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Steven Barrowes, Ph.D.
Nuclear Engineer
Continued...
Verdoia: What I'd like you to do is give me that statement
of relative impact.
Dr. Barrowes: Okay, the relative impact, half of our electricity
in this country comes from coal fired power plants. And that's
estimated to kill thirty thousand U.S. citizens each year. In
the nuclear industry, there's nobody killed in this country from
the nuclear industry yet. And the power plants that generate electricity
this way, as, a zero. Now you, course in constructing they might
have some concrete workers or something, in every form of construction
there's a chance of accidents, but from the radiation of the U.S.
nuclear power industry, it's a zero. No deaths yet.
Verdoia: But there are those images of Cherynobl. Images
of Three Mile Island that weigh on the American conscience and,
and opponents point to that and say therein lies the danger.
Dr. Barrowes: Three Mile Island was our worst nuclear accident
and it damaged the core. That reactor had to be shut down because
it got hot enough to warp the fuel rods, and therefore they couldn't
be operated in a proper manner. You can't just go in there with
a wrench and start fixing things. It's much too radioactive to
get in there, so they just had to shut that one down. That's our
worst accident, but nobody died from that. In Chernobyl it was
built without the safety features that are necessary and required
in all U.S. nuclear plants. It was built like the Titanic which
had not enough lifeboats and not enough care to the kind of steel
they built the hull from. With the Titanic they just had too much
confidence and not enough carefulness in their construction. And
then the same thing happened in operation of Chernobyl. The operator
had no nuclear training and he wanted to do an experiment on the
turbine and generator, which he had to do at low power levels
which was were the Chernobyl type of plant is most unstable. His
staff said, "Don't do it," but he was the boss. He was
the operator. He did it anyway and we had an explosion. It was
just like the captain of Titanic saying, "Full speed ahead,
I don't care about a few icebergs in the shipping channels."
It's very parallel to the Titanic.
Verdoia: One thing that I'm intrigued by is the Department
of Energy having a mandate created by Congress by 1998 to have
a national program in place to accept the responsibility and begin
the isolation or the relocation of waste materials into one centralized
location. The federal government would take care and would begin
the process. We're three years passed that.
Dr. Barrowes: And it will be 2010 at least before that is
operational. That's their latest estimate of their time. It's
kind of a mixed blessing, in a way. I think the environmentalists
have done their best to slow that project down and make it late.
Although they've raised some interesting scientific issues that
have to be thoroughly explored, since they say we have to store
that fuel for ten thousand years, I think by the time we actually
get operational we won't be looking at ten thousand years storage,
we'll be looking at three hundred year storage. By that time,
I think, we'll be reprocessing the spent fuel, separating the
uranium, plutonium and other actinides, the heavies, which can
be used as fuel in a new reactor, intergo fast reactor. The actual
wastes, which are fission products, would be melted into glass
and would become safe after only 300 years. They'd be as safe
as the original uranium or out in the desert. You could pick them
up, look at them and throw them away it wouldn't really be a serious
hazard to do that. So they only have to be stored 300 years. All
these questions with how do you have a 10,000 year guaranteed
safe storage? That's difficult, but 300 years is really much easier.
Verdoia: So I take it you are not concerned about the
notion of storing it above ground, on concrete pads for 40 years.
Dr. Barrowes: No that's not a problem. It is so much easier
and safer to engineer a safe storage than disposing the nerve
gas out in the desert. That is a complicated and difficult operation.
It has to be done because it's safer to incinerate it then let
it sit there and start leaking. It has to be done and it's being
done rather well but that's much more difficult, maybe a hundred
times more difficult to engineer a safe operation then this storage
of spent fuel in the desert.
Verdoia: As you and I meet on this day in February, the
Utah State Legislature is in session. And there is a sense of
momentum that laws will be passed, should be passed that will
make it very, very difficult, if not cost prohibitive for people
to interact and engage in business activities with entities dealing
with high level radioactive waste. How do you feel about that?
Dr. Barrowes: I think those laws are ridiculous, to put it
in one word. We have industries in this country like tobacco and
alcohol, the automobile industry, which kill tens of thousands
of people a year. Well, tobacco, 450,000 a year and these are
legal industries and their executive officers are not carted off
to jail. We have storage of spent nuclear fuel, which will most
likely kill nobody over the 40 year span, and these bills threaten
with felony convictions if you do business with this Goshute project.
That is something that is unheard of. I think if they pass those
bills it will be a total embarrassment to the state of Utah. I
just hope they have enough sense to realize that. I'll be down
there in a few minutes, talking to them. I already have talked
to most of the Senators in the Senator Rules Committee to ask
them to sit on that and let it die.
Verdoia: It seems to me that there's a great number of
Utahns out there in the middle that really don't understand this
and are being made to fear radiation, but they really don't understand
what is going on. If you could tell them one thing, the average
person, the person who's not an environmental activist, who is
undecided on this, if you could tell them one thing to help them
keep in mind, what would it be?
Dr. Barrowes: Well, perhaps that this spent nuclear fuel inside
of a 138-ton concrete cocoon is quite safe to eat your lunch by.
It's not going to hurt anybody. You could go out there in the
middle of all this stored fuel, have your picnic in there and
your radiation badge would still show that you had not exceeded
your limit for the day. You'd be getting somewhere close to it
if your lunch was a long lunch, but you could do that. And you
could work there and you would not suffer as much radiation exposure
as you would as a stewardess on the airlines. They get more radiation
exposure then the average nuclear plant worker and more than these
people who worked on this storage site. So if you're really so
worried about a little radiation exposure, don't fly.
Verdoia: How do you overcome human fear? Or those people
who prey on human fear?
Dr. Barrowes: Well, that is the definition of demagoguery,
playing on human fears for political advantage. The only real
antidote for it is to give them information that helps them to
be comfortable with the facts.
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