Nuclear Power Hazard Control Policy

By John C. Chicken

Nuclear Power Hazard Control Policy presents an analysis of the factors that appear to have influenced the formation and form of nuclear power hazard control policy in Britain. Particular attention is directed to those political groups that have developed a special interest in the problems of nuclear power, and to the interplay between organized groupings and public opinion generally. The metamorphosis of these groupings is traced from the origins of the nuclear industry in World War II to their prominent role during the Windscale Inquiry. This volume is comprised of nine chapters and begins with a simple account of the technical nature of nuclear hazards and of the legal and administrative framework that has been developed to control them. The subsequent chapters concentrate primarily on the influence exerted by social and political factors. Throughout the study, emphasis is given to the policy constraint imposed by increased expectations in the form of demands for higher standards of living, as well as improvements in the quality of the environment. The final chapter describes a model of the policy-making system that takes account of the consequences of variation with time in the environment surrounding the system. Appendices are included to provide a chronology of the relevant events and a summary of the administrative arrangements that various countries have made to control the safety of nuclear reactors. This monograph will be of value to policymakers concerned with the hazards of nuclear power and how to control them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Release date: Oct 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483154633

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Publisher Summary

This chapter discusses a study of the nuclear power hazard control policy in Britain. It assesses the factors that appear to have influenced the form and formation of the policy and focuses on the changes in the pattern of factors that have influenced policy in the two decades since Britain’s first nuclear power station started operating in 1956. The chapter compares the British policy and the policy-making processes with those of other countries. The problem of the control of nuclear power hazards has many facets—technical, legal, social, and political. The chapter explains the technical nature of nuclear hazards and the legal framework that has evolved for their control.

In recent years there has been increasing popular anxiety about the exposure of the public to the hazards associated with the exploitation of new technologies.* Looking at the growth of this public concern up to the late nineteen-seventies, it is clear that nuclear power was one new technology which had been a focal point of this anxiety.** I suggest that the political pressures resulting from this concern have been significant factors in shaping nuclear hazard control policy, to an extent which had no direct parallel in other technologies. Anxiety about nuclear power has not been unique to Britain; to some degree it has been manifest in all Western countries involved with nuclear power. The basis for this anxiety appears to be the association of nuclear power with the production of materials required for nuclear weapons, and fear that the radiation inventory inherent in reactors and their fuel represents an unacceptably high risk.***

The object of this study is to identify the nature of nuclear power hazard control policy in Britain and to analyse the factors that appear to have influenced its formation and form. In the analysis particular attention is devoted to changes in the pattern of factors which have influenced policy in the two decades since Britain’s first nuclear power station started operating in 1956. At a number of points in the analysis British policy and policy making processes are compared with those of other countries.

The problem of the control of nuclear power hazards has many facets, which include technical, legal, social and political questions. But this study concentrates on the social and political aspects of the problem. Hopefully, sufficient explanation is given of the technical nature of nuclear hazards and the legal framework that has evolved for the control of hazards, to allow the analysis to be presented in an objective way, understandable to a reader lacking specialist knowledge of the technicalities of the nuclear industry.

From the social science point of view interest lies in the groupings of people that developed, and in the increase in popular expectations which have taken place in parallel with the exploitation of nuclear power. These two factors are closely related. In the context of this study the significance of the increase in expectations is related to the demands for improvements in the standard of living, and improvements in the quality of the environment. Improvements in the standard of living have, in the past, often been accompanied by increases in power generation. Independent assessments of energy demands and fuel supplies such as those made by the Workshop on Alternative Energy Strategies, sponsored by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, suggest that part of the future demand will be satisfied by nuclear power.(1) The exact proportion which will be satisfied by nuclear power will depend to some extent on how quickly popular doubts about the acceptability of nuclear power are resolved. In a major article in The Times, five leading Engineers and the President of the Royal Institute of Chemistry put the case for nuclear power strongly in the following words:(2)

If the world is not to face a substantial fall in living standards, with a very real risk of civil upheaval — if not war — there is no alternative but to rely on a major contribution of energy from nuclear sources.

