No technology in history has generated more passion.
No technology in history has evoked such suspicion and fear.
It is the most evil, most health degrading type of energy that there is.
It's just the stupidest way I ever heard of to just boil water to generate electricity.
America's nuclear power industry is failing, crippled by public opposition, mounting costs
and a politically intractable nuclear waste problem.
Its critics have already declared victory.
Nuclear power's dead.
There will not be another nuclear power plant built here ever.
I mean, it's nothing that we really have to argue about.
Nuclear power's unsafe, it's uneconomical, and it's opposed by an overwhelming majority
of Americans.
Citizens distrust the technology, Wall Street distrusts the economic gamble.
Nuclear power's dead.
It's over.
It's that simple.
If the critics are right, the final resting place for the waste from four decades of commercial
nuclear power may well be here, buried under a remote stretch of the Nevada desert called
Yucca Mountain.
I'm Richard Rhodes.
I spent 15 years studying the history of nuclear energy.
I wrote about it in my book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
I find it extraordinary that half a century after the discovery of this new source of
energy, I'm standing on what may become its burial ground.
How did it happen that the nation that first harnessed this awesome new source of power
is about to abandon it?
What is it about this technology that stirs our passions?
Funding for Frontline is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by annual financial
support from viewers like you.
This is Frontline.
Additional funding for this program was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to enhance
public understanding of the role of technology.
The foundation also supports the Sloan Technology Series, a collection of books chronicling
the major technologies of the 20th century.
Atomic energy burst upon the world 52 years ago in the New Mexican desert.
In July 1945, scientists in the top-secret Manhattan Project prepared to test an atomic bomb.
They knew they were unleashing a force of mythic proportions.
Physicist Robert Oppenheimer paid homage in the words of a Hindu god,
Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
A few weeks later, the world learned about atomic energy when the U.S. bombed Hiroshima
and Nagasaki.
I remembered the awe I felt as a boy when I heard about the destruction these new bombs
caused.
They shocked the world and ended a long and terrible war.
Once discovered, this astonishing new technology could not be forgotten.
The atomic age had begun.
But instead of destruction, scientists dreamed of harnessing the power of the nucleus, offering
humankind a source of limitless energy.
By 1951, American scientists had taken the same nuclear power that had destroyed Hiroshima
and Nagasaki and used it to turn the lights on.
It was a very exciting field.
We thought it would be the leading method of making electricity throughout the world.
You have a very small amount of space, 12 feet tall, 12 feet in diameter, and you produce
enough electricity to run a large city in that small space.
So the energy source is extremely concentrated, which is one of its great benefits.
The source of nuclear fission is uranium, a naturally occurring metal.
Before the war, scientists discovered that a small fraction of the uranium atoms found
in nature, less than 1%, have a special property.
When they're hit by neutrons, they split, releasing more neutrons that in turn can split
other uranium atoms.
Each split or fission releases large amounts of energy.
By fabricating thumb-sized uranium pellets, loading the pellets into fuel rods, and assembling
the rods into a core, scientists were able to produce a self-sustaining chain reaction
that yielded enormous quantities of heat.
The core's energy heats water, producing steam that drives turbines, which generate electricity.
Proponents argued it was a dream form of clean energy that would be too cheap to meter.
But this rosy view of a nuclear future always had to compete with darker images.
From terrible explosions and the end of civilization, to nightmarish mutations induced by radiation
run amok.
By the 1970s, nuclear power had become a political target.
Its leading critic was Ralph Nader.
The Atomic Energy Commission is licensing unsafe reactors operating near major metropolitan
areas and that they clearly have been aware of this lack of safety.
The press wasn't critical.
The Congress bought into the Atomic Energy Commission party line.
There was a huge taxpayer-funded propaganda about how good nuclear power was going right
into the high schools and elementary schools in our country with traveling road shows.
The scientific community was part of the industry itself and there was no outside critique,
there was no government critique, and there was secrecy above it all.
Then in 1979 came Three Mile Island.
Good evening.
The world has never known a day quite like today.
It faced the considerable uncertainties and dangers of the worst nuclear power plant accident
of the atomic age.
It seemed to confirm our worst fears, that in trying to exploit nuclear fission, we had
opened a Pandora's box.
A series of technical and human errors led to a partial meltdown of one Three Mile Island
reactor.
