Given its history, SHOULD it?
By Colleen Cronin / ecoRI News staff
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| The nuclear reactor at URI's Bay Campus was built in 1960. For more than 50 years it has provided data to researchers and students. (RI.gov) |
As Rhode Island tries to reach its climate goals, the
discussions of solar panels and wind turbines are starting to include another
carbon-free energy source: nuclear power.
Anti-wind power advocates have
offered it as an alternative to ocean wind farms — which have come under fire
after a blade at a wind farm off Nantucket failed this summer — while power
brokers, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates and former Secretary of State John
Kerry, are suggesting it might be the most efficient way to get to
carbon neutral.
Fears around this type of energy, which does not produce carbon emissions but
has caused several deadly catastrophes, including one in Rhode Island 60
years ago, has prevented development of nuclear power plants over
the past several decades.
But improvements in technology and a push to decarbonize
could make nuclear more pervasive, though obstacles still remain before
large-scale nuclear power could come to Rhode Island.
Rhode Island already has one nuclear reactor, but like the
state itself, it’s small. It’s a research reactor on the University of Rhode
Island’s Bay Campus.
Built
in the 1960s, the reactor was originally
constructed to test different materials’ vulnerability to radiation, according
to Clinton Chichester, chair of the Rhode Island Atomic Energy
Commission, which oversees the reactor.
Today, the reactor is largely used for engineering and
medical research.
“The research reactor is so limited in size, it is very safe in terms of operations,” Chichester said. “The amount of radioactivity is orders of magnitude smaller than a power plant, and we don’t have water circulating from the bay through the reactor or anything like that.”
Federal officials inspect the reactor four times a year, and
according to recent U.S. Nuclear Regulatory
Commission Reports, it is in compliance with safety and security
regulations.
“I really have no concerns about safety about the small
research reactor because it’s so small,” Chichester said.
A nuclear power plant would be a completely different
situation, he said.
Although Chichester said he’s confident in the safety of
URI’s reactor and supports the important research that it helps facilitate,
when asked if he would be comfortable living next to a nuclear power plant, he
wasn’t sure.
“I’d have to think about it,” he said. A nuclear power plant
using current technology would need significant cooling resources, Chichester
thought out loud, and Rhode Island is such a densely populated state. A power
plant might have to be cited near the ocean.
“Who wants to disturb Narragansett Bay?” he asked. “I
wouldn’t go for that, for sure.”
There have been attempts in the past to bring nuclear energy
to Rhode Island. In the 1970s, residents of Charlestown fought a proposed plant
that would have been constructed at what is now Ninigret Park.
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| Residents and state officials fought the siting of a nuclear power plant in the 1970s at what is now green space in Charlestown. (Rhode Island Historical Society.) |
Donna Walsh, a former state representative and former
Charlestown Town Council member, recalled advocating against it at the time.
“I live very, very close to Ninigret Park, but I still would
have been against it” even if she didn’t live where she did, she said.
Instead of becoming a power plant, the park is now a green space and wildlife refuge.
“We’re very fortunate to have Ninigret Park,” Walsh said.
When the plant was proposed, the country was in the middle
of a gas crisis, so there was a lot of pressure to go nuclear, Walsh said. It
was before the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania underwent a
partial meltdown in 1979, but Walsh said she was still greatly concerned about
the danger of an accident and the damage that could be caused by nuclear waste,
a byproduct of the nuclear energy process.
The waste in particular, and where it would go, was a big
worry for Walsh. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, most nuclear waste today
is kept at department sites and is regulated under federal laws. Scientific American reported
last year that these repositories are piling up, which could be a problem in
the future.
Less than a decade before Charlestown’s plant was proposed,
an accident at a Rhode Island facility that dealt with nuclear waste resulted
in one death.
Thinking about nuclear now, Walsh said, she isn’t sure how
she feels.
“It would be a help in [reversing the] climate change
process we’re in,” she said, “but I couldn’t say I support it. I’d be pretty
apprehensive, unless I had my questions answered.”
Walsh also said she wouldn’t like to live near a nuclear
power plant, and “if I don’t want to, I’m sure others don’t.”
“I know I can change my mind,” she added, “but I’m not ready
to change it yet.”
If a nuclear power plant were built in Rhode Island, it
would have to first be approved by the General Assembly.
Rep. Brian Kennedy, a Democrat representing District 38 in
Hopkinton and Westerly, has tried to pass legislation to remove this step, but
it hasn’t been successful.
Kennedy told ecoRI News that he was motivated to write the
bill after going to a national conference and learning about new nuclear
technology, and after becoming frustrated with the limitations of wind and
solar farms.
“My area of the state has been overrun by solar,” he said,
with forested places cut down for large solar farms taking up acres of space.
Typically, nuclear power plants in
the United States use nuclear fission (the splitting of an atom) to produce
heat. The heat boils water, creating steam, which powers turbines that generate
electricity. The process doesn’t create any carbon emissions, though it can
cause water pollution by
changing the water temperature, thus degrading it.
But new technology being pioneered by companies like Bill Gates’s TerraPower are
testing systems that use liquid sodium instead of water, which theoretically
reduces the amount of space the reactor needs to operate and makes it safer.
Kennedy also said nuclear power plants have the added
benefit of being able to run 24/7, something weather-dependent wind and solar
farms can’t do.
Removing the requirement to get the General Assembly
permission for every new nuclear project, Kennedy thought, might allow the
state to consider the prospect of nuclear power more seriously.
“We have to open the discussion,” Kennedy said.
“Probably I would not enjoy living next to any type of
electrical generating facility,” he admitted, when asked whether he would feel
comfortable living near a nuclear power plant. But because new plants may not
take up as much space in the future as other energy producers, “you hopefully
can keep a whole bunch of trees up” to block it from view.
Kennedy said he will reintroduce the bill, which was held
for further study in the last legislative session.
“It makes sense for us to take at least one obstacle away,”
he said.
Reconsidering nuclear is not a unique question for Rhode
Island, according to Christine Csizmadia, senior director of state governmental
affairs and advocacy at the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI).
NEI, a trade association that advocates for pro-nuclear
policy on the state and federal level, testified in favor of Kennedy’s bill
earlier this year.
Csizmadia said she’s been in the nuclear advocacy space for 18 years, and when
she first started, there were probably five to 10 bills across state
legislatures that mentioned the world nuclear.
“Over the last couple years, there are upwards of 200 bills
every single year,” she said. The proposed legislation looks to end
moratoriums, include nuclear power in green energy standards, set up task
forces to look into the energy, and provide tax credits to nuclear energy
producers.
There were previously 16 state moratoriums on nuclear power,
and six have since been repealed, Csizmadia said, with bills introduced but not
passed to end the policies in Rhode Island and Hawaii.
“We’ve never seen this type of historic momentum toward
nuclear before in history, and so we’re really excited,” she said.
Part of the momentum comes from the push away from fossil fuels, Csizmadia
said, while emerging technology offers the potential to make nuclear energy
cheaper and safer.
Nuclear is already a part of the fight against climate
change, Csizmadia added. Currently, there are some 90 reactors across the
country, producing about 20% of United States energy. That energy amounts to
about half of the country’s carbon-free power, according to the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology’s Climate Portal.
When asked about the safety of nuclear facilities, a major
factor historically in opposition, Csizmadia insisted they are safe and that
she would be comfortable living next to a nuclear power plant. “Oh,
absolutely,” she said, “definitely.”
“The nuclear industry has decades of a very safe, very safe
record,” she said. Deadly incidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima give people
pause, she understands that, she said, and “there’s no reason to not talk about
them and address them.”
The failure at Chernobyl in
what is now Ukraine in 1986 is considered the worst nuclear disaster in
history. The United Nations estimated it killed about 50 people directly from
radiation and likely affected thousands more with long-term health impacts.
The Fukushima disaster
occurred in Japan in 2011 after an earthquake followed by a tsunami shut power
off to the plant’s reactors, causing a meltdown.
Michael Oumano, a member of Rhode Island’s Atomic Energy
Commission, said that while those disasters, along with incidents like Three
Mile Island, have scared people away from nuclear power, it is a very safe form
of energy.
Oumano is a radiation safety officer and a medical physicist
at Brown University and spends a lot of his time determining how much radiation
exposure from things like medical procedures and X-rays is safe.
The federal government regulates how much exposure people
are allowed to get from nuclear power plants, setting it at 1 millisievert (mSv) per year, Oumano
said. A millisievert is a measurement of a radiation dose or exposure,
and 1mSV is one
third of the average exposure Americans get from natural sources, like space
and rocks such as radon. Just from living in the United States, people on
average get exposed to about 3mSvs annually, Oumano said.
“If things are functioning properly, which they do with, you
know, a couple notable historical exceptions, most folks are going to be
limited to 1mSV per year, and likely much, much less,” he said.
A disaster, like Chernobyl or Fukushima, could increase
exposure, but few people die directly from radiation in the immediate aftermath
of a meltdown, Oumano said, although he noted it can be difficult to parse how
many people develop a life-threatening disease, such as cancer, years after an
accident.
Some literature shows more people died in the extensive
evacuations after the Fukushima meltdown than from the incident itself, he
said.
Oumano noted that those disasters will hopefully not be
repeated and wouldn’t likely impact a reactor in Rhode Island.
Chernobyl was caused by a design flaw with the reactor, and
that type of plant isn’t constructed anymore, he said, and Rhode Island is also
safely located away from fault lines and is largely protected from direct hits
from extreme weather.
Oumano said he would live next to a reactor, if one came to
Rhode Island. “If I could see one, I’d be fine,” he said. “I would enjoy the
clean air.”