Electric Power: Maneuvering in the Coal and Nuclear Debates

Coal: Social Costs and Transport

The problems created by coal are more easily understood than those associated with nuclear fuels. Coal production and use involve a variety of social costs, only some of which are reflected in the price. The threat of explosions, cave-ins, and occupational disease such as "black lung" makes underground coal mining one of the most hazardous of occupations. Underground mining also causes subsidence on the surface, with damage to overlying structures and land.

Strip mining can serious damage the land if good reclamation practices are not followed. In semiarid or arid regions, satisfactory reclamation may not be possible at all and, if it is, may take many years to restore the land to its original condition. Even where rainfall is adequate, methods to contour mine on very steep slopes without damaging the land have yet to be developed.

Much of the new coal production that is expected to be developed will be in the western coal regions where the coal is low in sulfur and can be strip-mined at low cost. The deposits are mostly located in sparsely populated areas having community services and a tax base suited to a small population. New large-scale mining developments will, in many instances, require so many employees that local schools, hospitals, roads, and housing will be unable to satisfy the new demands on them. Moreover, the tax base to finance the new infrastructure will take years to develop, so that the local communities will be unable to gear up for the influx of new residents.

For these socioeconomic and environmental reasons the western states where the low-sulfur, strippable coal is found are ambivalent about the development of new coal mines. These states have previously experienced the "boom and bust" cycle that accompanied the development of other mineral resources, and they wish to avoid repetition of such swings in the local economy.

At the electrical generation site, coal causes numerous air, water, and solid waste disposal problems. The major air pollutants from the combustion of coal are sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides, and particulates. In large, pulverized coal-fired boilers the amount of sulfur oxides emitted depends on the sulfur content of the coal used, with the amount of nitrogen oxides dependent on the nitrogen content of the coal and on the combustion conditions. In any case, coal produces more nitrogen oxides than equivalent quantites of either oil or natural gas. The amount of particulates emitted depends mainly on the ash content of the coal and on the type of ash removal system employed. These three air pollutants at sufficiently high concentration have been shown to produce damage to health, eye irritation, reduced visibility, materials damage, acid rain, and adverse aesthetic impacts.

Reduction of nitrogen oxides at coal-fired plants can best be accomplished by changes in the method of combustion—two-stage combustion, recycling of flue gas, and so on. Removal of sulfur oxides from the flue gas is much more difficult once they have been produced.

Pipelines versus railroads. Until recently, the one link in the cycle that had generated little controversy was coal transportation. When carried by conventional means, coal creates little adverse environmental or other effects. But proposals to move coal over long distances in pipelines as a coal-slurry have raised questions about the use of scarce water resources. The pipeline transport of coal consumes half as much water on a "coal-used basis" as conventionally designed synthetic natural gas plants and about a tenth as much as conventionally designed thermoelectric power plants; nevertheless, the consideration of slurry pipelines seems to have aroused the greatest political concerns because citizens in the western states perceive water used for pipeline transport as the export of a scare resource.

Illustrative of the political sensitivity of the issue is an incident related to western energy development and the western water problem. Michael Rieber and two other researchers at the Institute for Advanced Computation at the University of Illinois prepared a study for the National Science Foundation which concluded, among other things, that railroads are superior to slurry pipelines for coal transport. While pipelines seem to cost about half as much if built from scratch, railroads seem to cost about half as much as a new slurry pipeline if an existing roadbed is used, even a rather poor one. Moreover, the study claimed that railroads were also superior in terms of environmental impacts, conservation of scarce resources, and flexibility.

The railroads were particularly happy with these findings—a spokesman for the Burlington Northern noting the "objectivity and currency" of the study. But pipeline builders were not. Energy Transportation Systems, Inc. (ETSI), a consortium owned by several firms including the Bechtel Corporation—with interests in slurry pipeline construction—complained to the NSF of "fundamental deficiencies and factual errors." Finally, the NSF required Rieber and his co-authors to put a disclaimer on the report, indicating that the study did not represent an official NSF position. Such disclaimers are required under NSF guidelines, but seldom enforced.

Rieber found the required disclaimer ironic since Bechtel had recently prepared an energy report for NSF, which concluded that pipelines were superior and had not put any disclaimer on it.

