radioactive Southeast Map).
Uranium fuel production impacts broad geographic areas of the nation—negatively impacting states such as Utah that do not even have nuclear power plants. The production of energy at the nuclear reactor generates dangerous, highly radioactive, long-lived waste. This “spent” nuclear fuel is a dangerous residue that threatens local communities. Types of waste created by a one-year operation of a typical 1000 MW nuclear reactor—of comparable size to the nuclear power plants in Georgia— include 179,728 tons of uranium mill tailings, .2 metric tons of plutonium waste, 159 tons of reactor fuels as well as weapons grade plutonium. 288
Mining of Uranium
Uranium ore has to be mined, like coal, to be used as a fuel source. Uranium is both radioactive and a chemical toxin. Additionally, numerous heavy metals present in uranium ore can have adverse health effects. Many uranium mines in the United States are on Native American lands. Nearly one third of these mines are located within the Navajo nation.289 The mines have had a negative effect on the quality of life of Native Americans living near the mines.290 Even though lung cancer was considered rare in Navajo Indians, a report by Dr. Gerald Buker stated, “the risk of lung cancer had increased by a factor of at least 85 percent among Navajo uranium miners.”291
Uranium mines are found around the globe and both the mining and milling processes disproportionately affect indigenous populations. Africa has long served as a source of uranium for the nuclear industry. Describing an observation during a visit to a French-run uranium mine in the early 1980s, a BBC commentary described the injustice and abuse perpetrated at mines as, “Some of the poorest people on earth labor in one of the deadliest environments to power the electric train sets and fuel the bombs of the world’s richest nations.”292
Milling of Uranium
Milling consists of chemically separating uranium from other ore components. A thousand tons of ore must be processed to get just 2 tons of uranium.293 The waste produced is known as “mill tailings,” which are often left near the land surrounding the mine, creating another dangerous legacy of the mining process. For typical uranium concentrations, the tailings contain 85 percent of the radioactivity in the original ore along with toxic chemicals and heavy metals. Furthermore, the volume of mill tailings is enormous and the majority of the radioactive components are extremely long-lived. Unfortunately, a large portion of mill tailings in the United States were “grandfathered” when more protective standards began to be implemented in the late 1970s, leaving behind more than 100 million tons of uranium waste with limited regulatory oversight.294
The mill tailings can infiltrate surrounding waterways. In 1979, near Churchrock, New Mexico, a United Nuclear uranium mill tailings dam broke, dumping nearly 100 million gallons of liquid radioactive tailings and 1000 tons of solid tailings into a surrounding area, spreading nearly 60 miles from the facility. The Rio Puerco River was contaminated and the local Native Americantribe was devastated since their water source was forever rendered toxic by the tailings.295
Conversion & Enrichment
After the uranium ore is milled, it is converted to uranium hexafluoride at Honeywell International, Inc. (formerly Allied Signal, Inc.296) in Metropolis, Illinois.297 It is then further enriched at Paducah, Kentucky through a chemical process known as gaseous diffusion. Enrichment is required to increase the percentage of Uranium-235, the isotope of uranium needed for nuclear power or nuclear weapons. In natural uranium, U-235 concentration is too low, even after milling and conversion. The end results of gaseous diffusion are called a) the “product,” in which the percentage of U-235 has been increased and b) the “tails,” which is predominantly U-238, also known as depleted uranium, in which the percentage of U-235 has been decreased.298 Uranium enrichment has been the largest contributor of wastes to the DOE’s materials inventory.299
Union Carbide operated two of the three U.S. conversion and uranium enrichment plants, at Paducah, Kentucky and at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The Goodyear Atomic Corporation, a subsidiary of the Bechtel Company, originally ran the third plant, at the Portsmouth facility in Ohio.300 In the early 1990s, the U.S. Enrichment Corporation (USEC), a wholly owned government company, was formed to operate the nation’s enrichment plants. On July 28, 1998, USEC, Inc. was privatized, resulting in one of the largest privatizations of a federal government enterprise in American history and making the company the leading global marketer and producer of uranium enrichment services.301
Different end uses require different degrees of enrichment. Some enriched uranium can be used for commercial nuclear power plants while some nuclear weapons needs, or naval and research reactors, require further enrichment. Several by products are created. Depleted uranium (DU), for example, which is produced at a larger ratio than the desired enriched uranium, is a heavy metalpoison and is radioactive.302 Depleted uranium is frequently used in armor piercing munitions.
