Source document: https://docs-lawep.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/1697640396694.pdf (Australia)
A Nuclear Australia A submission to the govt.

enquiry on the subject by George Smiley My background is as follows.

I studied at the University of British Columbia and obtained a BSc.

Physics Major in or around 1973.

Later I did a diploma of education at UNE Armidale.

Since then I have worked in geological exploration, mining and mineral processing, forestry, agriculture and have competency in several trades like metal casting, boiler-making and carpentry and am a self-taught engineer.
Presently retired and working at writing, visual arts and the usual blog(s).

I have built several biodiesel plants, one of a small commercial size, make my own motor fuel, do my own diesel mechanics, raise my own livestock.

Something that might boost my qualification for this inquiry is that I am probably the only Australian who has been the cause of a nuclear accident.

I have also written a post-apocalyptic novella on the subject (not my own accident thankfully), presently seeking publication.
Precis: Firstly a look at famous nuclear accidents and probable future ones and discuss the human factor behind them all; why these are NOT just 'the mistakes of the past', and then a suggestion for a unique possibility for Australia.

1.
Inquiry into the prerequisites for nuclear energy in AustraliaSubmission 275 A Nuclear Australia Submission by George Smiley Watching the brown flood crossing the dual carriage way, inexorably smashing everything in its path as it rolled through the port, the surrounding Fukushima township and market gardens, smashing everything in its path until it reached the boundaries of high ground, by then a sea of construction debris it slowed, halted and retraced its path to the ocean; a churning mix of vehicles, boats, corpses and garbage and you had to wonder what was next.
And the news people arrived in helicopters just in time to record the next instalment which was the varying degrees of destruction of the three Fukushima reactors.

Watching an electric utility transform to a smaller, urban version of a US nuclear test in Nevada is disquieting to say the least.
Although the sonic shockwave and airborne bits of the containment facility were not an explosion of the actual reactor that's only technical word-mincing that allowed TEPCO and the Japanese government to throw out a barrage of lies that lasted for several weeks.

Confucius or Sun Tzu said something pertinent about that like "without honour, face is your second line of defence."
The third line was the ritual suicide of a few middle managers, blurting out teary- eyed, grovelling apologies for the cameras when the truth could no longer be denied; that there was at least one reactor core on its way to Peru.

Whether they were demoted, fired or treated to the quintessentially Japanese slow death by thousand cuts office with a window to look out of and no work until they resign, the important people were safely cleansed of blame.
There is a design quirk in a water-cooled reactor that makes you wonder who designed the thing- water seems like the perfect coolant.

The huge specific heat required to make the phase transition to steam makes it possible to cool anything quickly and cleanly.
But at higher temperatures and pressures the equation changes and water reacts with its container, giving up oxygen to the metal as if it had become nitric acid and produces copious amounts of hot hydrogen gas, the pressure of which prevents coolant being pumped in and having to go somewhere it vents into the containment chamber, making an explosive mix with air and blows the thing to pieces.

The whole fiasco was not helped by the emergency diesel generators.
They should have been powering cooling pumps but having been sited in the basement were underwater and ruined.

The heroic employees set up a network of their auto batteries outside on the tarmac in the hopes of getting some power up but it was no use.

And the errors went on.

Later they were pumping radioactive groundwater and storing it in hundreds of bespoke steel tanks.

Some were riveted and developed leaks though they were believed to be more secure than welded ones.

2.
2.

Inquiry into the prerequisites for nuclear energy in AustraliaSubmission 275 Perhaps Admiral Hyman Rickover, father of the nuclear submarine should shoulder some of the blame.

But it was about as perfect a smallish power supply for a vessel as could be conceived at the time and it seemed like a good short cut later to magnify it for producing steam to power the huge generators of power companies.
A malfunction in the bowels of a submarine isn't so broadly noticeable or disastrous, it could easily remain one more mystery of the deeps.

Notably there was no dumping of sand Chernobyl style into a hole.

Although the reactor had melted down and no-one knew where the core had gone it remained fairly intact.

The Russians had lost control completely in their 'stress' test.

