Gregg Easterbrook

At the malfunctioning Japanese atomic reactor, attention has shifted from the cores to the spent-fuel pools as the real radiation threat — the spent-fuel pools contain far more uranium than the reactor cores. Guess where most spent-fuel rods are stored in the United States? In pools at atomic power stations: exactly the situation at the Fukushima power plant in Japan.

There are much safer alternatives. One is “dry cask” storage of atomic waste, which does not require constant circulation of cooling water. Failure of cooling water circulation caused both the Three Mile Island and Fukushima accidents.

Hardly any of the spent fuel at Fukushima has been transferred to dry casks — only about five percent. That’s why the current emergency is extreme. Some atomic waste in the United States has been transferred to dry casks — your columnist once visited such an installation. Most has not, because dry casks are more expensive than wet pools and incredibly, U.S regulations do not mandate this safety step.

There is an even better idea than dry casks — the Yucca Mountain storage area in Nevada, designed specifically for spent fuel rods. Since 1992, the federal government has planned to move old fuel rods thousands of feet below the Nevada desert. Some $10 billion has been spent building the tunnels and elevators of the Yucca Mountain facility. The National Academy of Sciences has reviewed the design. A 2006 Senate report called Yucca Mountain “the most studied real estate on the planet.” Much of the spent fuel rods in the United States could already be far underground beneath Yucca Mountain, eliminating not just a Fukushima-style risk but all risks posed by this material.

Except that immediately after taking office in 2009, President Barack Obama cancelled the Yucca Mountain project. Environmentalists hate deep storage, because by solving the atomic-waste problem, this would eliminate an argument against nuclear power. With pollution-free electricity from the atom increasingly attractive because of climate change, environmental orthodoxy wants the spent-rods problem to continue indefinitely.

Obama also cancelled Yucca Mountain as a favor to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who had to stand for reelection in 2010. Many Nevada voters oppose Yucca Mountain — they want atomic wastes stored somewhere else. Voters in all states say “not in my backyard” to spent reactor fuel rods (and to practically everything else). But old reactor rods must go into someone’s backyard. The alternative is leaving them in everyone’s backyard, by leaving them at power plants.

Of course politics is always a factor in Washington decisions. But for President Obama to cancel a badly needed safety facility in order to appease an interest group, and to help reelect a senator who supports his agenda, was placing Obama’s personal interests ahead of the national interest. That was disgraceful.

Since not many people follow power-production issues, the president’s 2009 decision went unnoticed outside of Nevada. Now, with a nuclear emergency in Japan, the foolishness of cancelling Yucca Mountain should become a high-profile matter. Opening this facility would allow the systematic elimination of most risk posed by spent fuel rods at U.S. power plants. And there’s no serious argument (there are plenty of nutty arguments) that moving old fuel rods from leaky pools at reactor facilities, to deep underground in a stable geologic formation, won’t improve public safety without environmental risk.

Consider this quote: “If a relatively simple dry-cask fuel-rods storage system 200 feet from a parking lot can render nuclear wastes nearly harmless, how can it be that burying the same wastes deep below a remote desert is an astonish risk to the biosphere?” Your columnist wrote those words 16 years ago, in my book on environmental policy, A Moment on the Earth. I never would have guessed that 16 years later the country would still be avoiding the same problem.

The emergency at Fukushima is a warning to the United States — stop playing politics with old atomic materials, open the Yucca Mountain facility and eliminate public-health risk from spent fuel rods.

Note 1: For “dry cask” storage, spent fuel rods first are cooled in water for about a year, then surrounded by inert gases and encased in steel. Wrapping your arms around a dry cask would be a bad idea. At about 200 feet, Geiger counters show no radiation.

Note 2: Renee Schoff of McClatchy News Service reports that many utilities continue to use dangerous wet-pool storage of old fuel rods simply because federal regulations don’t require them to build safer dry casks.

Note 3: Here is one of the goofiest federal documents of all time, an Environmental Protection Agency forecast of what will happen to Yucca Mountain over the next million years. We can’t reliably predict what will happen next week.

Photos, top to bottom: Plutonium-uranium mixed oxide (MOX) fuel rods are placed in a storage pool at the No. 3 reactor of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima Prefecture, northern Japan, in this picture taken August 21, 2010. REUTERS/Kyodo; The U.S. Energy Department approved on January 10, 2001 the remote Nevada site of Yucca Mountain as the final resting place for the nation’s vast amounts of radioactive waste, a plan immediately opposed by the Senate’s top two Democrats. A repository would be built under the mountain, 90 miles from Las Vegas, and would store 70,000 tons of radioactive materials from the nation’s nuclear power plants for about 10,000 years. REUTERS/Dept Of Energy-Handout RC/HB

The situation in Japan is horrific — but because of the earthquake and tsunami, not because of the malfunctioning atomic reactor station. The earthquake and its awful aftermath killed at least thousands of people, perhaps tens of thousands. That is an unspeakable tragedy. The damaged reactors at Fukushima haven’t killed anyone, and while posing a clear danger, especially to workers heroically fighting the malfunction, the odds are that any harm to public health will be minor, if public health is harmed at all.

