ECHOES AND UPDATES

2) I know it won't last, but right now I am quite contented about the new administration. Not only am I happy that Bush is gone, but I gleefully savor the almost daily embarrassments suffered by President Billary. I don't have to tell you about the nanny double whammy and the crudeness with which he is reneging on his campaign promises, but you may have missed the political correctness of his Agriculture Secretary Espy. Following an outbreak of a bacterial infection from undercooked hamburger meat in a Jack in the Box restaurant, which has so far diseased 425 people and killed one child, the DoE Secretary acted promptly with a set of recommendations, one of which was to permit the low-level irradiation of hamburger meat (WSJ 2/8). Here it should first be pointed out that in general, the more primitive an organism of the animal kingdom, the higher radiation doses it can survive. Typically, the median lethal (whole-body) dose for a human is around 500 rads, but to kill the bacteria in food and in the sterilization of medical and cosmetic objects, 100,000 rads and more are used. Now back to the brilliant Secretary. A good place where to expose contaminated meat to low-level radiation in Washington is the Capitol where Congressmen pass antinuclear legislation. Its granite blocks emit so much low-level radiation that the NRC could not license it if it were a nuclear reactor. It also seems to have escaped Espy's intellect that the infection was due to undercooked meat; perhaps someone can tell him that, quite analogously to nuclear radiation, it is intense, not lukewarm, heat that kills bacteria. Billary, Billary, poof! A mouse is on the hoof.

3) I must repeat once again that the editorial pages of the Wall St.J., which are generally good, have nothing to do with its front page articles, which are often as shoddy as the New York Times. Remember it was the WSJ that published the brazenly concocted canard about increased mortality in the Western US in the summer after Chernobyl. This time (1/25) they had an article about decommissioning costs that was not as outright mendacious, but (worse) bristled with omissions. The case for untractable decommissioning costs of nuclear plants was made by generalizing the case of the Fort St. Vrain Plant in Colorado, which is utterly untypical of nuclear plants in general. What the authors left out is that the plant was given free of charge to PSC of Colo. by General Atomic as a pilot project; they also left out that its troubles were due to the helium pumps, which GA had scaled up without sufficient testing, and which have nothing to do with the reactor as such. (The reactor as such, an HTGR, is the finest there is: significantly higher efficiency, possibility of using nuclear energy for other purposes than generating electricity, inherently safe so that it does not even need a containment building.) The troubles with the helium pumps finally proved insurmountable, and the plant had to be closed down very early in its life, which makes decommissioning costs (paid into a pay-as-you-go fund) unnaturally high, much as if you suddenly had to pay off the 25-year mortgage of your house in a single week. To only a smaller degree this is also true of the Trojan and San Onofre plants, but none of the three are typical for a trend in the industry. The average revenue from a nuclear reactor is $400 million/year, plenty to take care of the decommissioning fund, which is not even under direct control of the utility, and whose adequacy is reviewed annually by federal and state regulators. A you would expect, these are part of the problem. One of the reasons why decommissioning costs have increased is that rate payers now pay twice for the same thing; on-site storing spent nuclear fuel by paying into the waste disposal fund, and once again by paying into the decommissioning fund. Other reasons are increased labor costs and bureaucratically increased low-level waste disposal costs. But more than 70 reactors (mostly test and research but also some commercial) have been decommissioned in the US over the last 35 years without bankrupting anybody, and the moderate increase in decommissioning costs is not one of the nuclear industry's big problems. Do not let ignorant scribblers intimidate you with popular witch hunts.