The other part of the increased expectation equation is the demand for improvements in the quality of the environment. Since the beginning of the nineteen-sixties there has been increasing pressure to reduce all forms of pollution, and improve the environment generally. This demand has not been directed only at nuclear power but at practically all forms of technology exploitation. The change in attitude has been described by Professor Commoner as:

a revolution in public attitude toward the acceptability of levels of environmental deterioration which have for a long time been tolerated without general complaint.(3)

At the same time there has been growth in the public willingness to participate dynamically in attempts to influence policy on environmental questions. One manifestation of this change has been the emergence of new groups whose objective is to influence policy on environmental questions and an increase in the number of long established groups which have added environmental questions to the list of subjects on which they make representations. Some of the groups formed have been in favour of nuclear power, while others have been against it. Several of the groups opposing nuclear power have been quite aggressive in the way they have demonstrated their opposition. Although the membership of the groups opposing nuclear power is small, compared with the total electorate, they have been given extensive facilities for making their views known to the proximate policy makers. It is the way policy and the policy making process have been modified to take account of the views and activities of these groups that is given particular attention in this study, and should be of special interest to the political scientist interested in the interaction between technology, policy and the public.

The analysis of policy presented in this study, as with any study of policy, is concerned with the way power and authority are exercised in a society to influence the technical content of decisions and the underlying value of the judgements on which they are based. Within the brief period covered by this study there has been a complete metamorphosis of the way nuclear hazard control policy has been developed. At the beginning of the period policy decisions were based mainly on the advice resulting from fairly confidential deliberations of specialists working in the nuclear field. By the end of the period discussion of policy options was open and often very protracted, as typified by the Windscale Inquiry into the application, by British Nuclear Fuels Ltd., for planning permission to build a reprocessing plant for nuclear fuel. The inquiry lasted 100 days and it is claimed cost about £2 million.(4)

The moral aspects of hazard control policy have also undergone considerable metamorphosis. No matter how well intentioned the specialists dealing with policy at the beginning of the period were, the conclusion cannot be escaped that there was no real attempt to discuss openly the risks the State should be allowed to impose on the public. By the end of the period a major part of the public discussion about the acceptability of nuclear power, as illustrated by the Windscale Inquiry, was related to the moral issue of what level of risk could reasonably be imposed on the public.

Nuclear power has three inherent features that combine to give it a unique interest. These features are that in Britain and in many other countries nuclear power is a completely state controlled activity, the fuel for nuclear reactors can be the source of the material necessary for the production of atom bombs, and nuclear power installations could be potentially vulnerable to a terrorist attack.

The fact that nuclear power reactors are state owned could have resulted in questions related to their control being treated entirely as a confidential government matter, and therefore protected from public scrutiny. Certainly all matters concerned with the manufacture of nuclear weapons have always been protected from public gaze, which is in complete contrast to the openness that nuclear power reactor matters have been dealt with latterly. The extent to which the increase in openness of discussion is a response to interest group activity is a matter that is given some consideration in the analysis which is presented in the chapters that follow.

Nuclear reactor fuel has always been a potential source of the plutonium from which nuclear weapons can be made. The first British power reactors at Calder Hall were built with the twin objectives of producing electricity and producing the plutonium required for the manufacture of British nuclear weapons.* This special characteristic of uranium has given the supply of nuclear fuel and the development of a capability for reprocessing used fuel a special political significance. It led the American government to have for a few years, just after the second world war, legislation to prevent American nuclear information being passed to other countries. As the use of nuclear power has grown throughout the world its political significance in international terms has also grown. An illustration of this is given by the fact that in 1977 President Carter found it necessary to discuss the question of the supply of nuclear fuel with the Prime Ministers of India and Germany.

Concern about the possibility of nuclear material being diverted from the fuel cycle, and leading to the spread of nuclear weapons is at the root of the concern that terrorists could attempt to obtain nuclear material by force. With the increase in terrorism all processes involving hazardous materials must be considered as potential targets. This has resulted in security precautions becoming associated with many ordinary activities. Security checks are now the accepted practice at airports and public exhibitions, and access to many factories and offices is now restricted. Another manifestation of the terrorist problem is that the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority security police are, as a result of special legislation, authorised to carry guns.