The accident riveted America.
Nothing would ever be the same.
While no one was injured or killed in the accident, the experience helped forge a generation
of hardened anti-nuclear activists like Eric Epstein and Mary Osborne.
They are convinced beyond doubt that nuclear energy is dangerous, that it kills people
in an invisible and insidious way.
They want to wipe it off the face of the earth.
I don't trust these people.
These people got away with murder.
They killed people.
And you know, radiation is difficult to pin down.
It's not like I put a gun to your head and shoot you.
You know, with radiation, it's going to be difficult to determine, you know, if a certain
disease was caused by it.
Since Three Mile Island, researchers have studied public attitudes extensively.
They found that people's doubts about nuclear power have increased with time.
Let's go back now to your word association associated with nuclear power, and I want
to just go around the table, and we'll start with Leo and go that way.
What's your first image?
Disaster.
Disaster.
David, what's your first image?
The first image I had was trouble.
Trouble.
Disgusting.
Disgusting.
My first word was dangerous.
The first thing I thought of was radiation.
Radiation.
Strong nuclear reactions.
Like this focus group, many people fear radiation.
But scientists like John Molder, who work with radiation every day, feel differently.
If we knew what they knew, they argue, we might feel less afraid.
Biologists measure radiation in small units called millirems.
Whether or not it's dangerous depends on the dose.
A sufficiently large dose of ionizing radiation, and here we're talking of millions of millirems,
will actually kill you on the spot, within seconds.
Getting down to somewhat more reasonable doses, hundreds of thousands of millirems, these
can also kill people.
It takes a while, typically seven to 21 days.
There were people in the Chernobyl accident, some of the firefighters, who got doses in
this range, 200,000 to maybe 600,000 or higher millirems, and they died as a result of this.
This is called acute radiation poisoning.
Once you get below roughly 200,000 millirems, this doesn't happen.
People do not get acutely sick as a result of radiation exposure.
What they are, however, is at an increased risk of some time in the future developing
cancer.
Much of what's known about the effects of radiation was learned in the aftermath of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In one of the largest studies ever conducted, 50,000 Japanese bomb survivors were followed
up for 50 years to see if their cancer rates increased and whether they passed on genetic
mutations to their children.
Much to the scientists' surprise, there was no increase in inherited mutations.
Despite the science fiction films, this fear proved unfounded.
Cancer rates did increase, though, especially among those exposed to more than 10,000 millirems.
Of those 50,000 people, about 5,000 of them have developed cancer.
Based on what we know of the rest of the Japanese population, you would have expected about
4,500 of them.
So we have 5,000 cancers over 50 years where we would expect 4,500.
So we assume that those extra 500 cancers were induced by the radiation.
But surprisingly, some of the citizens living near Three Mile Island see parallels with
Hiroshima.
At the time of the accident, we left the area.
And when we got to my mother's home, my son went into the bathroom and threw up.
He had thrown up a vile green slime.
There was no other way to explain it but that.
No food, just heavy, thick mucus.
And it was the color of a commercial cleanser.
Approximately six months later, some doctors came in who dealt with the victims from Hiroshima
and Nagasaki and Japan.
I told him the story about my son, and he said, well, that's a classic case of radiation
sickness poisoning.
But Mulder is skeptical because the dose at Three Mile Island was so much lower than Hiroshima.
In the case of Three Mile Island, it makes no sense whatsoever.
We have a very good idea what the doses to the population were around Three Mile Island.
Most of the population got something in the neighborhood of 2 to 10 millirem.
To get radiation sickness, you need 200,000 millirem.
But could the authorities have lied about the amount of radiation that was released?
There is no way in a technological society you could conceal radiation exposures that
high.
A dose high enough to cause radiation sickness would, for example, have fogged common photographic
film for hundreds of miles.
Any photographer would have noticed it.
Any hospital that did x-rays would have noticed it.
Any dental studio would have noticed it.
The Environmental Protection Agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the state boards of
health all concluded that extremely small amounts of radiation were released.
Small compared to what?
Certainly compared to Hiroshima, but also compared to the radiation we get from nature.
The average American, myself included, gets about 350 millirems of radiation each year,
most of it unavoidable.
Cosmic rays shower down on us from outer space, giving us about 30 millirems per year.
If you live at higher altitudes, like Denver, you get 60 millirems.