Yet in the United States and European Union, what’s happening at the power plant is receiving more attention, and generating more anxiety, than thousands of innocents crushed or drowned.

Japan is the sole place nuclear weapons have been used: to see the Japanese suffer, again, from fear of the atom is heartrending. But the reaction to the power plant in Japan shows lack of perspective. Today’s Washington Post front page proclaims, in large type, a “FULL- BLOWN NUCLEAR CATASTROPHE.” The earthquake and tsunami were catastrophes; the power plant leaks may cause little harm, let alone represent a “catastrophe.”

And in all the words and pictures being devoted to the Fukushima reactors, the most important concern raised is being missed. But first consider:

Atomic reactors are not particularly dangerous.
They cannot cause a nuclear blast — this is a common misconception. They can leak radiation, but this has happened only a couple times, and except at Chernobyl, radiation leaks from power reactors have had only slight impact on public health.

The sort of radiation you would experience standing close to an exposed atomic reactor is deadly, which is why being a reactor-station worker is a perilous occupation. But the kind of radiation that extends more than a few hundred yards away is less dangerous than a medical X-ray. Everyone’s terrified of the word “radiation.” Most types of radiation — you are being exposed to several forms right now, from the sun, the stars, radio broadcasting and some types of rocks — have mild if any health consequences.

The worst U.S. atomic accident, at Three Mile Island in 1979, was spooky and scary but caused no public health harm. Many studies, including this one from the Columbia University School of Public Health, found a slight increase in cancers near Three Mile Island in the years afterward, but also found radiation “did not account for the observed increase.” The Columbia researchers theorized that people who lived  near Three Mile Island went to doctors to get checked, and physicians found cancers that were already incipient before the accident.

Studies found people who lived near Three Mile Island experienced stress and anxiety, and stress is bad for you. But it’s nothing like the panic-in-the-streets threat being suggested by coverage of the Japan reactors. Here, the Washington Post details the relatively mild nature of most forms of radiation from power generation, and recounts studies showing fear is a greater hazard than cancer. This story appeared on page 9.

Atomic power causes significantly less harm than fossil fuel.
In 2010, 11 people were killed in the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling explosion while 29 people died in a coal mine in West Virginia. Nothing so bad has ever happened at an atomic power plant in the United States or European Union. Annually, coal mining and oil refining accidents kill several hundred people: annual worker deaths at atomic power plants, and in uranium mining, are much lower. Fossil fuel generates greenhouse gases that are causing climate change: atomic power production is just shy of zero-emission for greenhouse gases. Smog from coal burning in the developing world causes respiratory diseases and tens of thousands of premature deaths each year: no similar problem is associated with atomic power.

This morning, Reuters said the Fukushima situation is “the world’s most serious nuclear accident since the Chernobyl meltdown in Ukraine in 1986”. That statement surely is true, but think what it means — a quarter century of atomic power did no harm at all, and now the major problem in Japan may be resolved with only minor public harm. In the same 25 years, oil and coal use worldwide have killed many thousands of people while triggering global warming.

If the Japan accident increases political opposition to nuclear power, climate change will get worse.
So if you don’t like nuclear power, be careful what you wish for.

But won’t the radiation come after us?
Greenhouse gases are invisible: a  reactor station venting smoke is a cinematic image. That you can take dramatic pictures of one, but cannot photograph the other, causes many to obsess about atomic power while shrugging about greenhouse gases.

Science illiteracy — of which the media, not just voters, may be guilty — causes many to fear that clouds of deadly radiation will drift from Japan around the world. There is a tiny chance this could occur, if the elaborate “containment” structure at Fukushima should fail. (Chernobyl had no containment structure, which is why Chernobyl was a true catastrophe.) But the odds anyone outside Japan ever will be harmed by the reactor malfunction there are far lower than the odds you will be killed in a car crash today — and you’re not afraid to get into your car.

And now the issue everyone’s missing:

Antiquated reactors like Fukushima should be replaced with new nuclear designs.
The Japanese station uses a half-century-old engineering concept called “boiling water” reactors. The devices are obsolete plumber’s nightmares: they need to be torn down and replaced with modern reactors. Broadly across the world, old reactors designed in the 1950s and 1960s, when far less was known about controlling atomic power, need to be taken out of service and replaced with modern designs that do not have the problems experienced at Fukushima.