Up to the present (1981) no study has been published dealing specifically with the factors that have influenced the formation of nuclear power hazard control policy in Britain, although there have been many studies of other aspects of nuclear power that have given useful background to this study. These other studies can be divided into four categories. There have been (a) studies of the general history of nuclear power, (b) studies dealing specifically with the technical aspects of nuclear power hazards, (c) studies written to support the anti-nuclear case, and (d) studies written to support the pro-nuclear case. The contribution that these existing studies made to the argument in this thesis can be summarised briefly as follows. Of the studies on the general history of nuclear power in Britain pride of place must be given to the works of Professor Margaret Gowing. In Britain and Atomic Energy 1939–1945(5) she gives the official history of the part Britain played in the development of the atomic bomb during the Second World War, and identifies the main actors and the roles they played. In this study she also constructs a picture of the relationships that existed between the various countries that participated in the atomic bomb project during the war. In the two subsequent volumes of her study covering the period from 1945–1952 Professor Gowing takes the history of atomic energy in Britain up to the time when the first British bomb was exploded.(6) These two volumes, which are also an official history, deal specially with British policy making and policy execution in the period before the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority was formed and before a commitment was made to build a series of nuclear power reactors. Professor Gowing concentrates on general nuclear policy, although she does mention the early discussion of safety issues in relation to choice of reactor type and site selection. (7) In the period covered by Professor Gowing hazard control policy, of the type covered in this study, was hardly even at an embryonic stage. Nevertheless, her study is particularly useful as it gives a detailed account of the various actors concerned with nuclear matters, and the positions they took up, before the major programme of civil nuclear power station building was started.

In a rather different vein is the study by Dr Jensen, which was published in 1969, dealing with the likely future development of nuclear power as then envisaged. (8) The study opens with a review of the predicted growth in demand for energy and the problems of satisfying the demand. Attention is drawn to the views, held in some quarters at the time, that nuclear power was likely to be more expensive than conventional power plants and that part of the high cost was due to nuclear plant having to be built to satisfy stringent safety requirements.(9)

In examining the rate at which various European countries proposed to exploit nuclear power attention is drawn to the fact that the British Government’s view appeared to be that improvement in living standards would require increased supplies of energy. Also the opinion is expressed by Dr Jensen that only a few people were likely to be worried about the risks associated with nuclear power! (10)

Development of international co-operation associated with nuclear power was analysed both at the level of government sponsored organisation and of industrial organisations. Particular attention was directed at the role of Euratom. It was claimed that the original intention of the sponsoring governments was that Euratom should be the powerhouse for European development of nuclear power but this intention was not realised as countries preferred to develop their own national programmes. (11) At the level of industry international co-operation was very positive; the leading American nuclear companies like General Electric and Westinghouse became closely involved with the companies designing and building nuclear power plants in Germany, France, Belgium and Italy. (12) This co-operation between American and European designers resulted in the early European designs of water moderated reactors following closely American designs.

In his conclusions Dr Jensen shows how carefully comparisons of the cost of electricity generation using various types of fuel, have to be made. He stresses the importance of the variation in coal price between power stations sited in different parts of the country.(13) Obviously as the study was made before the oil crisis of 1973 the pattern of fuel prices was very different from the pattern in 1978. The final paragraph of the book brings together the central features of the economic and safety argument in the following way:

If cheap energy is the obvious desirable long-term goal of any energy policy in all industrialized countries, it is at least equally clear that this objective must be sought and achieved in a manner that is commensurate with any given country’s overall economic and social well-being. As far as the United Kingdom is concerned, this would appear to lie in a less ambitiously sized second nuclear programme, its diversification to include at least one large scale high temperature reactor, and a continued high priority emphasis on fast breeder research and development where competition from the United States, Germany, Japan, and perhaps France, promises to be severe. Above all, it is hoped that in the haste to pluck the rich and promising fruits of the future development of nuclear power, the responsible authorities in the industrialized countries of the world, and of the United Kingdom in particular, will not yield to the pressures and temptation of exacting too great a sacrifice from the present-day hewers of coal and drawers of hydrocarbon fuels.

A critical assessment of the role of nuclear power in international relations by Arnold Kramish was published in 1963.(14) The study was made at the invitation of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, and partly supported by the RAND Corporation, so to some extent had a bias towards the views held in the United States of America. Kramish expressed doubts about nuclear power being exploited without increasing the risk of war but suggested that co-operation on solving safety problems associated with the peaceful uses of atomic energy might help to resolve the issue.(15) He was careful to draw attention to the apparent anomaly in the way the hazards inherent in burning fossil fuel were viewed as compared with nuclear power hazards and expressed a certain amount of confidence that a solution would be found to the safety problems of nuclear power when nuclear systems were competitive with fossil fuelled plants.(16) Kramish concluded his assessment with the suggestion that the risks associated with the exploitation of nuclear power were most likely to be acceptably attenuated by co-operation through international organisations such as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the European Nuclear Energy Agency (ENEA) and Euratom.(17)

The early days of the American nuclear programme and the United States Atomic Energy Commission are described in two books, one by Hewlett and Anderson(18) and the other by Allardice and Trapnell.(19) Hewlett and Anderson trace the progress of the atom bomb project and identify the process by which the United States Atomic Energy Commission emerged. In the foreword to the book the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission’s Historical Advisory Committee rather succinctly described the development of nuclear energy in the following way: No other development in our lifetime has been fraught with such consequences for good or evil as has atomic fission. None has raised such challenging questions for the historian, the economist, the armed forces, the scientist and the engineers. The wartime scientific developments produced significant new techniques in public administration which came to be more widely used after the war, such as the enlistment of university and private contractors to perform new types of government activities. The fresh light this volume throws on the early history of these new techniques may prove helpful in clarifying current problems of conflict of interest in the military-industrial complex.(20)

Something of the authors’ concern about the social implications of nuclear power is expressed in their preface as follows:

"Despite Smyth’s* call for public discussion, the real issues posed by the exploitations of atomic energy failed to reach the American people during the succeeding decade. The fault lay partly in the layman’s disinclination to acquire the rudimentary technical knowledge necessary to understand the impact of this new force in his life. Politicians left technical details to the scientists; social scientists reacted with resignation or disdain to the newest manifestation of the scientific revolution in the twentieth century. The relatively few persons who were privileged to work behind the security barrier imposed by the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 found themselves more isolated in a world their fellow citizens had never seen.

Within a decade there were signs of a change. A new atomic energy law in 1954 liberalized security restrictions in the interest of international co-operation and civilian uses of atomic energy. The widening gulf between the physical and the social sciences caused growing concern."(21)

In the later chapters of this study the analysis of the factors that have influenced policy draws on the Hewlett and Anderson study for historical data about the actors concerned with the control of atomic energy during and immediately after the Second World War.

The book by Allardice and Trapnell is very different in style, as both authors had been concerned with public relations and had spent part of their career in the United States Atomic Energy Commission. Interest in their study stems primarily from the fact that they consider more recent developments in the United States of America (up to 1972) and give some indication of the impact of the environmentalists on nuclear policy. In their study they identify the manner in which bureaucracy surrounding nuclear safety and licensing procedures has grown.(22) The following quotations illustrate their essential view of the problems of public concern about reactor safety:

The AEC regulatory process proved workable and successful for the initial period of growth, as indicated by the number of nuclear plants in operation or under construction in the 1967–69 period. But the 1970’s have changed things. Recent public concern with the environment presents a challenge of which the AEC licensing and regulatory staff is only too well aware. AEC hopes that the greatly expanded demand for licenses can be met by shortening the issuing process on the basis of the safety experience and record of the plants licensed in the 1960’s and early 1970’s. But concerned members of the public, some technically qualified spokesmen for environmentalists, and new government groups like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Council on Environmental Quality are not so sure the standards applied to the plants built during the 1960’s were what they should be. L. Manning Muntzing has the job of seeing they are adequate for the 1970’s.(23)