Then there are the rocks beneath our feet.
Since the beginning of time, radioactive elements in the Earth's crust have been decaying, giving
off radiation.
As our building materials come out of the ground, they're slightly radioactive, giving
us about 10 millirems a year.
Some materials like granite give more.
New York's Grand Central Station, for example, emits hundreds of millirems per year.
We get about 50 to 80 millirems each year from medical sources like CAT scans and x-rays.
And another 30 millirems or so comes from within our bodies.
So when we eat food, a certain part of the molecules in that food, the hydrogen, the
potassium, even the oxygen, are very mildly radioactive.
So all of us and all animals and plants are mildly radioactive, and this has nothing to
do with any man-made source of radiation.
They always were and they always will be.
But there's one source larger than all these combined.
It came to light at this nuclear facility thanks to the efforts of this man, Stanley
Watrous.
A few years after the Three Mile Island accident, Watrous, an engineer, was helping bring Eastern
Pennsylvania's Limerick reactor online.
Watrous showed us what happened next.
All the alarms went off, sirens went off, red lights went off, came out on a digital
display that I was highly contaminated throughout my entire body.
So obviously that kind of set me back.
Watrous was decontaminated and went home.
The next day it happened again.
It happened for two weeks.
You again?
Yeah, same old, same old.
Come on over here.
Let's see what we got.
Okay.
Watrous didn't seem to be picking up radiation in the plant, so eventually he persuaded the
health physicists to check out his home.
They took air samples, little grab samples, which was the standard norm back in 1984.
They took these samples down to the chemistry lab and they found out that the place was
highly contaminated with background radon radiation.
Radon.
It had long been known as a danger faced by uranium miners.
It's a gas produced by decaying uranium in the soil, but no one suspected that significant
amounts built up in houses.
Ironically, Watrous had been carrying radiation from his house to the limerick plant, not
the other way around.
While few homes have as much as Watrous's, radon collects in all our basements, sticks
to all our furnace filters and air vents.
How does this source compare with what we get from a nuclear power plant?
Well, typical house in the United States, the annual dose from radon is about 200 millirem.
Compared to for the average person in the United States, the dose they get from nuclear
power is a small fraction of a millirem.
The annual dose from radon is hundreds of times bigger, probably thousands of times
bigger.
What dose would somebody get if they were living 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, at
the closest part of the boundary fence?
That's not very realistic, but that's beside the point.
They would get a couple of millirem per year.
It'd be very small compared to the background radiation.
And ironically, the area around Three Mile Island is exceptionally high in radon radiation,
four times the national average, yielding 800 millirems per year.
This fact leads nuclear physicist Bernard Cohen to a startling conclusion.
As a result, people living in that area get more radiation from radon in their home every
day than they got in total from the Three Mile Island accident.
Many Pennsylvanians, like Linda Brash, have been actively monitoring radiation from Three
Mile Island since 1979.
But have they had their own houses tested for radon?
I have not had my house tested.
And perhaps I will someday, but I don't look at it as a...
It's not a man-made thing.
Radon is part of...seeps in through...it's in the dirt, it's in the...it seeps in through
our homes.
And we've been building homes for many, many, many, many, many years.
Am I...you know, where's my thinking wrong here?
Can human cells tell the difference between a millirem of radiation from a man-made source
and one of nature's millirems?
No, there is no logic to that.
A millirem of penetrating radiation will do the same amount of damage essentially no matter
what the source of it is.
There's no logic worrying about radiation from a nuclear power plant five miles away
and not worrying about the radon in your basement.
Nuclear critics concede that a normally operating plant may not pose a major threat.
Their biggest fear is what happens if something goes wrong.
From the beginning, Hollywood exploited our dread of a nuclear apocalypse.
Films like The China Syndrome have left the impression that nuclear reactors might cause
devastation on the scale of Hiroshima.
I may be wrong, but I would say you're probably lucky to be alive.
For that matter, I think we might say the same for the rest of Southern California.
Well, first, you couldn't have an explosion like a bomb, like a nuclear explosion.
What you really have is a situation where you lose the cooling to the core and you have
the melting of the fuel.
If nuclear reactors can't blow up like atomic bombs, and no one I spoke to says otherwise,
the next worst imaginable scenario is the loss of the water that cools the core.
