Tests of river water near the spill found high levels of lead, cadmium, thallium and other toxic heavy metals. One sample tested by the Environmental Protection Agency on Dec. 23 had an arsenic concentration 149 times the federal safety standard.

Local folk were caught off-guard

"The disaster carries a hint of irony for longtime residents," reported the Los Angeles Times. "If there was a concern about ecological threats, it came from a few miles south, where TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority] operates a nuclear plant."

Indeed, the Watts Bar Nuclear Generating Station, about 20 miles downstream from the Kingston plant, has been a focus of intense protest and litigation by environmental groups ever since it was licensed for construction in 1973. Yet it is the Kingston plant, never really on green radar, which is suddenly in the news.

These sister TVA plants produce almost exactly the same amount of electricity, but their waste streams are very different.

About 96 percent (by weight) of the Kingston plant’s waste can’t be seen from any helicopter, since it has vanished into the air through tall, twin smokestacks.

In 2007, Kingston emitted 11 million tons of carbon dioxide (the principal "greenhouse gas" driving climate change), 51,000 tons of sulfur dioxide (which causes acid rain), 12,500 tons of nitrogen oxides (300 times more potent than carbon dioxide for global warming, and a source of acid rain plus low-lying ozone), 1,700 tons of hydrochloric acid aerosol, 330 tons of sulfuric acid aerosol, 230 tons of hydrogen fluoride, 11 tons of ammonia and 30 tons of toxic heavy metals — arsenic, barium, mercury, selenium, etc. — in airborne particulates (smoke).

Except for the carbon dioxide, all these substances harm the respiratory systems of people and animals. However, the power plant’s emissions could have been worse. Because Kingston uses "clean coal" technology (in one of its dirtiest incarnations), most of the particulate emissions that darken raw coal smoke never go up the smokestacks. Particles of smoke and ash, mostly in the 10-micron range, are captured and hauled off to storage.

In 2007, Kingston impounded about 400,000 tons (dry) of this "fly ash," with a total volume of about half a million cubic yards, which contained 1,100 tons of toxic heavy metal compounds, including 24 tons of arsenic, 720 tons of barium, 25 tons of lead, 90 tons of vanadium, and roughly 10 tons of radioactive thorium and uranium.

Unfortunately, water seeping through fly ash readily dissolves heavy metals and washes them into rivers, groundwater and drinking supplies. It was this poison-leaching, cancer-causing fly ash slurry that recently surprised the Kingston plant’s neighbors.

Just a half-day’s float down the once-pristine river is Watts Bar. This, not Kingston, is the TVA power plant that environmentalists have been denouncing for decades as a public menace because of its unmanageable wastes.

In 2007, the Watts Bar nuclear reactor produced 26 tons of waste, with a total volume of 3.5 cubic yards. This is in the form of dense metal-oxide pellets, stored (for now) in long metal tubes or "fuel rods," that are mounted in metal racks and immersed in water.

In a well-guarded building, somewhere on the 5-square-mile grounds of the Watts Bar plant, there is a concrete-lined pool smaller in area than an Olympic-sized swimming pool that holds all the used fuel rods from the plant’s history of providing electricity to 650,000 Tennessee homes, with enough room to keep future spent fuel for at least another decade.

These rods are very radioactive, especially for the first few years, until their shorter-lived components decay.

The water around them serves as an absorbing shield. The Watts Bar plant managers expect the spent fuel to eventually be placed in a dry, underground repository for safe, long-term storage. However, anti-nuclear activists, unconvinced by the analyses of Energy Department scientists, think that some of the waste will contaminate a patch of desert, raising its level of radioactivity measurably above the background after perhaps 10,000 to 1 million years.

With the planet being ravaged wholesale by the burning of fossil fuels, such speculative concerns seem oddly misdirected. Moreover, the issue is very likely moot because of advantageous new technologies on the horizon.

In particular, 95 percent of nuclear "waste" can be burned as fuel in advanced fast-neutron reactors after suitable reprocessing ("pyroprocessing"). This promises to wring about 20 times more energy out of "spent" fuel rods than they have produced so far. The ultimate waste of nuclear power generation will likely consist only of fission products (split atoms), which decay to a level of radioactivity equal to that of the uranium ore from which the fuel originally came after only 400 years.

Even if this advanced technology is never developed (which is unlikely since all parts of it have been demonstrated in labs and pilot projects), the contrast between the Kingston and Watts Bar waste streams should be clear.

Kingston produces 400,000 times more waste, with vast toxic, radioactive and climate-destroying components, all released into the environment. Watts Bar’s waste stream is fully contained, and so minuscule in volume that its management poses no substantial economic or logistical burdens. It has never hurt anyone, and there’s no good reason to think that it ever will.

One last note: The anti-nuclear organization Greenpeace has called Watts Bar "a lemon" and "a clear and present danger," but Watts Bar has never had an operational accident in its entire working life. In 2006-08, it ran for 437 days straight at nearly full capacity without a glitch, stopping only for scheduled refueling.

Nuclear energy provides about 20 percent of our nation’s electricity, but not a single person has ever been killed in a U.S. commercial nuclear power plant accident, not in the industry’s whole 51-year history. (The 1979 Three Mile Island incident harmed equipment, but not people. Some radioactive steam was vented up a stack, but so little that there’s only a small chance that it caused a single case of human cancer.)

Many Americans still learn to fear nuclear power from groups like Greenpeace, or from The Simpsons on television. This would be funny if the environmental devastation of fossil-fuel burning was not so tragic and so unnecessary.

Robert C. Duncan is a research scientist at the University of Texas in Austin and is on leave to write a book.

This article is included on SENAA International's Web site to underscore the fact that coal defies the term "clean energy source" on several levels. It is not our intention to champion nuclear power plants as "clean energy sources" by any means.

While the author of the article seems to favor nuclear power plants as a clean source of energy, the fact of the matter is that nuclear power plants generate nuclear waste that has far more destructive and deadly potential than anything that coal fired plants generate. Both are black marks on our ecological history.

There is still no safe way to store the nuclear waste generated by nuclear power plants. Using nuclear energy to generate electricity for public consumption is a technology that was implemented too early in its development. After all its years of use, the safe disposal of nuclear waste has yet to be developed. Safe means of disposal or use of nuclear waste should have been developed before the first nuclear power plant was ever built. Instead, it seemed to have been an afterthought.

The solution of choice remains the sealing of waste in steel drums that are subject to oxidation and subsequent leakage and storing that waste on Native American land, where the inevitable deadly consequences will be the agonizing annihilation of our people.

That is the truth about nuclear energy and just how "clean" it really is as a source of energy.

It is SENAA International's contention that nuclear power plants, together with coal fired plants, are among the dirtiest and most environmentally hazardous means of generating electricity that have ever been developed and used. Furthermore, it is our contention that both technologies should be phased entirely out of existence at the earliest possible opportunity.

Nuclear power plants should never have been built without an effective way of neutralizing or disposing of the radioactive waste products. It isn't as if those who designed the nuclear power plants had no knowledge of how dangerous the nuclear waste would be or how much nuclear waste would be generated over a given period of time.

SENAA International's founder is acquainted with several people who work or have worked at TVA's Watts Bar and Sequoyah nuclear facilities. Each and every one of them has stories to tell of radiation leaks;  weld joints cracking, leaking radiation contaminated water into the environment; radiation related illnesses among both employees and nearby residents; disproportionately high incidents of cancer among nearby residents; and certain areas where employees have to change their radiation exposure badges regularly due to contamination from a persistent radiation leak. Those are facts of nuclear energy that the author of the above article has failed to mention and that the NRC would keep from public knowledge.