(90Sr)
2.8.9. Chalk River
The two accidents at the Chalk River Laboratories in Canada required a major clean-up effort involving many civilians and military personnel (approximately 850). Health surveillance of these workers did not seem to reveal any negative impact of the two accidents [WER 82]. However, some cleaning workers who were part of the military contingent assigned to the NRX reactor applied unsuccessfully for a military disability pension as a result of health damage.
2.8.10. Ruthenium 106 releases in Russia in September 2017
Contamination of the food chain by ruthenium 106 is known, with the contamination of laverbread (made from the seaweed Porphyra sp.) around Windscale and beyond in the Irish Sea causing a partial exposure of the population in 1959 of 7 mSv [AMI 13a]. The risk in the case of this Russian accident (Mayak) would be the consumption of mushrooms. The maximum acceptable standard (MAS) for this radionuclide in mushrooms is 1,250 Bq.kg−1. The transfer factor from soil to fungal mycelium is about 102 m2.kg−1. Therefore, to exceed the MAS, it is necessary that the soil be contaminated to more than 2,000,000,000 Bq.m−2, which in this accident represents about a 2 km radius. In addition, for a child (2–7 years old) to exceed the committed effective dose by ingestion of 1 mSv, they would have to eat 32 kg of mushrooms in 1 year [IRS 17c].
2.9. The cost of accidents
For the Simi Valley accident, dismantling costs for the period 1974–1983 amounted to US$16.6 million. This represents about 11% of the cost of the liquid sodium cooled test reactor (estimated at US$150 million, 1982 value) [CAR 83].
For Three Mile Island (TMI), the initial construction cost was US$400 million. In Marc Haumont’s blog, a text is summarized by Cousteau [COU 81] on the cost of the TMI accident. “In 1975, Congress passed the Anderson Act, according to which the American state insured itself against nuclear accidents to the tune of US$560 million. After the accident, the decontamination and reconditioning of the defective reactor was estimated at more than US$500 million. A few months after the accident, 14 law firms representing people living within a 40 km radius of the TMI plant filed lawsuits for ‘negligence or wilful mismanagement’ against the responsible electricity company (Metropolitan Edison). This was the largest trial ever undertaken and the sums claimed amounted to US$560 million. Finally, the expenses generated by the TMI accident, classified at level 5 on the INES, will prove to be more than 1 billion dollars, excluding the storage of radioactive waste for which no definitive solution exists”. The cleaning of TMI Unit 2 ended in December 1993, 14 years after the accident, but the reactor will remain under permanent control until it is completely dismantled.
Located within the Sellafield complex, the THORP for reprocessing spent nuclear fuel ceased operations in 2010. This site, which cost €2.35 billion to build and was considered the spearhead of the British nuclear industry, operated for only 9 years. British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) decided that the plant, following the dismantling of the reprocessing plants, will become a nuclear waste storage center. But how much will this conversion cost? “45 billion euros of clean-up work will be required”, predicted Brian Watson, the director of the Sellafield complex [BRO 03].
In the case of France, many questions remain about the costs of nuclear power in the field of safety, decommissioning and waste. With regard to safety, following the Fukushima accident, the ASN launched additional safety assessments in 2011 and 2012. These assessments demonstrate the need for many developments in operating facilities to be carried out as quickly as possible. Under ASN’s terms, this would lead to a massive investment that could be in the order of €50 billion or more. However, only 40 have been provisioned by EDF [LEG 13]. An increasing number of nuclear installations will be dismantled in the future, and it will be inevitably necessary to manage their waste. Cost estimates have been put forward: will the dismantling require 20, 25 billion euros or more? For waste management, the sum of more than 30 billion has been proposed [LEG 13].
After Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, Leglu et al. [LEG 13] have several questions. Where and when will the next disaster take place? How big will it be and who will sacrifice themselves to contain it? How many people will have to be evacuated, and how much territory will become a restricted area? If this perspective is not unthinkable, as the authors have tried to show, in France the consequences would be catastrophic, particularly because of the population density near some reactors. In the end, these authors wonder whether staying in the nuclear industry would not be more expensive, in both human and financial terms, than leaving it. A serious accident would cost France several hundred billion dollars! Ultimately, Leglu et al. [LEG 13] believe that there is only one solution: to develop an energy plan that will save money and further diversify primary sources.
By using the definition of a nuclear accident as the death of a human being or the cost of the accident exceeding US$50,000, Sovocool [SOV 10] identifies no less than 99 nuclear accidents from 1952 to 2010. The total cost of legal damages for these accidents is US$20.5 billion, representing one accident and US$330 million in damages each year over the past six decades.
2.11. Conclusions
Environmental impacts are not necessarily related to a nuclear accident. Thus, the abandonment of uranium mines is often synonymous with radioactive contamination by uranium.
However, the most serious environmental and health impacts result from accidents at nuclear reactors or spent fuel reprocessing plants.
The health impacts, out of any accident, were significant for miners working in the period from 1940 to 1970. Since then, precautions have been taken to extract as much radon as possible from mine galleries.
Until 1995, the number of accidents involving nuclear reactors was two to three accidents per year (Figure 2.7).
Figure 2.7. Number of accidents involving nuclear reactors or causing high irradiation over 5-year periods from 1945 to 1995 (modified from Sanderson et al., 1997 in [MAC 00])
The 99 nuclear accidents, fatal and/or costing more than US$50,000, between 1952 and 2010 resulted in 4,100 deaths (including 4,056 from the Chernobyl accident alone). Compared to deaths caused by other energy sources, nuclear energy is the second most deadly source of energy supply (after hydroelectric dams, including the failure of the Shimantan hydroelectric plant in China causing 171,000 deaths on August 8, 1975) and above oil, coal and natural gas production systems [SOV 08]. A total of 57 accidents (as defined by Sovacool [SOV 10]) have occurred since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 and nearly two-thirds (56 out of 99) of all nuclear accidents have occurred in the United States, refuting the notion that serious accidents are consigned to the past or to non-American countries that have neither the control of modern technology nor the effective supervision of the nuclear industry [SOV 10].
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