Press accounts, charges, and countercharges by lawyers, researchers, and others caused the NSF considerable embarrassment.

The incident will soon be forgotten, but it serves as a reminder that there are immense stakes in the transportation of western coal, to say nothing of generating electricity from it. Personal and social values, cultural life styles, the structure of major institutions, and differences between national and local interests are involved. The resolution of these problems will require sober deliberations.

Nuclear Power: Reorganization and Reappraisal

The uncertainties related to some technical features of fission power, the future demand for electricity, and the costs of constructing nuclear plants have contributed to a slowdown in the expansion of nuclear fission-generating capacity. In 1975 there were several changes in the framework of nuclear regulation and in nuclear technology assessment that lent themselves to a resolution of the stalemate. But at the same time the opposition to the expansion of nuclear power became more articulate and better organized during the year, so that, on balance, it is not clear that Americans are much closer to a consensus on the future of nuclear power in the United States.

For many years the old Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) had been burdened by its mandate, under the Atomic Energy Act, to perform two potentially conflicting functions. The AEC was (1) to promote the technological expansion of nuclear power, and (2) to regulate that expansion so as to ensure the protection of workers in the nuclear industry, and of the general public, from the hazards of radiation. Critics of the AEC had often charged that these functions were incompatible, and with the end of 1974, in recognition of this problem, the AEC was broken into two parts. Responsibility for the technological development was vested in the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) while responsibility for regulation was vested in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

The NRC moved to place its own stamp on regulatory policy in the key trouble points of the nuclear fuel cycle during 1975. Although it is too early to say what that stamp will be, there will be a new evaluation of the environmental problems of the long-term management of highly radioactive nuclear wastes. Because some of the waste products of the fission chain reaction retain substantial radioactivity for thousands of years, critics have argued that fission power is an unethical imposition on future generations of an uncertain but conceivably significant hazard.

Similarly, the NRC has announced that it will rule, in 1976, on whether to allow the recycle of plutonium from spent reactor fuel back into mixed oxide reactor fuel. Because plutonium recycle requires the chemical separation, in fuel reprocessing plants, of plutonium from spent reactor fuels, and because plutonium—unlike the low-enriched uranium in fresh reactor fuel—can be fashioned into a nuclear explosive relatively easily, this will be a monumental decision (even though a U.S. decision to forego reprocessing does not guarantee that other countries will do likewise). Safeguarding reprocessing facilities here and abroad against the diversion of reprocessed plutonium to weapons use will be one of the severe challenges of the new nuclear technology and diplomacy; present U.S. policy calls for the internationalization and international supervision of reprocessing facilities. Negotiations for international reactor sales and the associated possibility of spreading fuel facilities suggest that such supervision may come too late.

The possibility of the accidental release of radioactivity from a nuclear electric power plant probably is responsible for the lion's share of the anxieties surrounding the risks of nuclear power development. In its last year the AEC issued a draft version of a $3 million study of reactor safety, popularly known as the Rasmussen report after the study director, Norman Rasmussen, professor of nuclear engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And one of the first major reports issued by the new NRC is the final version of that study.

Since the report has been so widely publicized, because of the importance of the problem, and because of the careful nature of the study itself, it is important to be clear about what the report does and does not do. The report studied, and intended to study, only reactor accidents originating in mechanical failures and possibly nonmalicious human failures; releases of radioactivity associated with sabotage or malicious human action were explicitly not part of the study. And hazards outside the power reactor stage of the nuclear fuel cycle, such as the diversions of plutonium from a reprocessing plant, were not to be considered. With those important qualifications, the conclusions of the Rasmussen report can be qualitatively characterized as: the risks of illness, disability, and death imposed upon the general population by a nuclear industry of the scale anticipated for the next few decades is insignificant in comparison with other risks routinely accepted by most people in exchange for other things; for example, the risk of death in a commercial air transportation accident, which many travelers consciously accept in return for the convenience and time saving of air travel.

Do the Rasmussen conclusions "settle" the reactor safety issue? Not by themselves. The final decision will depend upon how people value the hazards analyzed by Rasmussen as well as those not included in his study—and how they act, through the political process, to articulate that evaluation. In 1976 there will be state referenda on nuclear power, the first one in California, which will begin to provide an answer. That answer will be conditioned by concerns that transcend the range of issues considered in the Rasmussen report.