Newspapers / The Guilfordian (Greensboro, N.C.) / Dec. 13, 1977, edition 1 / Page 7
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necembor 13,1977 Energy Awareness: Dangers in Transportation BY RICHARD FULTON A few weeks ago, there were two accidents involving shipment of dangerous materials which received little or no publicity. The first incident involved a train carrying 25 cars of poisonous ammonia gas in Florida. The train derailed near Pensacola and one of the cars carrying 33,000 gallons of pois onous gas leaked and exploded 40 feet from the home of Dr. John Thorshov. He died from inhalation and the incident left his wife and two small children in critical condition. A total of thirty people were treated for ammonia inhalation and at least 1,000 persons were evacuated from their homes as the toxic cloud drifted out to sea. This was the second accident involving Louisville and Nashville Transportation. Another L&N train spilled ammonia gas in downtown Pensacola seven weeks ago. The second accident involved a truck carrying low grade nuclear waste material on I-95 in eastern North Carolina en route to the nuclear storage t ■■ Bf JiJiii American workers, once the highest-paid job-goers in the world, now rank a mere sixth when it comes to the size of the paycheck. This is the conclusion of the conference board, a Business Research Organiza tion. The board compared starting salaries for beginning engineers in 1975 with salaries for those same jobs in 1971. While American engineers took hom the biggest pay checks in 1971, the board found that Denmark is now the top paying cuntry, followed by West Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Belgium, and then the United States. sight in Barnsville, South Carolina. There was no report of any leakage of radioactive material, although many times reports don't cover all the facts. As we know, there are many problems involving nuclear energy. Transportation accidents involving nuclear wastes are exceptionally serious. In a three year span, from 1971-1974, ninety-eight accidents involving radio active cargo occured. (60 of them occured in 1974 alone!) In 1975, the accidents rose to a startling average of twelve to fifteen per month. This is 130-200% increase. Gasp! To comfort you, it is esti mated that rail transportation is six times as dangerous as trucking. The incident involv ing ammonia gas clearly illus trates the dangers of railway shipments because of the masses of cargo involved. Imagine ten or twenty years from now, the same accident could very easily happen, but the train might be carry ing radioactive uranium or plutonium instead of ammonia gas, and you could very easily be one of the Thorshov family! The Guilfordian Energy Awareness: Questions and Answers 1. Where will you reprocess the radioactive wastes now that the facility which was to perform this function has been closed as a technological failure? The technological process to reprocess spent fuel from nuclear reactors has not been proved. GE has scrapped its S6O million project for repro cessing, but it has enlarged its capacity to temporarily store wastes. The Barnswell, S.C. plant isn't completed, and hasn't proved itself operable. The West Valley N.Y. plant is closed due to technological and environmental problems. 2. How are you going to dispose of the radioactive wastes which can be toxic for up to hundreds of thousands of years? No place has been deter'm ined to be safe enough. The recent borings in New Mexico salt deposits were determined inadequate by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission itself (Denver Post, October 13, 1975). The Industry maintains it will develop a place and ceramic containers to take the 60 million gallons anticipated by the year 2000. No container presently used is guaranteed for more than 40 years - and we've had over Vi million gallons leakage already. Besides domestic waste, the U.S. has contracts with many countries to take back their radioactive wastes. (Lee Dye, Los Angeles Times, 1973 and others). 3. What will be the long term economic and social costs of radioactie wastes? No one knows. A 1975 paper by David D. Comey (Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Sept. 1975) shows that the death burden due to just one part of the nuclear fuel cycle the mining of uranium could be 400 deaths per year per average nuclear power plant. Coal fired plants cause about 50 deaths per year per plant. Dr. John Gofman, former researcher for the Atomic Energy Commission, calculates that radioactive fallout from plutonium in the air right now from weapons testing has irreversibly committeed almost 1 million persons in the northern hemisphere to lung cancer. Gofman says that if the plutonium is per fectly contained (99.99%), it will still be responsible for 500,000 additional lung cancers annually. 4. Why build nuclear power plants? Any utility would have any of three reasons to justify the construction of one type of power plant over another: 1. The facility can be built more quickly, to meet power needs. 2. Fuel resources are more reliable 3. Power is cheaper ft 1 does not favor nuclear power, as it takes 10 years to build a nuclear plant, and 6 years to build a coal plant. #2 might favor nuclear over oil, but certainly not over coal. The Westinghouse uranium defaults are a dramatic example of the greater problem of limited uranium resources. #3 has always been the argument for nuclear power. But this argument is crumbling. Electrical World's latest cost survey produced power at an average at an average cost of 1.80 per killowatt hour (KWH); coal at 1.50; gas at 1.40; and oil, at 1.90. 5. Why hasn't nuclear power lived up to its promise of cheap energy? To understand this, you have to know the three major factors that determine the cost of power: 1. Capital Costs - the cost of building the plant. The capital cost/kwh depends on the number of kwh's you are able to produce. (The more you generate, the lower the cost/ kwh.) 2. Operation and Mainten ance. 3. Fuel Costs Page Seven 6. What about fuel costs? They'd better be lower, or nuclear power can't compete. Precisely. The promise of low fuel costs has been the one saving grace of nuclear power. People thought uran ium costs would remain so low that Westinghouse signed contracts with the utilities to which it sold reactors, guaran teeing them fuel at what now seems incredibly low prices. 7. And what Happened? Uranium prices have more than tripled in the last several years, and haven't stopped yet. Westinghouse had to default or face bank ruptcy. The overall result: uranium prices at SB/lb. in 1974 are at S3O/lb. today. No one knows where it will stop, but SIOO/lb. in the 1980's no longer seems impossible. 8. So what has been the overall situation on fuel costs? Is coal or nuclear fuel cheaper? That depends on where you are, since transportation costs are a major part of the coal fuel costs. In the mid west, with coal all around us, coal fuel cycle costs are about equal to nuclear fuel cycle costs: if you use unit-trains and strip-mined coal, coal prices are not significantly higher. But that's not the right question, anyway. 9. What is the right question? The right question is whether nuclear fuel costs are low enough anymore to offset the higher capital costs of nuclear power. 10. Why is that? You can't buy electricity just by buying the fuel. You have to add together the total cost of electricity - capital, fuel, and operation and mainten ance to make any sense. 11. Like who? Like the Electrical World survey I cited earlier, plus studies by William Blair Et Co. and Jesup & Lamont, Inc., (two major investment houses), and the Investors Responsibility Research Center.
The Guilfordian (Greensboro, N.C.)
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Dec. 13, 1977, edition 1
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