The literature dealing with the technical aspects of nuclear power reactor hazards is very extensive. One recent book that reviews the technical aspects of assessing reactor safety is Nuclear Reactor Safety edited by Professor Farmer.(24) Professor Farmer, who was until 1979 Safety Adviser to the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, and is visiting Professor in Industrial Hazards at Imperial College, has for many years been a leading authority on reactor safety. He has had a seminal influence on the development of reactor safety philosophy throughout the world. In the preface to the book Professor Farmer describes how the quantitative approach to the evaluation of reactor safety has developed over the years. The following quotation from the last paragraph of the preface summarizes the safety philosophy he supports:

We cannot achieve zero risk; we can reduce the likelihood of serious accidents by the effective application of relevant technical and managerial skills.(25)

The contributors to the book are all specialists who either are, or have been, members of the Safety and Reliability Directorate of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority. Their contributions describe the nature of radiation hazards associated with reactors, and the environmental consequences of reactor accidents. In a contribution on calculated risk, G. D. Bell makes the following rather prophetic statement about the importance of reactor safety:

Certainly a serious accident to a nuclear reactor in the near future anywhere in the world would have repercussions on the building programme in all countries and could create the antipathy to nuclear matters inevitable after the initial military use of fission power. Since that time public anxiety has focussed successively on the genetic risk, the levels of permissible dosage, the possibility of catastrophic accidents, and the long-term storage of fission products. With the development of fast reactors, the issue of plutonium safeguards is coming to the fore. The risks presented by nuclear power have been more thoroughly explored in public debate than any other aspect of industrial development, and it is only right that the industry should be required to allay public fears of this kind by presenting the best assessment of the various risks and by attempting to put them into the context of the general background of risk to which human society is exposed.(26)

Most of the rest of the book is devoted to describing the quantitative methods, and data that can be used, to assess reactor safety. The book concludes with two chapters reviewing the nature of possible reactor fault conditions, one chapter deals with thermal reactors, and the other deals with fast reactors.

In 1975 the important report on reactor safety that the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission had sponsored Professor Rasmussen of MIT to prepare was published.(27) The importance of this report is that it presented the first comprehensive quantified assessment of the risks associated with the reactors used in the United States of America. To quantify the risks Rasmussen devised a form of assessment somewhat similar to that proposed by Farmer a few years before. The report was widely discussed and a certain amount of controversy developed about the methodology and data used.

As a result of the discussions of the Rasmussen report Morris K. Udall, Chairman of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, asked the Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Committee to establish a group to review the report.(28) In June 1977 the Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Committee appointed Professor Harold Lewis, of the University of California, to chair a small group to review the Rasmussen report.(29) Together with Professor Lewis there were seven people in the group; four were academics, one was from the Environmental Protection Agency, one from Brookhaven National Laboratory, and one from the Electric Power Research Insitute.(30)

Professor Lewis’s review group endorsed a large part of the Rasmussen report in the following way:

"WASH-1400 was a substantial advance over previous attempts to estimate the risks of the nuclear option. The methodology has set a framework that can be used more broadly to assess choices involving both technical consequences and impacts on humans.

WASH-1400 was largely successful in at least three ways: in making the study of reactor safety more rational, in establishing the topology of many accident sequences, and in delineating procedures through which quantitative estimates of the risk can be devised for those sequences for which a data base exists."(31)

The Review Group made some criticism of the methods used in the Rasmussen report. They were particularly critical about some of the statistical data used and the way it was interpreted and presented.(31) Perhaps more important is the criticism that the Review Group made of the Nuclear Regulatory Commissions for not making full use of the Rasmussen Report. The Review Group’s criticism was made in the following terms:

"The achievements of WASH-1400 in identifying the relative importance of various accidents classes have been inadequately reflected in NRC’s policies. For example, WASH-1400 concluded that transients, small LOCA*, and human errors are important contributors to overall risk, yet their study is not adequately reflected in the priorities of either the research or regulatory groups."(31)

