Part I: Getting Started

How to Use the Handbook

If you need just a definition or quick explanation, go directly to the glossary in Part III. For example, if you want to know what a "curie" is, go to the glossary and look up the definition. You will find that it is "the basic unit used to describe the intensity of radioactivity in a sample of material. The curie is equal to 37 billion (3.7 x 1010) disintegrations per second, which is approximately the activity of 1 gram of radium." If you want a more detailed discussion of a particular topic, go to the table of contents and look over the topics in Part II. For example, for information on how a curie relates to a becquerel and how both are related to health impacts, turn to Section 1 of Part II. It provides background information about radionuclides, key issues related to public health, possible stories, and pitfalls noted in previous coverage of health impacts.

Each brief is self-contained. Reporters should be able to get what they need from a given brief; in other words, we hoped to reduce the need to search through the book. This means that there is some unavoidable redundancy among the briefs. To assist those who need more information, within the briefs, we cross-reference other briefs. The index provides further guidance.

We clustered the briefs into five sections within Part II. Section 1 examines nuclear materials and radioactivity—that is, what they are, how they are formed, where they are found, and most important, effects of radiation on humans. Section 2 examines nuclear power and other nonmilitary uses of radionuclides, including nuclear medicine and food irradiation. It explores issues that have arisen during the past half-century, such as nuclear-energy safety systems, the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island events, and the economics of nuclear power. Section 3 focuses on nuclear waste management. Briefs describe nuclear waste, how and where it is managed, monitoring of waste management sites, the ecological impacts of cleanup, and long-term surveillance and maintenance of waste management sites. Section 4 focuses on military-related nuclear issues, such as managing nuclear weapons, radiological dispersal devices (dirty bombs), nonproliferation initiatives, nuclear terrorism, and international and national policy related to these. Section 5 reviews climate change, public perception, and risk communication focused on nuclear energy and waste issues.

Reporters who are not familiar with environmental risk, economic, and technology assessment, risk perception, and theories about how technology fits into the larger context of resource management will find helpful background in the short overviews in Part I, "Crosscutting Themes."

Why Now? Why This Discussion?

Written by Michael R. Greenberg, with comments by John F. Ahearne and Richard L. Garwin

The simple answer to "Why now?" is that the governments and people of the world are being driven to consider nuclear power and other energy sources, along with conservation, as options for meeting increasing energy demand. This is not the first time this pressure has gripped the United States, but the increasing fear about climate change has added another dimension. Also, the United States, Russia, France, and Great Britain face major nuclear weapons waste issues as a cold war legacy.

Beginning with the nuclear energy issue, on October 17, 1973, the members of the OAPEC (Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries) embargoed petroleum shipments to the United States, some of Israel's allies in Western Europe (initially the Netherlands) and Japan because of their support for Israel against Egypt and Syria in the Yom Kippur War. Just before the oil embargo in 1973, the average gas price at the pump was $1.80 per gallon (adjusted for inflation to 2007 dollars). In 1981, the average price was $3.00 (a 70% increase). These price increases sent a recessionary ripple through the economies of the dependent nations that spread across the world. High oil prices persisted until 1986. The embargo and price increases sparked an interest in exploration for conservation and new sources of fossil fuels. Governments' monetary policies became more restrictive, and interest in nuclear power increased.

France, Belgium, Sweden, and Japan now heavily depend on nuclear power. In the United States, even before the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor meltdown in 1979, U.S. commercial business interest in nuclear power was waning. A worldwide recession during the oil embargo caused economists to reduce their estimates of the growth of electricity demand, and the price of new reactors seemed high to U.S. utilities. Furthermore, the U.S. economy grew despite the lack of growth of energy use. Serious efforts were made by all sectors of the U.S. economy to economize energy use. After 1986, the year of the Chernobyl nuclear incident, the economy continued to grow; while oil prices declined and remained relatively low until the new millennium. Reprocessing nuclear fuel that has been used once in a nuclear reactor to generate electricity was considered too risky by the United States because it has the potential to be used for nuclear weapons proliferation. The incident at Chernobyl along with the extensive time required to construct and license nuclear power plants increased costs and further undermined the credibility of nuclear power. National leaders and utilities concluded that nuclear power in the United States was a bad idea. Other countries, such as Japan and France did not agree and moved forward with nuclear power plant operations.

The events of the current decade are forcing reconsideration of policies examined during the embargo and price increases of the 1970s. The political instability of the world's oil producing nations has created a fear of political blackmail by petroleum supplying nations in the United States and other countries. The rapid rise and fall of petroleum prices seems inexplicable even to some experts. Also, a new consideration is that during the past decade scientists have become convinced that the burning of fossil fuels is leading to global warming, whereas nuclear power does not contribute notably to greenhouse gases that lead to global warming. Therefore, nuclear power, despite its history of environmental and economic risks and despite waste management...