Nuclear Monitor #920

Laura Tanguay and M. V. Ramana

Decades of experience with nuclear power shows that putative climate benefits of nuclear energy do not justify the significant social, cultural, and environmental costs it imposes.^[1] Nevertheless, the nuclear industry has utilized the acceleration of climate change to promote atomic power. More recent studies have demonstrated that the financial costs and long timelines associated with nuclear energy render the technology an infeasible option to deal with climate change,^[2] especially in view of the warnings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that global greenhouse gas emissions have to be drastically reduced in the next few years and decades.

Over the same period as the multiple facets of the climate crisis have become more apparent, there has been a parallel growth in the recognition of the importance of incorporating considerations of environmental justice in evaluating possible ways to deal with climate change. The term environmental justice dates back to social movements of the 1980’s in the United States, in particular to movements opposing the disposal of toxic waste materials in mainly African-American, underprivileged neighbourhoods.^[3] Since then, the concept has been applied widely, expanding to encompass similar disproportionate impacts on disempowered communities resulting from land-use propositions and energy infrastructures, resulting in the concepts of energy justice and climate justice becoming more prominent.

Producing nuclear power necessarily imposes environmental injustices, in large part due to the radioactive nature of the waste materials produced at each step of the nuclear fuel chain. Historically, these injustices have disproportionately impacted disempowered communities. Whether it is during routine operation or in the event of an accident, the communities that carry the main burdens of nuclear power are “geographically remote, economically marginal, politically powerless”.^[4] Despite lip service to avoid such practices, current policy makers continue to target such communities.

An example of such targeting exists in Canada, where both authors reside. In the province of Ontario, Canadian Nuclear Laboratories wants to build what it calls a “near-surface disposal facility” to bury low level radioactive waste. The chosen site is located on the unceded lands of the Algonquin peoples, close to the Ottawa River. Despite substantial opposition from the majority of the Algonquin nations, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission approved the proposal in January 2024.^[5]

Although the Canadian government talks about reconciliation, and is a signatory to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP), the opposition of the site from the vast majority of Algonquin communities was not deemed important enough to relocate the project. Nor is it in line with UNDRIP: Article 29(2) of the declaration states that no storage or disposal of hazardous materials shall take place in the lands or territories of indigenous peoples without their free, prior and informed consent.^[6]  Ten out of eleven Algonquin communities whose unceded territory the proposed site is located on did not provide their consent for the “near-surface disposal facility” to be built there. This is just one example of how the costs and risks of nuclear power disproportionately affect economically and politically marginalized communities. In addition to such distributive iniquities, the nuclear industry has historically not even recognized some of these impacts, and disenfranchised and excluded communities from speaking up about their experiences. A unique feature of nuclear power is the long-lived nature of the hazard from radioactive wastes, including some substances that have not been present on the Earth prior to the dawn of the nuclear age in 1945. This contributes to intergenerational injustice, as future generations of human beings will be exposed to risks from nuclear power plants that will offer no benefits to them. Considering the environmental injustices associated with nuclear power—historically, currently, and those projected for the future—it cannot be seen as part of a responsible or sustainable clean energy system.

Nuclear power FUEL Chain

Producing nuclear energy requires a long chain of processes, both before a nuclear reactor actually generates electricity and well after the reactor has stopped operating. This chain of processes produces multiple streams of radioactive waste materials, which is illustrated in Figure 1 for the case of France. These waste streams range in the concentrations of radioactive materials contained in them, from very low values in Very Low Level Waste (VLLW) all the way to extremely large values in High Level Waste (HLW).

The chain starts with mining uranium. Uranium, being radioactive, is never found in isolation but alongside many other radioactive elements that are produced when uranium decays. Examples include radium-226, polonium-210, and, especially, radon-222 (a gas) and its decay products (“daughters”).

In the next step of the chain, the mined ore is chemically processed to separate the uranium from other parts of the ore. This process creates large quantities of wastes, usually called mill tailings, because the typical amount of uranium in the ore is quite low. These mail tailings are often contaminated with toxic heavy metals, such as molybdenum, arsenic and vanadium, and with radioactive materials, principally thorium-230 and radium-226.