Graphite moderator was scattered all over the ground and a big glowing hole existed where the reactor had been.
They resorted to any means as the whole reactor complex was built over an underground reservoir of cooling water and if the core had fallen through the whole complex would have probably gone as it boiled away.

And the others are still operating.

But in both cases substantial pieces of the world were contaminated forever in human terms.

Nevertheless life has gone on for plants, older people and short- lived, fast reproducing mammals like pigs.

It is the growing children who cannot deal with radiation.
Having studied a few units of nuclear physics during my degree I knew what had happened from the TV images and the right thing to do.

If you were a local survivor it was to get the hell out of there.

For me on the other side of the world it was to wait a couple weeks and then take a position in a really hot Saskatchewan uranium explorer that had gone from a market swan to an ugly duckling in so many days.
They had been drilling wide-spread crazy high grades of uranium oxide that nobody in the world outside Cameco had ever seen and uranium prices have been depressed for a long time.

Nearly every producer is operating at a loss but these companies would still make a profit.

Unfortunately the official government blather still held a lot of weight; another three weeks of extra patience would have been well rewarded because the stock halved again.
If there had been an actual reactor explosion and subsequent fire there would have been no correct meaningful response because the cooling ponds are situated submarine-like in the superstructure above these old GE reactors and if one had been breached it would have burned.

That was an end-of-the-world, "On the Beach" scenario where thousands of tonnes of spent fuel exposed to the atmosphere burns chemically at least or in combination with a rekindled nuclear fire in a melt pool.
The worst affected #3 reactor pool (only cracked) also contained over a thousand tonnes of new plutonium-enriched fuel rods from Areva.

In the cooling pond fire scenario the other two reactors would be too contaminated for human life or maybe even robotics to deal with the waste.

Even if there was time and cooling water available to bring the plants to a cold shut-down, the ponds would eventually dry out and burn.

3.
3.

Inquiry into the prerequisites for nuclear energy in AustraliaSubmission 275 Japan would have been uninhabitable, easterly moving weather systems would have rained the fall-out down on North America and with an average 40 thousand year half -life for plutonium isotopes against a 6 month to 3 year lung cancer death sentence for so many there it begs a question.
Would a sickening populace faced with insurrection and death by starvation, disease or mob violence put their efforts into decommissioning their own twelve similar GE light water reactors plus the 85 others on the continent with bulging cooling ponds already overstuffed with waste?

The names are scattered like their locations on all our tongues; dinosaurs like Hanford, Indian Point, Diablo Canyon.
With the end of civilisation and a surviving citizenry abandoning their duties for rape and pillage of real assets while they last such as AR- 15s, tinned spaghetti and meatballs there would be a slow chain reaction of cooling pond fires following the social and infrastructure break-downs, each putting out as much poison as a '50's cold war nightmare nuclear exchange.

"We'll meet again, don't know where........" But once again humanity had dodged the bullet by dumb luck.
Notably the Japanese have estimated a $70 billion clean-up cost over the next few decades.

Only a wealthy and stable modern economy could hope to carry that kind of cost and commitment through and cooling ponds require constant monitoring, water supply and maintenance.
And so we have created a Strangelovian doomsday device not for visceral reasons like deterrence or revenge but simply for the corporate bottom line; it being so much cheaper to store the stuff in water with anti-boiling agents for the future when a more enlightened, wealthy or threatened ownership will shut down and decommission these relics of the Polly Annaish 'Atoms for Peace' era.
In other words it is left to our kids to reprocess or dry store the garbage in some warm and dry geologically stable underground facility or drop it into the mud in the deepest ocean trenches in glassy mineral blocks or stainless steel torpedoes.

And since those future costs are indefinable your friendly electric utility doesn't need to carry real decommissioning costs on its books as a liability.
Everyone knows it will devolve on whatever exists as a state when the time comes by the simple expedient of bankruptcy.

The next candidate for disaster is the Diablo Canyon complex; built on a web of fault lines only 45 miles from the San Andreas fault in California.