Gaseous diffusion plants, such as Paducah, require an enormous amount of electricity produced largely from coal-fired power plants in the areas surrounding the plant along with large amounts of cooling water for the processing equipment.303 In order to support the United States’ defense effort, the Atomic Energy Commission needed to construct a uranium enrichment plant. Since the Portsmouth plant required electricity amounts that were not available so the Ohio Valley Electric Corporation (OVEC) and its subsidiary, Indiana Kentucky Electric Corporation (IKEC), were organized in 1952 by fifteen investor-owned utilities in the region. In 1955 two coal-fired powerplants, Kyger Creek in Ohio (OVEC’s) and Clifty Creek in Madison, Indiana (IKEC’s) were built and began supplying electricity to the Portsmouth plant.304
In 1998, energy sold to the Department of Energy for use by USEC was 9.2 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) with costs of over $180 million.305 These two old coal plants were also extremely polluting. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, in 1998 Clifty Creek emitted over 9 million tons of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas associated with global warming.306 Additionally, in 1999 both plants rated in the top 100 for coal plants emitting hazardous air pollutants such as mercury, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur dioxides.307
During the gaseous diffusion process, though the uranium hexafluoride gas produced is highly corrosive and radioactive, the safety precautions around these facilities were questionable at best. Drums full of trichloroethylenecontaminated uranium along with large amounts of other uranium wastes were buried on site at Paducah, with most of the drum contents having leaked away by 1984, and large releases of uranium to surface waters also occurred.308 Portsmouth originally produced highly enriched uranium for naval nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons and now provides enrichment only for commercial nuclear power. It is also a federal Superfund site as the aquifer beneath it is contaminated. Department of Energy estimates for clean up were approximately $163 million.309
Eventually, the resulting enriched uranium is converted into a metallic form and then made into tiny pellets. This is done at seven uranium fuel fabrication facilities in the country, with six located in the Southeast, such as Nuclear Fuel Services, Inc. in Erwin, TN, Westinghouse Electric Company, LLC (formerly a Division of CBS) in Columbia, SC, and Global Nuclear Fuel Americas, LLC (formerly GE Company Nuclear Energy Production) in Wilmington, NC.310 These pellets are stacked end-to-end like tiny poker chips and encased with a zirconium/aluminum cladding known as Zircalloy in approximately twelvefoot long fuel rods that look like very long pencils. These fuel rods are thenshipped to reactors and inserted into the reactor core in groups known as “assemblies” or “bundles,” approximately 60 per assembly. The reactor cores contain thousands of fuel rods in a large nuclear reactor.311
End Notes
287 U.S. DOE, Linking Legacies, p. 143.288 Dr. Rosalie Bertell, No Immediate Danger, p. 112.
289 Makhijani & Saleska, The Nuclear Power Deception, p. 219.
290 M. Annette Jaimes, Ed., The State of Native America: Genocide, colonization, and resistance, (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992), pp. 248, 249, 264, 265.
291 Dr. Rosalie Bertell, No Immediate Danger, p. 84. From a monograph entitled “Uranium Mining and Lung Cancer Among Navajo Indians.”
292 Makhijani, Hu, & Yih, Nuclear Wastelands, p. 106.
293 Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, “The Uranium Burden,” Science for Democratic Action, vol. 8, no. 4, Sept. 2000.
294 Dr. Rosalie Bertell, No Immediate Danger, p. 86.
295 Makhijani & Saleska, The Nuclear Power Deception, p. 219; IEER, “The Uranium Burden.”
296 U.S. NRC, Information Digest 2000, NUREG-1350, vol. 12, p.62.
297 Honeywell International, Inc. is the only uranium hexafluoride production facility in the nation, U.S. NRC, Information Digest 2002, pp. 64, 67.
298 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, Public Health Assessment for PaducahGaseous Diffusion Plant [USDOE] Paducah, McCracken County, KY EPA Facility ID: KY8890008982, May 21, 2002, p.1.
299 U.S. DOE, Linking Legacies, p. 143.
300 Taylor G. Moore, III, “The fateful choice in uranium enrichment,” Time Bomb: A Nuclear Reader from The Progressive, (Madison, WI: The Progressive, Inc., 1980),pp. 23-26. This article also discusses the complicated issue of the Separative Work Unit (SWU), which is the unit of measurement for determining the cost of theend product, the amount of energy required to boost a kilogram of natural uranium from U-235 content of 0.7 percent to 3 percent U-235.
301 U.S. Enrichment Corporation, Inc., 1998 Annual Report, pp. 1, 29; Schwartz, Atomic Audit, p. 346.
302 Makhijani & Saleska, The Nuclear Power Deception, pp. 215-220.
303 U.S NRC, NUREG-1437, vol. 1, May 1996, pp. 6-24, 6-25.
304 Ohio Valley Electric Corporation, 2000 Ohio Valley Electric Corporation and Subsidiary Corporation Annual Report, http://www.ovec.com/AnnualReport.pdfConfirmed in conversation with Ohio Public Service Commissioner Leon Wingjet on June 13, 2000 that Kyger and Clifty Creek plants power U.S. EnrichmentCorporation’s Portsmouth facility.
305 OVEC, Annual Report 2000, p. 18.
306 U.S. EPA, “Plant Summary CO2 Emissions Data by Unit,” 1998. www.epa.gov/acidrain/emission/in/983_co2.htm
307 Clear the Air, “Lethal Legacy,” April 2000, pp. 21, 26, 30.
308 Makhijani, Hu, & Yih, Nuclear Wastelands, pp. 206.
309 Ibid.
310 U.S. NRC, Information Digest 2002, p. 64; Information Digest 2000, pp. 62.
311 Daniel Ford, Meltdown: The Secret Papers of the Atomic Energy Commission, pp. 95-96.
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