An example of such a toxic legacy is described in Leanne Leddy’s Serpent River Resurgence: Confronting Uranium Mining at Elliot Lake. During the Cold War uranium boom, the nuclear industry established twelve uranium mines in Anishinaabe territory and the settler town of Elliot Lake in Northern Ontario. Although the last uranium mines closed in the 1990s, Serpent River First Nation continues to have to deal with the mill tailings that require perpetual monitoring, and the legacy of a sulphuric acid plant that processed uranium from these mines.

Much of the uranium that has been mined around the world has come from areas occupied by Indigenous peoples, including in Australia, in Canada, in India, and in the United States.^[7] Indigenous peoples have suffered incalculable health consequences as a result of these activities, for example, the Navajo nation in the United States.^[8]

The process has also been related to what scholars have termed “radioactive colonialism”,^[9] or “nuclear colonialism”,^[10] which Daniel Endres has described as “a system of domination through which governments and corporations target indigenous peoples and their lands to maintain the nuclear production process”.^[11]

All of this uranium eventually goes into nuclear power plants in the form of fuel rods loaded into the core of the reactors. Once the fuel has produced the amount of energy that can be economically extracted, the radioactive spent fuel is stored in pools of water for cooling. If all goes according to plans, this would be followed by these materials being buried in a storage facility of some kind.

Even if these wastes are stored in geological repositories, the proposed management method that is currently most widely accepted, there is no way of knowing whether they will prevent radioactive materials leaking out into the water and earth over the epochal time periods for which they will remain hazardous.^[12]

But not all of the radioactive materials produced in a nuclear reactor goes into a repository. The nuclear fission process also produces gaseous and liquid elements that are released into the environment. Such liquid and gaseous wastes include radioactive materials such as tritium,^[13] a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, and noble gases like Argon-41.

Some countries like France do not store the irradiated spent fuel from reactors as such. Instead, they chemically process this spent fuel and extract plutonium.^[14] This plutonium is to be used to fuel other reactors, but there is also the danger that it can be used to make nuclear weapons.

Reprocessing also has a major impact on the problem of dealing with radioactive waste. The chemical process used results in multiple radionuclides being extracted from the solid spent fuel and added to liquid and gaseous waste streams. Because of the huge volumes of these waste streams, they are often released into the atmosphere or water bodies like oceans and rivers.^[15]

Dealing with all of these wastes is problematic because they are radioactive. Exposure to radiation is hazardous to health, even at low levels.^[16] Therefore, when people come into contact with these wastes, they are at higher risk of developing cancers and a range of other health effects. A particular complication is that some of these radioactive substances have extremely long half-lives, and remain hazardous for hundreds of thousands of years.

All of these environmental impacts are made worse by the inherent risk of severe accidents associated with nuclear facilities. Such accidents could result in releases of radioactive materials into the biosphere, as exemplified by Chernobyl and Fukushima, as well as a host of others that came close to such an outcome.^[17] Because of the inherent technical characteristics of nuclear power plants first clarified by sociologist Charles Perrow,^[18] it is impossible to predict in advance what kind of accident sequences could occur. All nuclear plants, small and large, can undergo accidents, which could result in widespread radioactive contamination.

Conclusion

From its inception, nuclear power has been critiqued extensively, not only on techno-economic grounds but also regarding the manifold social and environmental injustices this technology is prone to bring about. None of the injustices sketched above should be surprising. The nuclear enterprise is firmly anchored within a growth-oriented, techno-economic paradigm, in which profits are privatized and costs and risks are socialized. Those who promote nuclear power as the answer to the pressing challenges of climate change are often those who disproportionately benefit from such a system.^[19] For the rest of us, this history of injustices and the inevitability of more of the same if nuclear power were to expand globally should be a strong reason to reject this option as a way to deal with climate change.

[1] Brice Smith, Insurmountable Risks: The Dangers of Using Nuclear Power to Combat Global Climate Change (Takoma Park, MD: IEER Press, 2006); Natalie Kopytko and John Perkins, “Climate Change, Nuclear Power, and the Adaptation–Mitigation Dilemma,” Energy Policy 39, no. 1 (January 2011): 318–33, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2010.09.046; M. V. Ramana, Nuclear Is Not the Solution: The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change (London: Verso Books, 2024).

