Nuclear Power: Atom's Eve in Vermont

( The author is a junior living in Dunster House. )

ONE OF THE most vigorous grassroots political movements in recent Vermont history is now forming. The issue is a mammoth nuclear power station just built in the Connecticut River Valley at Vernon, Vermont. This reactor, designed by General Electric to generate 513,900 kilowatts of electricity, has not yet begun production pending final approval by its mother, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), and its host, the state of Vermont.

The Vernon plant is one of the first of between 50 and 100 atomic reactors with which the AEC plans to blanket the-Northeast before the year 2000, and it raises some important questions about the Nuclear Nirvana envisioned for America by utilities, the AEC and electricity fiends in general.

The facility at Vernon will be operated by the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Corporation, but suffers from limitations inherent in its fission, boiling water reactor (BWR) design and its peculiar location in the Connecticut River Valley near the Vermont Massachusetts border.

Nuclear power is just another way of boiling water: An atomic reactor sustains a fission reaction which produces heat used to boil water which drives electric turbines in the same way as in traditional, coal-fired plants. All coal contains traces of radioactive carbon, which is released when coal is burned. Recent studies suggest that boiling water reactors will leak over 14,000 times the amount of radioactivity produced by coal burning. Such a reactor is also only about 20 per cent efficient, which means over 80 per cent of the heat generated is wasted and must be released to the environment. This is less than half as efficient as a fossil fuel (coal) plant, so the average nuclear plant requires 50 per cent more cooling water. This becomes an acute problem at Vernon where the Connecticut River provides a minimum of water to do the job.

A Vernon-sized nuclear reactor requires about 1100 to 1200 cubic feet of water per second, all of which is heated to about 18 F above its original temperature. Although over 900 reactors are expected in the U. S. by the year 2000, just 120 of them would require more water than the total annual runoff from the continental U. S. Coastal power stations which use ocean water are being offered as a solution to this problem.

Critics of the reactor expect the presence of all this heat to create dense fogs during weather inversions. In the case of Vernon, such fogs are expected to be about 10 miles wide, 40 miles long and 400 feet thick and could occur on as many as 30 days of the year.

How will the Vernon reactor be cooled? It is expected that the winter temperature of the Connection River will be raised 10 F. To enable this stream to accommodate this and other such reactors the Army Corps of Engineers has planned a $4 billion project for the entire Connecticut River from the Canadian border to Long Island Sound, including over 205 dams, 84 of which are directly related to the Vernon plant.

In order to store electricity produced by this reactor during off-peak hours, four pump storage stations are now planned. In each of these, water pumped up to huge tanks on mountain tops and released to generate electricity when needed. These will be built on Wantastiquet Mountain in Brattleboro, Vermont; on Northfield Mountain in Massachusetts; near Bellows Falls in Walpole, New Hampshire; and near Bear Creek Swamp above Rowe, Massachusetts. The ecological consequences of the 10 rise in river temperature, the 205 dams and the pump storage stations have hardly been investigated.

A WATER reactor, like Vernon, has a fuel cycle of one year, which means that the spent-but highly radioactive-fuel is stored in the reactor for a year at a time. Such materials may accumulate to 1000 times the radioactivity of one Hiroshima-sized bomb. Although a reactor cannot sustain a nuclear explosion, the presence of many hundreds of tons of material which is one billion times more toxic than any known industrial substance is an unparalleled hazard, especially during fuel replacement. Such replacement is an extraordinarily delicate operation and, in the case of Con Edison's Indian Point ?I plant at Buchanan, N. Y., took six weeks during which 40 of the 120 fuel elements were removed, each weighing nearly four tons.

When these dangerous materials are removed they are transported over highways or railroads to a reprocessing plant. By 1963, with only ten operating reactors, the AEC had reported 47 accidents in waste shipment, including 18 spills and 15 "severe impact accidents." Vernon's wastes would be taken to the Nuclear Fuel Services facility in West Valley, New York. This plant, run by the Getty oil interests, is notorious for its tendency to continue sending employees into high radiation areas until they have received the maximum legal dose. Of 80 employees on strike in late 1969, 70 had received more than the maximum permissible dose by December 1 when the strike began.

Even worse, though, the plant is not equipped to trap any gas released during reprocessing and over 30,000 curies of gaseous radioactive krypton (K85) are released every month. One curie, fully absorbed, is fatal. With prevailing winds from the west a serious hazard is posed for Buffalo 30 miles to the northeast and for Vermont, which thought its problems had ended when the wastes first left the state.

Another drawback of the Vernon reactor is its operational requirement to release low-level radioactive liquid and gaseous wastes from time to time. The AEC contends that these wastes are harmless. But a recent paper has shown remarkable correlation between changes in infant mortality and radioactive gaseous discharges in Illinois in the area surrounding the Dresden No. 1 power station (a BWR of one-third the capacity of Vernon) over the past ten years. Dresden's annual effluents ranged from 34,860 to 800,000 curies from 1959 to 1969.