When Western reactors lose this water that moderates or slows the neutrons, the nuclear
reaction shuts down.
That's the good news.
The bad news is that the heat from decaying fission products can't be shut off and might
melt the fuel rods.
The worst meltdown in history happened in 1986 at Chernobyl in the Ukraine.
Critics and champions alike were appalled.
Chernobyl was a very large plant.
It had been operating long enough that it had a large inventory of radioactive materials
in it.
It was open to the atmosphere for days on fire, with plumes of material radioactive
going up into the air.
Tens of thousands of people were exposed to high levels of radiation, some of them up
to 50,000 millirems.
There's nothing deadlier than a long-lasting, highly toxic ingredient that does not challenge
your sensory perceptions, because you can't see it, smell it, taste it, or otherwise defend
yourself against it.
And you can see that around Chernobyl now.
You've got all these villages and towns that have been abandoned with the creaking doors
swinging in the wind and abandoned buildings.
Western utilities say it's unfair to condemn their industry because of what happened at
Chernobyl.
Unlike Western reactors, Chernobyl used graphite, not water, as a moderator, so the reactor
didn't shut down but ran away, setting the graphite on fire.
The resulting explosion spread radioactive fallout far and wide.
The Soviet Union, at the time they built these Chernobyl-type reactors, they simply, they're
so large that they couldn't afford to contain them.
Our reactors are much smaller, the pressurized water and the boiling water reactors, the light
water reactors are very small, and they're all contained.
They have to be contained in order to get licensed.
By contained, Reynolds means that the cores of American reactors are shielded within massive
steel and concrete domes.
Even if an accident occurred, the argument goes, the radioactive material would be confined
inside the plant.
But what about a fire?
No, they couldn't catch fire, and even if some of the fuel melted, that fuel cannot
get out of the containment into the environment.
The worst accident I can see in a Western reactor is a couple, two to five fatalities
maybe of people inside associated with the plant.
I can't see general public outside the exclusion zone.
Whether you're convinced that a Chernobyl-type accident could or couldn't happen in America,
one thing is certain, Chernobyl gave us a worst-case demonstration of just how bad a
nuclear catastrophe can be.
After Chernobyl, we don't have to rely on Hollywood to fuel our fears.
We can examine the real thing.
The accident was economically devastating.
Thousands of people had to abandon their homes and have a slightly increased risk of cancer.
Some children contracted a rare thyroid tumor, fortunately it's curable.
Despite these tragedies, some scientists argue that the evidence from Chernobyl is reassuring.
That's as bad as an accident can be in a nuclear plant, and worse than any accident in a modern
nuclear plant could possibly be.
The point is that that reactor was on fire for days and days and days, and yet the number
of identifiable deaths from it are really only a handful.
The actual death toll from Chernobyl is surprisingly low.
Thirty-one firefighters died in the accident.
So far leukemia and adult cancers have not measurably increased.
Terrible as Chernobyl was, there have been many more deadly accidents in this century,
like the Bhopal chemical plant accident in India that killed thousands.
Supporters of nuclear power complain that if the chemical industry were held to the
nuclear standard, it wouldn't survive.
Even in America, more than a thousand people have been killed in chemical plant accidents
during the past 40 years.
Nuclear executives say their safety record is much better.
In this country, no one has been injured or killed in a nuclear accident involving radiation
exposure.
No one.
But people aren't really good at assessing risk, and somehow we've decided that nuclear
power is very, very risky, is a very risky business.
A non-nuclear steam explosion at a U.S. nuclear facility killed four people in 1986.
But Howard is right.
In America, there have been no deaths or injuries from nuclear accidents in commercial power
plants.
Physicist Bernard Cohen blames the media for singling out nuclear.
The media don't pay any attention to risk analyses.
They just say this is radioactivity.
They call it deadly radioactivity.
I don't know why they call it deadly.
It's not killing hardly anybody, if anybody, where nobody talks about deadly electricity,
which although over a thousand people a year die from electrocution in the United States,
nobody talks about deadly natural gas, although I believe it's 5,000 people a year die from
asphyxiation from natural gas, things of that sort.
Have environmental groups unfairly targeted nuclear energy?
Well, you'll find actually that public citizen and other allied groups have been very active
critics of the chemical industry and the aviation industry and the coal industry.