It is running still, now beyond its supposed lifetime, just like we don't do for passenger jets.
The owner/operator Pacific Gas and Electric has already bankrupted itself with a long line of predacious corporate directorships in combination with losing a series of negligence lawsuits, most recently there is the fire (thanks to poorly maintained power lines) that destroyed the town of Paradise.

With a couple of recent serious shakes along the fault, and California being long overdue for another big one there is some local angst.
Notably the Cascade fault off the west coast is also long overdue and according to geological evidence pre-dateing white settlement the San Andreas is only a pipsqueak in comparison.

4.

Inquiry into the prerequisites for nuclear energy in AustraliaSubmission 275 There are other dangers to the systems we aren't keen to acknowledge.
A nuclear airburst in even a small nuclear war between Pakistan and India say would produce an electromagnetic pulse that would burn out all the low voltage logic circuitry in computers over a wide area.

Vehicles, utilities and communications would fail instantly in the vicinity and one wonders if an operating reactor could even be 'scrammed' to a halt or supplied with cooling water.
Passenger jets now are more and more 'fly by wire', without mechanical linkages and those too can and would fall out of the sky by a similar principle.

Broader threatening hazards outside of engineering and management incompetence include weather, general terrorist action like an airplane strike, flood, fire, war,, insurrection, plague and computer hackery.
The Fukushima earthquake and resulting tidal wave was always on the cards which begs the question of why they were ever placed where they were to begin with.

It's a prelude to a host of further questions - how could anyone have got something so supposedly cut and dried as engineering so wrong and how much of it was a pot- pourri of an even more dangerous failure devolving from national pride, business, social and economic relationships; in short the human factor.
Industry shills everywhere throw out the phrase 'mistakes of the past' implying we have learned so much that never again......

But maybe that's just another mistake that carries us forever hubristic through the present.

They will certainly be making submissions to this inquiry.

All this leads to the question of whether Australia should nuclearise.
I would say possibly but that it must be based on an honest examination of two questions and they are not about the economics of uranium reactors which are lousy.

Firstly do we want to be like like North Korea brandishing nuclear weapons in hopes of maintaining our security in an international rebalance of power where the US is retreating into its ungreat isolationism?

In that case we will need conventional reactors and to develop a credible delivery system.
If the answer is no to the offensive or defensive aspects there is still one more consideration - what are we or the world going to do with the burgeoning waste problem?

It is in our own backyard wherever it may be on the planet.

Australia has a plethora of dry and ancient relatively uninhabited areas where it could be entombed forever in relatively safe circumstances.
A parallel way of getting into the potentially lucrative business of nuclear waste is that it may be safely disposed of by deep incarceration and/or incinerating a lot of it in thorium reactors, hopefully before we end up wearing it.

We have a great deal of thorium as an unwanted component in our mineral sands resource.
Thorium is all fissionable unlike uranium of which less than one percent is U235 and requires a difficult and expensive enrichment process which was the biggest part of the Manhattan Project.

5.

Inquiry into the prerequisites for nuclear energy in AustraliaSubmission 275 The thorium fuel cycle is a series of short lived radioactive elements that ends in humble lead and in the main waste products are only hazardous for a few hundred years rather than tens of thousands.
A thorium reactor cannot melt down because it requires a continuous external neutron supply nor can thorium be used to make a bomb for the same reason which is why it was always ignored.

You might think it would have been the centrepiece for 'Atoms for Peace.'
The biggest fly in the thorium ointment is a Pa (protactinium) isotope that is a big neutron absorber with a hard gamma ray decay and needs to be removed from the process occasionally BUT that can go on to produce another uranium isotope capable of making a 2nd rate bomb if you really need one.

But this is all in Wikipaedia.

Thorium has a great many fans and there would be no real competition for it as a specialty out there in the reactor industry.
With uranium so cheap, no-one wants the stuff or the burden of development.

One was built in America in the 60's and worked and the Chinese are working on it now and so may pip the world at the post while we are asleep in our beds.

But with or without a nuclear option I hope we can get together before it is too late to do something about nuclear waste and the many other doomsday machines by which we have hobbled our future.

6.

Inquiry into the prerequisites for nuclear energy in AustraliaSubmission 275