Be careful about comparing apples to oranges...

Dear Readers,

Using toxic materials, taking them out of the ground, extracting them from whatever, are all things which require a proper cost/benefit analysis. How much material is available? How difficult is it to extract? How hazardous is it?

Any dangerous material or activity requires careful consideration -- especially if the hazard is most likely to be borne by someone else.

But none of these useful-yet-hazardous extraction activities -- other than nuclear (uranium mining) -- has the ability to actually transform the hazardous material that's so carefully extracted, purified, modified or whatever, into something that is several million times MORE hazardous than it was to begin with.

Spent nuclear fuel, pound-for-pound when it comes out of the reactor, is roughly 10 million times more hazardous than so-called "fresh" nuclear fuel.

Nuclear reactors are a dangerous and expensive way produce steam and spin a turbine to produce electricity. The heat for a reactor is the result of fissioning (i.e., splitting) atoms of specific isotopes of various elements -- usually Uranium-235 and/or Plutonium-239. After a few years (typically 3-8, depending on the reactor design), the fuel is considered “spent”.

You can hold "fresh" fuel that's never been in a reactor in your hand. You might prefer not to, and I don't recommend it (but I am going in for PET in a few weeks, which has its own radioactive risks).

(Note: "Fresh" nuclear fuel is mostly U-238 but has had its U-235 portion "boosted" from about 0.7% (the natural proportion worldwide) to about 5% for reactors, or up to about 20% for future SMRs, and as high as 90% or more for bombs.)

Uranium is not a health food before use in a reactor (though 100 years ago some people thought it might be!). But after it's been used in a nuclear reactor, you can't even be near a spent fuel pellet (something the size of a bone in your little pinky finger) for even a second or it will kill you. Not later, but right then and there. If you're a little further away it will kill you sooner or later...

If you were to diabolically spread out that one little pellet evenly into unlucky human lungs, that one little pellet would be able to kill hundreds of thousands or perhaps even millions of people, with lung cancer or some other disease.

And after they're dead, you could extract that nearly-microscopic fraction of the original spent fuel pellet from the cadaver, and give it to someone else...and people could keep doing that for a thousand human generations...and even then, it would still be lethal for many more half-lives.

The fission process does this, by producing a poisonous rainbow of previously-nonexistent short-and long-lived radioactive isotopes from each fission of a uranium or plutonium atom. Nearly all of their "daughter" isotopes are also radioactive, in a "decay chain" that can go through more than a dozen steps, each radioactive.

Sometimes a neutron from one fission event is absorbed by an already-radioactive atom creating another radioactive byproduct.

Each fission event of a single uranium or plutonium atom can create three, four, or more dangerous new radioactive elements, which each then might have their own radioactive decay chains.

Some of these radioactive elements (especially the three mentioned above) mimic useful STABLE (non-radioactive) atoms that all living things need. So they can get inside a living body, STAY THERE, and do their damage internally.

One radioactive decay can destroy thousands of chemical bonds in living organisms, creating havoc at a microscopic level. Even a single so-called "low energy" (according to the nuclear industry) tritium beta emission can destroy thousands of chemical bonds. Tritium is extremely hazardous to humans and nothing BUT hazardous. A tritium's beta emission is only "low energy" compared to, say, a plutonium atom's alpha emission or various gamma emissions. But compared to a human chemical bond inside your body, it's not at all "low energy"!

That's why we need to keep plutonium especially, and all the other radioactive isotopes out of the environment as much as possible. Because they will always keep escaping from imperfect human-engineered containment built and maintained (if at all) by imperfect humans.

Everything involved in the nuclear fuel cycle is extremely hazardous, from mining through processing and enrichment, but especially from the moment the fission process is begun, in a nuclear bomb or nuclear reactor.

There is no "natural" plutonium on earth. Some fission products exist or are created naturally, but mostly in vanishingly small quantities, and most of that remains external to living things.

There's no hazardous poison quite like the waste from nuclear fission, which can destroy life in so many ways, and in such vanishingly small quantities. Invisibly. No smell. No taste (except is very high doses, but as John W. Gofman would say, "any dose is an overdose").

This is why we have to stop making more nuclear waste. It is impossible to store safely at any price, let alone at a price that keeps the nuclear industry profitable. Even with all the subsidies, blank checks, avoided liability...

So please be careful about comparing apples to oranges...

Ace Hoffman, Carlsbad, California USA

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Note: The graphic by Mary Olson showing the disproportionate impact of radiation on women and children was obtained from: www.genderandradiation.org

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Below are some of the many resources used for this essay:

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The author's own book is available free online: