Nuclear power is clean, government-regulated, and safe – until something goes wrong. In a 92-minute documentary titled “Atomic States of America,” co-directors Don Argot and Sheena M. Joyce trace the development of nuclear power – and what have turned out to be some of its attendant risks.
“The risk/reward is so different in nuclear power that one bad day at one facility can wipe out decades of good days at dozens of other facilities,” says David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer and Senior Member of Union of Concerned Scientists.
“The hundred tons that’s in the typical core can generate power for millions of homes for two years,” he said. “It is a very enticing technology.”
Until, for instance, an accident happens at Three Mile Island, or Chernobyl, or Fukushima. The Soviet Union reportedly calculated the damage from Chernobyl exceeded the economic benefits derived from all its 54 remaining operating nuclear power reactors. Calculations at Fukushima will take years, maybe decades.
And those are only the most visible adverse effects of an industry said in its infancy to be capable of generating electricity so plentifully and cheaply that metering it would be unnecessary.
The movie is based on “Welcome to Shirley: A memoir from an atomic town”, a book by Kelly McMasters. McMasters moved with her family to Shirley, Long Island, in 1981, when she was a young girl. When she was in fourth grade, the first of her neighbors “got sick, and ended up dying,” she says.
“Over the years, more and more people became sick, and suddenly that became more the norm,” McMasters adds. Eventually, one in nine women on Long Island would develop breast cancer. Lung and thyroid cancers rounded out “the big three” killers.
“It was just part of the texture of the town,” she says of Shirley, and the sickness and death.
It later was determined that all three reactors on Long Island were leaking radioactivity.
The movie opens with an unidentified, 1950s-era announcer touting the benefits of nuclear power: “In a piece of uranium the size of a walnut there’s as much potential energy as in the amount of coal to fill a 100-car train.”
Unfortunately, the economics have not worked out, and many plant owners do not have the money to shut down their facilities at the end of their lives.
Christine Todd Whitman, co-chair of the Clean And Safe Energy Coalition, former New Jersey governor and EPA administrator under President George W. Bush, lobbies strongly for nuclear power. It is, she says on camera, free of greenhouse gases while providing “extremely good jobs and a lot of money for the communities in which they’re located.”
The plants do, indeed, provide jobs and money, and their effluent does not include greenhouse gases. But the problems are spread out and do not get much attention – unless they are as photogenic as Chernobyl or Fukushima.
According to Whitman, more than 80 percent of residents who live near a nuclear power plant would support having another one in their home town, expecting it would reduce the need for imported oil and preclude increased coal mining and natural gas fracking. They believe the plants are virtually risk-free, well-regulated providers of electricity.
“And the problem is that the regulator is responsible to Congress,” says Arnie Gunderson, a nuclear engineer and former Nuclear Energy Services Senior Vice-President, “and Congress is being run by lobbyists.”
Harrisburg-area resident and Three Mile Island Alert Chairman Eric Epstein acknowledges residents’ acceptance of the TMI facility going back to the 1950s, when the decision was made to embark on nuclear power generation.
“I believed my dad, and my dad believed the industry,” says Epstein, of a nuclear empire that came into being in part because the U.S. needed some way, other than building weapons, to keep money flowing to its nuclear research laboratories.
“All these things came into question on March 28, 1979,” he says in the movie of the day TMI Reactor 2 suffered a cooling system malfunction that resulted in a core melt-down.
To the operational problems and long-term health hazards add the difficulty finding a place to store spent, highly radioactive, fuel rods, some of their output considered hazardous to humans as long as 240,000 years. Currently, they are being stored – in most cases – on the site of the plant where they were used. After years of lobbying and political wrangling, a potential permanent site at Yucca Mountain was quashed, and the Nuclear Regulatory Agency has halted approval or re-approval of any nuclear plants. Meanwhile, the waste is being stored on-site.
Argot and Joyce have woven together threads of history, future benefits and risks, forming connections among events into a well-edited, attention-holding, informative tale of nuclear power development, and political intrigue.
“Atomic States of America” is available on Amazon and iTunes. It is, admittedly, one view of nuclear power, but it is a must-see tale for anyone even a little interested in the safety of nuclear power, and the relationship between the industry. government regulators and consumers.