A reader agrees with me:
Yes, the left is blind on this issue. As an environmental engineer, I’m always puzzled by the reaction of so-called environmentalists who immediately reject nuclear. But the right isn’t any better. Neither political party will implement reprocessing. One, because they reject nuclear in general, and both, because terrorists.
We as a nation do not reprocess our fuel, thus we have massive amounts of fuel that must be stored. The Yucca Mountain depository was inadequate by the time it was built, with more spent fuel than capacity. In the 1970s, reprocessing was banned out of fear of terrorists getting their hands on plutonium. There are downsides to reprocessing – namely the process does create some very toxic waste streams (much more so than normal spent fuel) and potentially weapons-grade plutonium. However, France has reprocessed for decades and we’ve figured out techniques to avoid weapons grade fuel.
People don’t understand nuclear power and are needlessly scared of it because of Chernobyl and poor education on the topic (even in college). Having worked in refineries, coal plants, hydroelectric dams, and nuclear power plants, I would rather live inside a nuclear plant than within 10 miles of the others.
From an attorney who focuses on energy policy:
The basic thrust of your point is well-taken: environmentalists must be strategic about how we deal with nuclear energy, and forcing the immediate closure of nuclear plants is a counterproductive strategy, especially in parts of the country (such as the Northeast) where resources are already stretched to capacity and grid reliability is a pressing issue.
However, there are two things that you miss in your post.
First, increased reliance on nuclear energy would do essentially nothing to disentangle us from the Middle East. That part of the world supplies us with, of course, a significant amount of oil. But in the US, oil is consumed primarily for vehicle fuel, for industrial uses (i.e., plastics), and for home and industrial heating (among various other things); only a tiny fraction of it is user for electricity generation. In fact, only about 1 percent of our current electricity derives from burning oil at power plants, and no new oil-fired units are predicted in the near future. Nuclear fission, on the other hand, has only really only one major civilian application: generating electricity. (Of course, there are also various military uses for it, including weapons material and powering large ships and submarines.) There simply isn’t much overlap between oil and nuclear, and shifting our dispatch significantly to electricity generated from nuclear plants won’t help us much extricate ourselves from the Middle East.
Second, there’s economics. Let’s put aside for a moment all the other problems related with nuclear, such as safety, localized health impacts (which are highly uncertain), proliferation risks, and the perpetual problem of waste storage and disposal. Nuclear electricity generation is, at the heart of it, just a damn expensive way to boil water. Even disregarding the generous public subsidies that nuclear energy enjoys, its overall cost per megawatt-hour is still more than that of various renewable energy sources, such as onshore wind and geothermal, and is comparable with that of solar (both rooftop solar and larger-scale generation). Moreover, the cost of solar is diminishing rapidly, and can be expected to do so on into the future; nuclear, not so much. Yes, many of these sources receive subsidies as well, but the rapid cost-saving innovations that are occurring as we speak more than justify that from an economic standpoint (to say nothing of the environmental benefits).
In short, while nuclear power plays a role in our current generation mix, it’s not the long-term solution to our electricity needs. Increasing our reliance on renewables and maximizing our opportunities for energy efficiency are.
Another reader speculates:
While I agree that there are many in the environmental movement who are on the wrong side of nuclear power, I think your previous post is too quick to label it as an ideological issue. Rather, I think it’s generational. I know that I and many others in my age range (born in the mid-’80s) are pretty agnostic when it comes to nuclear power. Our parents, however, lived through Three-Mile Island, through Chernobyl, or May 1953, when Chicago was pummeled with rain carrying radioactive dust. These were serious errors caused by either a lack of understanding or a lack of thorough oversight in nuclear power. My generation has never lived through these. The closest we have is Fukushima, and it’s hard to relate to a place that is that far away.
Another is less blasé about the dangers:
Just as you need to calculate the health and environmental effects into the electric cost of fossil fuel plants, you have to calculate the cost not only of waste disposal, safety, and security precautions, but the risk – however low – of having to evacuate and abandon an area in case of an incident like Fukushima and Chernobyl. What do you figure the cost per kilowatt hour at Fukushima was after adding in the still ongoing and fraught cleanup process there?
Every few decades nature seems to remind us that it is very hard to engineer a structure to account for every possibility. I am all for an everything-is-on-the-table approach to combat global warming and don’t discount the possibility that we will need to build more nuclear power production. But the burden is certainly on the industry and the government to convince the public that our existing plants are safe, nuclear waste is being responsibly taken care of, and future plants are prepared as they can be for “unpredictable” events.
The Dish 