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On August 6, 1945, when the mushroom cloud from the first atomic bomb rose over the devastated Japanese city of Hiroshima, who could have imagined the "peaceful atom"? And in the decades that followed who could have imagined just how unpeaceful that second version of atomic power might prove to be? I'm thinking, of course, about, among other disasters, the 1979 almost-meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, cleanup from which took more than 15 years and cost a billion dollars; or the all-too-peaceful 1986 total disaster at a Soviet nuclear plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine, that killed 30 people, led to the evacuation of 350,000 more, and caused "the largest uncontrolled radioactive release into the environment ever recorded for any civilian operation," sending fallout over Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia itself; or the one at a nuclear plant in Fukushima, Japan, in 2011, thanks to an earthquake and tsunami, from which, 12 years later, significant amounts of treated radioactive wastewater are soon to be released into the Pacific Ocean; or the one that, at this very moment, continually threatens to occur at another vast "peaceful" nuclear facility, now occupied (and possibly mined) by the Russian military at Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, in the midst of a devastating war there.
And then, of course, there's the peaceful nuclear waste produced by the creation and running of any nuclear facility. That's something TomDispatch regular Joshua Frank has focused on in a devastating fashion in his book Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America, about the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in the state of Washington, the place in this country most likely to give us our own Chernobyl.
And to make matters potentially worse, as he reports today, there's a whole new kind of "small" nuclear facility that lurks in our future, ensuring that ever more nuclear waste will be humanity's fate even if another nuclear weapon is never used (and don't count on that either). In a better world, the nearly $2 trillion that the U.S. military is planning to spend in the decades to come to sustain and "modernize" the American nuclear arsenal might be used to begin to denuclearize our world. With that in mind, consider Frank's latest thoughts on a deeply troubling subject. Tom
The Hype of a Nuclear "Renaissance"
The Forever Dangers of Small Modular Reactors
By Joshua Frank
If you didn't know better, you'd think Lloyd Marbet was a dairy farmer or maybe a retired shop teacher. His beard is thick, soft, and gray, his hair pulled back in a small ponytail. In his mid-seventies, he still towers over nearly everyone. His handshake is firm, but there's nothing menacing about him. He lumbers around like a wise, old hobbling tortoise.
We're standing in the deco lobby of the historic Kiggins Theater in downtown Vancouver, Washington, about to view a screening of Atomic Bamboozle, a remarkable new documentary by filmmaker Jan Haaken that examines the latest push for atomic power and a nuclear "renaissance" in the Pacific Northwest. Lloyd, a Vietnam veteran, is something of an environmental folk hero in these parts, having led the early 1990s effort to shut down Oregon's infamous Trojan Nuclear Plant. He's also one of the unassuming stars of a film that highlights his critical role in that successful Trojan takedown and his continued opposition to nuclear technology.
I've always considered Lloyd an optimist, but this evening I sense a bit of trepidation.
"It concerns me greatly that this fight isn't over yet," he tells me in his deep baritone. He's been at this for years and now helps direct the Oregon Conservancy Foundation, which promotes renewable energy, even as he continues to oppose nuclear power. "We learned a lot from Trojan, but that was a long time ago and this is a new era, and many people aren't aware of the history of nuclear power and the anti-nuclear movement."
The new push for atomic energy in the Pacific Northwest isn't just coming from the well-funded nuclear industry, their boosters at the Department of Energy, or billionaires like Bill Gates. It's also echoing in the mainstream environmental movement among those who increasingly view the technology as a potential climate savior.
In a recent interview with ABC News, Bill Gates couldn't have been more candid about why he's embraced the technology of so-called small modular nuclear reactors, or SMRs. "Nuclear energy, if we do it right, will help us solve our climate goals," he claimed. As it happens, he's also invested heavily in an "advanced" nuclear power start-up company, TerraPower, based up in Bellevue, Washington, which is hoping to build a small 345-megawatt atomic power reactor in rural Kemmerer, Wyoming.
The nuclear industry is banking on a revival and placing its bets on SMRs like those proposed by the Portland, Oregon-based NuScale Power Corporation, whose novel 60-megawatt SMR design was approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in 2022. While the underlying physics is the same as all nuclear power plants, SMRs are easier to build and safer to run than the previous generation of nuclear facilities -- or so go the claims of those looking to profit from them.
NuScale's design acceptance was a first in this country where 21 SMRs are now in the development stage. Such facilities are being billed as innovative alternatives to the hulking commercial reactors that average one gigawatt of power output per year and take decades and billions of dollars to construct. If SMRs can be brought online quickly, their sponsors claim, they will help mitigate carbon emissions because nuclear power is a zero-emissions energy source.
Never mind that it's not, since nuclear power plants produce significant greenhouse gas emissions from uranium mining to plant construction to waste disposal. Life cycle analyses of carbon emissions from different energy sources find that, when every stage is taken into account, nuclear energy actually has a carbon footprint similar to, if not larger than, natural gas plants, almost double that of wind energy, and significantly more than solar power.
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