Gronlund, et al., [amid their usual pessimism and age-old-over reaction], the authors of the Union of Concerned Scientists conclude that global warming demands a profound transformation in the ways we generate and consume energy. Because nuclear power results in few global warming emissions, an increase in nuclear power could help reduce global warming—but it could also increase the threats to human safety and security. The risks include a massive release of radiation due to a power plant meltdown or terrorist attack, and the death of hundreds of thousands due to the detonation of a nuclear weapon made with materials obtained from a civilian nuclear power system. [Approach Check: This group continues to mix weapons and civil use for pandering to their base?]. Minimizing these risks is simply pragmatic: nothing will affect the public acceptability of nuclear power as much as a serious nuclear accident, a terrorist strike on a reactor or spent fuel pool, or the terrorist detonation of a nuclear weapon made from stolen nuclear reactor materials.[Another Fact Check: They are clearly fear pandering to the public making untrue statements, providing misinformation, and generally distributing the old anti-nuclear BS].
Their report finds that:
1. The United States has strong nuclear power safety standards, but serious safety problems continue to arise at U.S. nuclear power plants because the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is not adequately enforcing the existing standards. The NRC’s poor safety culture is the biggest barrier to consistently effective oversight, and Congress should require the NRC to bring in managers from outside the agency to rectify this problem.
2. While the United States has one of the world’s most well-developed regulatory systems for protection of nuclear facilities against sabotage and attack, current security standards are inadequate to defend against credible threats. Congress should give the responsibility for identifying credible threats and ensuring that security is adequate to the Department of Homeland Security rather than the NRC.
3. The extent to which an expansion of nuclear power increases the risk that more nations or terrorists will acquire nuclear weapons depends largely on whether reprocessing is included in the fuel cycle, and whether uranium enrichment comes under effective international control. A global prohibition on reprocessing, and international ownership of all enrichment facilities, would greatly reduce these risks. The United States should reinstate a ban on reprocessing U.S. spent fuel and take the lead in forging an indefinite global moratorium on reprocessing. The administration should also pursue a regime to place all uranium enrichment facilities under international control.
4. Over the next 50 years, interim storage of spent fuel in dry casks is economically viable and secure, if hardened against attack. In the longer term, a geologic repository would provide the stability needed to isolate the spent fuel from the environment. It is critical to identify and overcome technical and political barriers to licensing a permanent repository, and the Department of Energy should identify and begin to characterize potential sites other than Yucca Mountain.
5. Of all the new reactor designs being seriously considered for deployment in the United States, only one—the Evolutionary Power Reactor—appears to have the potential to be significantly safer and more secure than today’s reactors. To eliminate any financial incentives for reactor vendors to reduce safety margins, and to make safer reactors
competitive in the United States, the NRC should require new U.S. reactors to be significantly safer than current reactors.
6. The proposed Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) plan offers no waste disposal benefits and would increase the risks of nuclear proliferation and terrorism. It should be dropped.
Since its founding in 1969, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has worked to make nuclear power safer and more secure. We have long sought to minimize the risk that nations and terrorists would acquire nuclear weapons materials from nuclear power facilities. This report shows that nuclear power continues to pose serious risks that are unique among the energy options being considered for reducing global warming emissions. The future risks of nuclear energy will depend in large part on whether governments, industry, and international bodies undertake a serious effort to address these risks—including the steps outlined here—before plunging headlong into a rapid expansion of nuclear energy worldwide. In particular, the risks will increase—perhaps substantially—if reprocessing becomes part of the fuel cycle in the United States and
expands worldwide.
The risks posed by climate change may turn out to be so grave that the United States and the world cannot afford to rule out nuclear power as a major contributor to addressing global warming. However, it may also turn out that nuclear power cannot be deployed worldwide on the scale needed to make a significant dent in emissions without resulting in unacceptably high safety and security risks [What safety and security risks...this is an example of unfounded claims and misinformation]. Resolving these questions is beyond the scope of this report, but the information provided here will help inform a necessary discussion of the risks of various energy technologies that can address global warming, [all of which have already been discounted and the group is clearly asleep at the wheel and out of date. Time to retire the Union of Concerned Scientists, the name of which is also a misnomer in any event].
[Post script by I2M Web Portal Editors: Notice how the group intermingles civil nuclear power issues with military issues. The group was formed and still seems to be stuck in the "Ban the Bomb" thinking of years past and present, but related now also to their pandering fear regarding civil nuclear power, which has a proven safety record (relative to coal, oil and gas and even renewables).]
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