MODERN TIMES
Art Hobson
ahobson@uark.edu
NWA Times 20 June 2009
What about nuclear
power?
We
Americans are so hung up in ideologies that we can't think straight. One of President Obama's major virtues
is his "get the job done" pragmatism, the opposite of George W.
Bush's ideological approach.
Nuclear
power is one of the many hot-button issues that arouse our ideologies. For conservatives, nuclear power could
solve our energy problem if we could just get rid of those pesky
environmentalists with their unnecessary restrictions. For pro-environment liberals, nuclear
power will poison the environment, cause large deadly accidents, and lead to
nuclear war. Both sides have for
decades shown an ideological fervor that's probably related to our fear and
fascination concerning the ghastly power of nuclear weapons.
Let's
take a pragmatic look.
Overpopulation
and industrialization drive an increasing demand for energy that's destroying
our environment. Global warming,
caused primarily by carbon emissions from human fossil fuel use, is the leading
problem. Nearly three-fourths of
America's carbon emissions comes from electricity and transportation. But future transportation will probably
be powered directly or indirectly by electricity. So three-quarters of the climate problem comes down to
electric power generation.
Industrialized
nations must reduce their carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050. If we can't manage this, most
scientists think we'll see catastrophic environmental damage.
Americans
get nearly half their electricity from coal, 20 percent from natural gas, and
20 percent from nuclear power.
"New renewables" such as wind and solar are small but rising
fast. Natural gas emits only half
as much carbon as coal, per unit of electricity. So coal is by far the main problem.
So
it's easy to see why expansion of nuclear power, which does not emit carbon, is
being widely considered. America's
first nuclear power plant opened in 1957 and soon expanded to 104, where it
stands today. However, because of
plant accidents at Three Mile Island in 1978 and Chernobyl (in the Soviet
Union) in 1986, controversy over what to do with nuclear waste, and nuclear
proliferation concerns, U.S. nuclear power's expected expansion stopped by
1980.
Today,
accidents and nuclear waste are vastly over-rated. Today's reactors are reasonably safe, and future reactors
will be safer. There were no
deaths at Three Mile Island, although some long-term cancer deaths are
likely. At Chernobyl, there were
50 radiation overdose deaths, and an expected 4000 long-term cancer
deaths. The utterly irresponsible
construction and operation of the Chernobyl plant is not likely to re-occur
anywhere. The 4000 probable cancer
deaths need to be viewed against the 24,000 probable deaths caused every year
in the U.S. alone from coal plant pollution.
Used
nuclear fuel rods, which remain radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years,
are the main waste disposal problem.
In 1987, Congress designated Yucca Mountain, Nevada, as the sole future
disposal site. Recently, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency specified
maximum permitted exposure rates for this site. These rates specified that an exposed individual living and
gathering food anywhere near Yucca Mountain anytime during the next million
years should receive at most 100 millirem of radiation from the site. This is considerably below the natural
"background" rate of exposure of 295 millirem per year that every
human has always received from the atmosphere, rocks, etc. Scientists found that actual exposure
rates would be far below these rather strict EPA specifications.
But
Nevadans didn't want the site in their backyard, Senate majority leader Harry
Reid hails from Nevada, and Obama saw the political handwriting on the wall. He nixed the Yucca Mountain
location. Another site will be
found. John Holdren, Obama's
bright and caring science advisor and a long-time public interest physicist,
commented that "I think we are going to see more nuclear power plants in
this country. They'll be of a new
generation that will be characterized by better safety characteristics. ÉWe're going to be paying some
attention to figuring out how we're going to deal with [the nuclear waste
problem]."
Nuclear
weapons are by far the most serious problem for nuclear power. Nuclear power programs have provided
cover, knowledge, and materials for many nations' nuclear weapons
programs. Two kinds of dangerous
facilities connect nuclear power to nuclear bombs. The first are plants that enrich uranium for use as low-enriched nuclear power fuel
but that can then continue the process to obtain high-enriched bomb-grade
uranium. The second are
reprocessing plants that extract plutonium from used fuel rods and recycle it
as nuclear power fuel, but that can also use this plutonium to make plutonium
bombs. North Korea, for example,
uses both kinds of facilities to produce both uranium and plutonium bombs. .
If
the U.S. goes ahead with nuclear power, we must simultaneously make the world
much safer for nuclear power. We
must put all enrichment and reprocessing facilities, including our own, under
international control. Our Senate
must ratify a nuclear test ban, already signed and ratified by 148 nations. We
must agree, with the Russians, to destroy most of the large
"strategic" nuclear weapons that each nation still possesses. We've made progress, cutting from
25,000 (!) on each side in 1985 to 5000 today, but 5000 is still enormous.
Nuclear power can help solve global warming by providing an additional alternative to new coal plants. We'd all prefer to use efficiency and renewable energy to solve global warming, and we should certainly pursue these approaches vigorously. But in the real world we're not likely to switch to efficiency and renewables fast enough to prevent global warming. Nuclear power's only serious drawback, namely its connection to nuclear weapons, can be solved with sensible international controls. We need to expand nuclear power to replace coal.