So I don't know why you're trying to distinguish among them, we are safety watchdogs and we're
trying to improve health and safety for the American people.
And the nuclear industry's record is nothing to shout about.
But still, you're not trying to shut the chemical industry of the aviation industry down, are
you?
Um, no, we're not.
The record shows that some of these industries, coal for example, are environmentally unfriendly.
Burning coal generates air pollution, acid rain, greenhouse gases and cancer-causing
chemicals, but little protest or fear.
If you think the difference is radiation, think again.
Since coal contains radium, a coal plant actually emits much more radioactivity than a nuclear
plant.
The nuclear plant's cooling towers emit only steam, water vapor.
The health effects of coal burning are thousands of times worse than the health effects of
nuclear power, according to anybody's analysis, not my analysis necessarily, but they never
report it.
I've never seen that in print.
Experts like Cohen, who rank risks according to cold statistical danger, seem to come up
with a completely different picture than the public, which assesses risks more personally.
What Cohen is doing is called risk analysis, determining statistically how dangerous various
technologies actually are.
What ordinary people engage in is risk perception, intuitively deciding how dangerous technologies
can be.
Where do our perceptions come from?
Why do we perceive this technology to be dangerous rather than safe?
What was the source of the knowledge that you have, the ideas that you have, the impressions
that you've gotten of nuclear waste and nuclear power?
I think the very little that I know, I probably heard on the news before.
Okay.
I don't know very much.
I first up on the news and read out the paper and watch TV programs based on what could
happen in Hollywood.
Television news, newspaper, public television.
Scientists like Hank Jenkins-Smith have done extensive studies of the ways ordinary people
think about nuclear power.
Most of what we know as a population about nuclear power and nuclear stuff in general
is an amalgam of images of nuclear war.
In some cases, the potential benefits, the technologies that can be harnessed, the energy
that can be produced, but mostly images that are quite negative.
Think about popular culture, which is one of the great deliverers of information about
most concepts right now.
These bits and pieces of popular mythology feed the way that people understand facts
about these things.
Most times if you ask people, they'll say they really don't know a whole lot, but they
still have a point of reference, and that is all these sort of vague linkages to awful
events.
Huh?
It's my problem!
We're doomed!
Sector 7G is now being isolated.
It's got enormous implications.
It creates this dread association, the fear that the worst can happen.
Researchers say ordinary people use rules of thumb to measure risk.
People tend to find technologies like nuclear power especially scary because of qualities
that have nothing to do with how dangerous they are.
First, there's the dread factor, the fear of a catastrophic disaster.
Second, say scientists like psychiatrist Robert DuPont, an expert in fears and phobias, there's
the issue of who's in control.
If you feel like you're in charge, you have the feeling that you can stop the risk, you
can help yourself.
It's the difference between driving a car and being a passenger in an airplane.
When you're driving a car, you perceive your ability to stop or swerve or stay out of a
situation, whereas when you're the passenger in 14C, then you've got to depend on the air
traffic control system and the mechanics at American Airlines and the pilot and everybody
else who is going to keep you up there.
You get more afraid.
Now, of course, the paradox here is that in the modern world, when someone else is controlling
the risk, we're actually safer than when we control the risk because when someone else
is controlling the risk, there are social institutions in place to reduce the risk.
To fly an airplane, you actually have to have training.
To drive an automobile, you don't so that you're actually much safer when somebody else
is controlling the risk.
But the perception, the psychology is the opposite.
So what happens with nuclear power, it's them, it's not me, it's somebody doing it to me
that makes it unacceptable.
DuPont, who was attacked in the 1980s by anti-nuclear groups for expressing these views, identifies
two other important reasons we fear nuclear power.
It's unfamiliar.
Yet exotic technologies are much scarier than technologies we encounter every day.
Finally, there's need.
Since most Americans know that the US has ample supplies of coal and natural gas, they
have little incentive to confront their nuclear fears.
With air travel, which can't easily be replaced, people make great efforts to overcome their
anxieties.
At all four counts, nuclear power generates fear.
It's a cataclysmic accident that people are concerned about.
It's controlled by them, the utilities or the government or the scientists or wherever
it is that is perceived as being the bad guys.
It's unfamiliar to most people.
And most people feel they don't really need nuclear power, that they can get their power
from coal or oil or windmills or some other basis.
They don't really need the nuclear power.