If the entire U. S. population is exposed to the level the AEC considers safe for the general population, Joshua Lederberg, Nobel Laureate in genetics, estimates a 10 per cent increase in the mutation rate. Other researchers, notably Drs. Gofman and Tamplin of the AEC, estimate between 32,000 and 150,000 additional annual deaths due to increased mutation, cancer and leukemia.

These are hotly debated issues but the town of Brattleboro (12,800 people) lies only four miles from the reactor, 65 per cent of the time downwind. Amherst is within forty miles as is Boston's entire water supply, the Quabbin Reservoir, soon to be supplemented by the Connecticut River. And twenty miles beyond Quabbin lies Springfield with more than 500,000 people. As the Tennessee Valley Authority's manager of power, G. O. Wessenauer, has said:

The ideal site for a nuclear plant is one for which there is no evidence of any seismic activity over the past millennia; is not subject to hurricanes, tornadoes or floods. It should be in an endless expanse of unpopulated desert with an abundant supply of very cold water flowing nowhere and containing no aquatic life. Most important, it should be adjacent to a major load center.

BUT periodic low-level discharges are not what principally alarms anti-reactor groups. The big fear is of a major accident at Vernon. Although it is certain that the plant cannotsustain a full, A-bomb blast, it can easily run out of control, melting its safety devices and enclosures. Such overheating would cause explosions of superheated water which could rupture the reactor shielding, releasing highly radioactive particles and gases.

Such a disaster was investigated by the AEC in its own Brookhaven Report, which suggested that reactors one-fifth the size of current models could contaminate up to 150,000 square miles of land, kill 3,400 people outright, cause 55,000 premature cancer deaths, and force evacuation of 450,000 people for over one year. An additional 4 million might have to be kept under close surveillance. Damage could exceed $7 billion. Such a peace-time, man-made catastrophe boggles the imagination. And physicist-writer Dr. Ralph Lapp has said he feels "Before the year 2000 it would appear a certainty that we will have a serious accident."

How well equipped are reactors to avert accidents? Out of almost 4000 construction standards for nuclear plants only about 100 have been officially recognized. And in the recent construction of a reactor in Gravel Neck, Virginia, the welding superintendent admitted that as many as 5000 welds in vital parts of the structure could be defective. A cooling water failure might precipitate a "runaway" which could cause a high-power steam explosion within one-hundredth of a second. Vernon's emergency cooling system takes from three to ten seconds to become effectively operational.

There will be no full-scale test of emergency systems at Vernon before 1973 or 1974 because the test facility has been delayed in construction. Testing will take place at the National Reactor Testing site near Idaho Falls, but results will not come before 1975. And, as Dr. Milton Shaw, AEC director of reactor development, testified before Congress, "Seventy-one utilities and twenty architect-engineering firms are working on nuclear power plants. Most of these personnel are trying to build the first nuclear plant they ever built."

REACTORS are licensed under the Research and Medical Section of the Atomic Energy Act. They have not yet been deemed of "practical value" by the AEC, according to the act. Yet over 92 are now being actually designed. In short, nuclear power plants are colossal experiments, with entirely untested emergency systems, poorly defined construction standards, built by complete novices. Is this why no insurance company in the nation will cover the risk involved? In fact, no utilities would consider building nuclear plants until the Price-Anderson Act of 1957 absolved them of all financial responsibility. The government, under this form of subsidy, limits payments in the case of an accident to $560 million per reactor, although the AEC itself has estimated damages from small reactors to be as high as $7 billion.

Given the lack of operating experience and their novelty, why aren't reactors built underground as in Sweden and Switzerland? This has been advocated for many years by Dr. Edward Teller (proverbial father of the H-bomb) and others in this country. The reason is simple. As has been proven in Britain, which generates four times as much electricity from fission as the U. S., nuclear reactors are simply more costly than other forms of power. Underground construction would be prohibitively expensive.

What about other sources of power? When many estimate that there are over 300 years of fossil fuels left-coal, shale, oil, natural gas-and that geothermal, fusion, solar, magneto-hydrodynamics and other clean power technologies are just around the corner, why the rush for fission? These other power technologies haven't been given a chance. The AEC spends 83 per cent of its research dollar on fission power. Con Edison spent more on advertising last year than on all research. In fact, over ten times as much is spent on advertising for electricity as is spent on research into non-fission power sources.

As a result Senator Mike Gravel (D-Alaska) has announced a bill to call for a moratorium on reactor building and the creation of a national energy agency to oversee the AEC and stop reckless proliferation of atomic reactors.

In the meantime, conservation groups and the state have recently obtained some important concessions from Vermont Yankee in the form on improved emissions standards for the Vernon plant. But Vermont continues to explain that it is entirely unable to conduct effective monitoring and enforcement of the improved standards. And it is also incapable of coping with a major accident.

( Members of the New England Coalition on Nuclear Pollution will be in Cambridge on Sunday [ March 14, Sever 1, 2 p. m. ] to explain their opposition to the Vernon power plant. Hearings on the Vernon power station should begin late this month.