A rather more philosophical evaluation of the hazards associated with nuclear reactors and the long-term implications of the whole nuclear fuel cycle is given in the sixth report of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution.(32) The Commission reviewed the risks associated with nuclear power in the context of the whole energy policy. With such a wide ranging review it is almost inevitable that there is a certain amount of conflict between the various conclusions. The following quotations from the report illustrate its tenor and the conflict that arises from the qualified support that is given to the continued use of nuclear power.(33)

At the levels of radiation likely to be permitted in relation to possible somatic effects, the genetic effects should be of little concern.

The risk of serious accident in any single reactor is extremely small; the hazards posed by reactor accidents are not unique in scale nor of such a kind as to suggest that nuclear power should be abandoned for this reason alone. There are substantial environmental objections to a nuclear power programme on the scale envisaged in official projections.

It appears possible that an alternative strategy could be devised that would avoid the future need for a large nuclear programme based on fast reactors. The abandonment of nuclear fission power would, however, be neither wise nor justified. But a major commitment to fission power and a plutonium economy should be postponed as long as possible.

The Commission also made some criticism of the various institutions concerned with controlling the hazards associated with nuclear power, and these are dealt with at some length later in this study.

Slightly to one side of the straightforward discussion of the technicalities of reactor safety is a book by Dr Lowrance of Harvard that was published in 1976(34) dealing with a wide range of risks from DDT to lead and from Thalidomide to noise. The safety problems associated with nuclear reactors appear to be considered as just one of the many risks man faces today, and not something that is greater than all other risks. For all types of risk Dr Lowrance attempts to identify moral criteria for judging their acceptability. The following quotations from his analysis of the factors influencing decisions involving risk suggest the nature of the dilemma facing the decision maker:(35)

Distribution of risks, benefits, and costs may be a political issue, but in many senses it is still an empirical matter. Who will end up paying? Will those who benefit be the ones paying? Will those at risk be the ones to benefit? Often the answers can be surveyed or estimated.

Appraising the above empirical factors generates the following derivative characterisations, which are matters of personal and social value judgement. Safety is the degree to which risks are judged acceptable. Benefit is the degree to which efficacies are judged desirable. Equity of distribution of risks, benefits, and costs is a judgement of fairness and social justice. The above notations are logically symmetrical: safety is to risk as benefit is to efficacy. Risk and efficacy are matters of measurable empirical fact; safety and benefit are matters of value judgement.

This brief review of the technical literature does not by any means provide an exhaustive list of the literature on the technology of reactor safety. Each of the key documents mentioned refers to many other relevant and important sources. However, the list would not be adequate without mention of the proceedings of important symposia and conferences such as the United Nations International Conferences on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, and the International Atomic Energy Agency symposium on Principles and Standards of Reactor Safety. The importance of these proceedings is that they give public exposure to the technical safety arguments which have taken place in official circles. Later in this study these proceedings will be referred to and their function put into perspective.

The literature presenting the case against nuclear power has become quite extensive. Walter Patterson, who is on the staff of the anti-nuclear power group, Friends of the Earth Ltd., has written two books. In 1976 his book Nuclear Power was published,(36) in 1977 his second book, The Fissile Society was published.(37) In Nuclear Power Mr Patterson gives a simple but accurate introduction to nuclear reactors and the radiation hazards associated with them. The description he gives provides the non-specialist reader with a clear picture of the constructional differences between the various types of reactor. Over half the book is devoted to describing the various nuclear accidents that have taken place in the world, though the picture he paints tends to emphasize the problems of nuclear power and to overlook its successes. The dramatic description of the accidents might be held to obscure the objectivity of the case presented against nuclear power. The last two sentences of the book give Mr Patterson’s concluding message which, in itself, is difficult to disagree with:(38)

"Before we commit ourselves and our descendants to a nuclear future, it is vital that we concur in and understand the nature of the commitment. If we undertake it now we do so for all