[2] Amory B. Lovins, “Does Nuclear Power Slow Or Speed Climate Change?,” Forbes, November 18, 2019, sec. Energy, https://www.forbes.com/sites/amorylovins/2019/11/18/does-nuclear-power-slow-or-speed-climate-change/.

[3] Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990); Robert Doyle Bullard, Unequal Protection: Environmental Justice and Communities of Color (Sierra Club Books, 1994).

[4] Jinyoung Park and Benjamin K. Sovacool, “The Contested Politics of the Asian Atom: Peripheralisation and Nuclear Power in South Korea and Japan,” Environmental Politics 27, no. 4 (July 4, 2018): 686, https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2018.1439436.

[5] Laura Tanguay, “Contentious Nuclear Waste Site Approved despite First Nations’ Opposition,” The Hill Times, February 12, 2024, https://www.hilltimes.com/story/2024/02/12/contentious-nuclear-waste-site-approved-despite-first-nations-opposition/410758/.

[6] United Nations, “UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,” OHCHR, 2008, https://www.ohchr.org/en/indigenous-peoples/un-declaration-rights-indigenous-peoples.

[7] Valerie Kuletz, The Tainted Desert: Environmental Ruin in the American West (New York: Routledge, 1998); Peter H. Eichstaedt, If You Poison Us: Uranium and Native Americans (Santa Fe, N.M.: Red Crane Books, 1994); Peter van Wyck, The Highway of the Atom (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010); Jim Green, “Radioactive Waste and the Nuclear War on Australia’s Aboriginal People,” The Ecologist, July 1, 2016, http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2987853/radioactive_ waste_and_the_nuclear_war_on_australias_aboriginal_people.html; Prerna Gupta, “Reason and Risk: Challenging the Expert and Public Divide in the Risk Debates on Uranium Mining in India,” in Making the Unseen Visible: Science and the Contested Histories of Radiation Exposure, ed. Jacob Darwin Hamblin and Linda M. Richards (Corvallis, USA: Oregon State University Press, 2023).

[8] Doug Brugge, Timothy Benally, and Esther Yazzie-Lewis, eds., The Navajo People and Uranium Mining (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007).

[9] Winona LaDuke and Ward Churchill, “Native America: The Political Economy of Radioactive Colonialism,” The Journal of Ethnic Studies 13, no. 3 (Fall 1985): 107–32.

[10] Kuletz, The Tainted Desert.

[11] Danielle Endres, “The Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism: Rhetorical Exclusion of American Indian Arguments in the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Siting Decision,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (March 1, 2009): 40, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420802632103.

[12] M. V. Ramana, “Technical and Social Problems of Nuclear Waste,” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Energy and Environment 7, no. 4 (August 2018): e289, https://doi.org/10.1002/wene.289.

[13] Arjun Makhijani, Exploring Tritium Dangers (Washington, D. C.: Politics & Prose, 2023).

[14] “Plutonium Separation in Nuclear Power Programs: Status, Problems, and Prospects of Civilian Reprocessing Around the World” (Princeton: International Panel on Fissile Materials, 2015), http://fissilematerials.org/library/rr14.pdf.

[15] NRPA, “Discharges of Radioactive Waste from the British Reprocessing Plant near Sellafield” (Nowegian Radiation Protection Authority, 2002); “Plutonium Separation in Nuclear Power Programs: Status, Problems, and Prospects of Civilian Reprocessing Around the World.”

[16] Jan Beyea, “The Scientific Jigsaw Puzzle: Fitting the Pieces of the Low-Level Radiation Debate,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 68, no. 3 (2012): 13–28; National Research Council, Health Risks from Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation : BEIR VII, Phase 2 (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2006), http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip066/2006000279.html.

[17] Kate Brown, Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019); David Lochbaum et al., Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster (New York: New Press, 2014); Georgui Kastchiev et al., “Residual Risk: An Account of Events in Nuclear Power Plants Since the Chernobyl Accident in 1986” (Brussels: The Greens/European Free Alliance, 2007).

[18] Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies (New York: Basic Books, 1984).

[19] M. V. Ramana and Cassandra Jeffery, “Bill Gates and Techno-Fix Delusions,” Against the Current, October 2022, https://againstthecurrent.org/atc220/bill-gates-and-techno-fix-delusions/.