What's true for Americans is also true for Italians, Germans and Swedes.
But it's not true everywhere.
There are countries where nuclear power is accepted, even popular.
Parts of Asia and especially in France.
France runs on nuclear power.
Seventy-five percent of French electricity is nuclear generated.
I visited the village of Sivau in southwestern France, the site of France's latest and most
modern nuclear plant, to find out what local people like Madame Schumacher thought of nuclear
energy.
I asked her if she was afraid.
This is René Barque, the village schoolteacher.
Is he afraid that the nuclear reactors half a mile away will put his students in danger?
Everyone we spoke to in the village seemed unconcerned.
From the baker to the village hairdresser.
Since the technology is the same, why are the attitudes so different?
They're not well informed at all.
They can't get the information from their government.
There's the administrative state that's very, very secretive.
And the industry and the government are almost indistinguishable, number one.
Number two, they have no right to go to court to open it up.
The courts don't have the influence in France against administrative agencies the way our
courts do.
They don't have a tort law system the way we do.
They don't have a freedom of information law the way we do.
When it comes to nuclear power, they might as well be a totalitarian society.
We're as closed on nuclear power as any Soviet Union was.
But are the French really so brainwashed, or is there another explanation?
Certainly since the early 70s, there's been little public opposition to nuclear power.
To the contrary.
Three years ago, we thought possibly it would be necessary to have a new unit.
There was a fight between several sides, not to avoid the plant, but to have it.
And there were a lot of members of parliament who came to see the minister, I want the plant.
French people like big industrial projects.
And nuclear plants are one of the most often visited plants in France.
During summer, it's a place where you go in family and you see.
More than six million French people have taken tours, like the one I took of CIVOT, which
explained in exhaustive detail how everything worked.
Unlike Nader, I thought the French knew much more about nuclear power than Americans, not
less.
But I noticed a more striking difference.
Unlike Americans, the French seemed to trust their experts.
For a long time, in the families, the good thing for a child was not to become a lawyer,
it was to become an engineer or a scientist.
French people like their engineers and their scientists.
And they are confident, they rely on them.
While French citizens have no more control over nuclear power than Americans, polls show
they trust the people who do.
That's an important difference.
But more important even than familiarity and trust, it seems to me, is the fourth attribute,
need.
The French have few energy resources.
After the 1973 oil crisis, they concluded that their future as a modern nation depended
on nuclear energy.
In France, we have no oil, no gas, no coal, no choice.
And for the French people, it was very positive to develop a national energy with nuclear
energy.
And when we built this plant, we explained much, we developed many, many presentations.
To explain to French that it was very important for France.
If fear is less in France, so is cost.
France's centralized political system allows standardization and control unimaginable in
the US.
The French selected just one American reactor model and charged one agency, ADF, to run
the system for the nation.
But America's decentralized system meant that from the start, it was a messy and expensive
free for all.
Many different designs, managed by many different utilities.
Ironically, in American hands, the energy that some dreamed would be too cheap to meter
has ended up one of the most expensive ways to generate electric power.
And what we have coming in this country is more competition in the electricity market.
And a lot of these nuclear reactors cannot compete.
Some of the existing ones will be able to compete and will keep running for a while,
but they'll reach the end of their lifespans.
Some of them will not be able to compete and will shut down well before the end of their
projected lifespans.
And building a new reactor is just a complete fantasy in this country.
What do you say about a technology that wants to persist on the public dole because it can't
meet a market test?
I don't know anybody in Wall Street and I don't know anybody in the electric utility
industry who wants to build any more nuclear plants.
Other physicists like Charles Till argue that's short-term thinking.
The exciting thing about nuclear power is its ability to handle mankind's needs in
the future.
It's not whether today in the 20 percent of electricity that it produces in this nation,
whether it can produce it for two and a half cents a kilowatt hour or four cents a kilowatt
hour where, you know, coal is three and a half cents or whatever, that isn't the argument
at all.
Fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas, says Till, may be cheaper now, but as supplies
decline that will change.
Fossil fuels also produce pollution and greenhouse gases, so that many environmental groups oppose
their use as well.
So where do we get our electricity from?
We get it from solar.
Do you want me to give you a book that shows how realistic solar is?
You've got wind power, you've got biomass, you've got photovoltaics, you've got tidal,
you've got all kinds of technologies now moving toward commercial viability.