All 104 nuclear power reactors in use in the United States are 30 or more years old, based on obsolete engineering. They need to be demolished and replaced with improved designs. Modern reactors require fewer moving parts than reactors of the 1950s and 1960s, and employ a new idea, “passive” safety. Passive safety means failures are not emergencies — if the cooling pumps fail, as happened at Fukushima, the atomic reaction simply stops. Hit by the same earthquake, a modern reactor would not have gone haywire.

Yet political opposition to construction of new atomic power plants is preventing the spread of improved modern reactors. Yesterday, Germany and Switzerland said they would postpone plans to tear down obsolete reactors and replace them with modern designs. Attempts in the U.S. to obtain political permission to demolish obsolete reactors, in favor of new systems, are likely to be set back.

This is exactly the wrong conclusion. If the Japan accidents produce a new wave of opposition to new reactor construction, the result will be to lock into place a profusion of obsolete reactors with antiquated engineering. Japan should have replaced the Fukushima reactors with a modern station years ago. Will other nations refuse to act, and wait till the next obsolete reactor fails?

Photos: Top; A family photograph is half buried in the mud in Rikuzentakata after it was a destroyed by an 8.9 magnitude earthquake and tsunami, in Iwate prefecture, northeast Japan March 13, 2011. REUTERS/Lee Jae-Won; Bottom; A man looks at the damage caused by the earthquake and tsunami in Ofunato town, in Iwate Prefecture March 13, 2011. State broadcaster NHK said more than 10,000 people may have been killed as the wall of water hit, reducing whole towns to rubble. REUTERS/KYODO

An Asian nation with a roaring economy will eclipse the United States … America has entered a cycle of decline, while the sun is rising in the East … soon all our products will be made overseas and America will falter … doom is at hand.

The above paragraph does not describe Monday’s news about the expansion of the Chinese economy — this is what opinion-makers were saying about Japan in the 1980s. And how’d that work out for you, Tokyo?

“Experts,” the New York Times intoned on Monday, are impressed by “China’s clout” and believe “China will pass the U.S. as the world’s biggest economy as early as 2030.” If experts think this, then it’s certain not to happen.

Yet the sentiment is widespread. This recent Pew Research Center poll found that a plurality of Americans — 44 percent — think China already is the world’s number one economic power, while just 27 percent of Americans think the United States still anchors the global economy.

It is wise therefore to remember what was said about Japan in the 1980s. Japan’s GDP growth was rapid, Japanese investors were snapping up New York City real estate, Sony just bought CBS Records. Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry was whispered about as possessing near-supernatural prowess. Commentators said only “industrial policy” – direct government control of business decision-making – could save America from becoming a vassal to Tokyo’s super-ultra-unstoppable economy.

The epitome of this thinking was a 1980 book called “Japan As Number One,” by Ezra Vogel of Harvard, which became a bestseller in Japan and sold well in the United States, too. “It is a matter of urgent national interest for Americans to confront Japanese successes,” Vogel warned, before Japan takes control of the global economy. As Meredith Woo of the University of Virginia has written of the early-1980s U.S. mindset reflected by this book, “Japan seemed superior to America in every way.”

You know the rest: the Japanese economy stagnated in the 1990s while the U.S. economy roared, Japan replaced Turkey as the “sick man” of major nations, the Japanese experienced a real-estate crash, low growth, deflation – and MITI was folded in 2001, after compiling a track record of one bad decision after another.

But historical perspective isn’t the U.S. long suit. Here we are thinking about China what we once thought about Japan. There are good things to be said for Chinese political, cultural and economic trends. But overall, China is a chaotic nation with a weak social fabric, perilously poised on the assumption of rapid economic growth. China has far more potential for major social problems than the United States.

As for those experts who think China will pass the United States for number one economy in just 20 years?
This year China is on track for a $5.2 trillion GDP, very impressive compared to where China was economically just a generation ago — but still staring at taillights of the United States, whose GDP should finish the year at around $15 trillion. Even if China’s annualized growth stabilizes at 6 percent — and most nations would be quite happy with that level — it will take China until about 2030 to match America’s $15 trillion GDP.

But the United States won’t be sitting still. If U.S. growth is 3 percent, half of China’s, in 2030 the American GDP will be about $27 trillion, comfortably ahead. If the United States sustains half the growth rate of China indefinitely, China’s GDP will not pass America’s for several generations.

China might end up number one — or become Japan: the Sequel. China’s national economic policy of mercantilism, coupled to its social policy of attempting to discourage individualism, seem awfully similar to what backfired for Japan.

For more than a century, Westerners, and especially Americans, have experienced some form of yellow-peril fear. Exaggerating the shadow of Japan was a manifestation of such fear in the 1980s, and exaggerating the shadow of China is a manifestation today. I’ll take a “buy and hold” attitude to stock in the United States, thanks.

For points that didn’t quite make the main column, click here.