Can the sun and the wind satisfy our energy needs?
Energy has to be produced for modern society on a huge scale.
The only way you can do that is with energy sources that have concentrated energy in them.
Coal, oil, natural gas, and the quintessential example of it is nuclear, where the energy
is so concentrated.
I mean, you have something to work with.
With solar, your main problem is gathering it.
You seem to share Till's long-term vision, from Main Street to Wall Street, nuclear energy
is perceived to be a risky proposition, and since America, for now, has ample supplies
of cheap fossil fuels, it's a risk Americans don't have to face.
That still leaves the 109 nuclear plants currently in service that produce 20% of our electricity.
Anti-nuclear groups want these plants shut down because of what may be the biggest nuclear
issue of all, nuclear waste.
On this surreal parking lot, a few hundred yards from the Prairie Island reactor near
Minneapolis sit five dry casks filled with nuclear waste.
Inside each cask are 40 intensely radioactive spent fuel assemblies that have been removed
from the core.
I don't keel over and die because nine and a half inches of stainless steel blocked the
gamma rays.
As you can see right here, right on the cask, it's about three millirems per hour.
A cross-country airline flight is going to give you about five millirems, and a chest
x-ray is in the 30 to 50 millirems.
A few feet away, the level drops off to background.
Of all the materials inside the casks, the one that probably causes the most fear is
plutonium, a substance that remains radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years.
Plutonium has attained legendary status as the most toxic substance in the world.
Plutonium is the most deadly substance known to man.
A tiny amount on the skin will kill.
The truth is less dramatic.
The radiation given off by plutonium can't penetrate human skin.
It can even be stopped by a thin sheet of paper.
While plutonium is dangerous to ingest, it's nowhere near the most toxic substance known
to man.
It is, however, a highly concentrated form of energy.
There's as much energy available in one gram of plutonium as in one ton of oil.
So outside the United States, in France, Japan, and many other countries, they don't regard
plutonium as waste.
They recycle the plutonium and unused uranium and fabricate new fuel elements.
By recycling the plutonium, they not only reduce the volume of waste, they also get
energy.
The U.S. is different.
In the 70s, because of fears that reactor plutonium might fall into the wrong hands,
the U.S. government decided not to reprocess plutonium, but to treat it as waste.
That means it's going to be around for a very long time.
When you make that decision you're not going to recycle, then no longer are you dealing
with a potential resource, but you're dealing with a waste product.
And a waste product that has a tremendous half-life.
I mean, we're talking about a product that's not going to be just around for a few hundred
years, but thousands of years.
Richard Stallings was appointed in 1993 as the federal nuclear waste negotiator.
It was his job to try to find a community willing to take the high-level waste from
nuclear power plants on a temporary basis until the government established a permanent repository.
He found it hard-going.
It was a very hard sell.
When people are terrified, they're not concerned about facts.
The perception was anything nuclear just scared people to death.
Their thought is that it's some kind of green, oozy stuff that's spewing poison, that you
get near it and you'll die within minutes or hours.
Stallings discovered that public fear of nuclear waste knows no bounds.
Nobody wants this stuff in their backyards or traveling on their roads.
The nuclear industry claims their transportation casks will survive any conceivable accident.
They've hit them with trains, dropped them from the air onto metal spikes, submerged
them underwater, and burned them for hours.
The containers survived intact.
But somehow these demonstrations don't seem to make people feel safe.
Nevertheless, the waste has to go somewhere, even if the nuclear industry shut down tomorrow.
That's one point both sides agree on.
This is, of course, the conundrum of conundrums, because while you can stop nuclear power,
what do you do with the waste that's available?
Do you keep it next to the reactor?
Do you put it in a temporary repository, or do you put it in a permanent?
The federal government wants to send all the high-level waste from all the plants to Nevada,
a state that has no nuclear power.
In Las Vegas, people are mad as hell.
Business leaders worry that the stigma will drive tourists away.
Citizens worry about the danger the waste might pose now and for thousands of years
to come.
How many deaths can we expect over the duration of this project?
We don't want to be scapegoats again.
We want to bring other people's nuclear waste into our state.
How come they can't keep it?
The proposed permanent repository is here at Yucca Mountain, some 80 miles from Las Vegas.
The Department of Energy has been tunneling for more than two years.
It's quick to say that this is just a scientific investigation to see if the site is suitable.
To dig and characterize this exploratory tunnel will cost $2 billion.
To build the repository itself may cost 10 times as much.
The repository, if it's built, will accommodate hundreds of casks of high-level waste, including
plutonium, in a labyrinth of rock tunnels.
The plan is to seal it up and leave it forever.
Yucca Mountain is a graveyard.
Governments want reassurance that the waste will be safe not only this year, but for the
tens of thousands of years it remains radioactive.
The government is not finding it easy to reassure people.
You can't find any engineer that's going to sign onto a document that this hole in the
ground is going to be safe for 10,000 years or safe for even 200 years.
That's impossible to do.
Research shows that people are even more opposed to living near a nuclear waste dump than a
nuclear reactor.
The difference isn't the risk.
It's the lack of benefit.
In the United States, of course, we don't reprocess.
We don't reuse, recycle, however you want to describe it, that nuclear waste.
What we've done is we've isolated all the bad attributes and packaged them up as nuclear
waste.
And, you know, there's not much in the way of redeeming value in there to warm people
up to it.
In France, people worry about waste as well.
A few years ago, when it discovered the strength of such attitudes, France redesigned its high-level
waste policy.
Research showed that what bothered people most was the idea of a permanent geological
site like Yucca Mountain, where waste would be abandoned.
People felt much safer with the concept of an underground laboratory, where waste is
not only carefully monitored, but where research goes forward on how to transmute it into a
safer form.
Remarkably, simply redefining the site completely changes people's attitudes toward the same
waste.
Now, if that kind of a strategy were opted for in the United States, would that seem
more attractive than a place that's primarily a disposal facility where we permanently cork
it up?
Or what's your sense about that?
What's your reaction to it, Darlene?
I think it would be a great idea if for the simple reason it would be carefully watched.
Shannon, what about you?
Oh, yeah, because it means somebody is doing something with it instead of just leaving
it on the ground and forgetting about it and waiting until something happens years down
the road.
They're working with...
The research laboratory idea actually is a high prestige kind of an entity.
It brings in top-level scientific jobs.
It creates the prospect that this dreadful stuff might actually be turned into something
useful.
Things that are seen as waste right now could be seen as the most valuable of resources
in the future.
I mean, we weren't using molybdenum much 150 years ago.
It was in the way.
Wood chips now that we use regularly as building material were a waste product not so long
ago.
I mean, as technologies change and as different uses are found or as other resources are used
up, things that are now of no value could be of tremendous value.
But U.S. policy makers don't want a laboratory.
They want a graveyard.
They're determined that Yucca Mountain will open sometime after 2010.
And essentially it says to this nation that we're as smart as we're going to get on nuclear
materials.
No one's going to get any smarter.
And the fact that there might be other things that we can do with this material was completely
lost.
And so we just put it in a hole in the ground and thought somehow we could walk away from
it and our problems would be solved.
These children are visiting a teaching reactor in Virginia, where it's possible to see a
nuclear core glowing at the bottom of a containment pool.
For them it's like a museum visit, a curiosity.
If current trends continue, by the time they're middle-aged nuclear power may be largely phased
out in the U.S., though it will almost certainly continue to thrive in France and in Asia.
Throughout history, our species has encountered and mastered powerful natural forces, balancing
promise and risk.
In this century, when we unlocked nuclear energy, we built weapons capable of destroying
the world because we thought we needed them.
We haven't needed nuclear power in America, so we enjoy the luxury of investing it with
our nuclear fears.
Civilizations run on energy.
What will our descendants make of our decision to reject this awesome source?
Will they applaud us for having the courage to say no?
Or will they condemn us for surrendering to our fears?
So what do you think about nuclear power?
Join in the discussion at Frontline's nuclear website at www.pbs.org.
Check out Hollywood's radiation nightmares and dig deeper, take the nuclear phobia survey,
tour the best of the nuclear web, and much more at www.pbs.org.
And let us know what you thought about tonight's program by fax at 617-254-0243, by email frontline
at pbs.org, or by the U.S. Mail.
Next time on Frontline...
The story of a warrior breed.
The culture they thrive in.
And what happens when it clashes with the sexual politics of the 90s?
The Navy Blues, a Frontline investigation.
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