Atomic power regains its glow
Governments must take a gimlet-eyed look. Nuclear's drawbacks haven't gone away.
| January 17, 2008 edition
More than two decades after the Chernobyl meltdown, the world again is staring uneasily at the Janus faces of nuclear power. One offers an energy source that won’t cause global warming. The other presents challenges in cost, safety, disposal, and nuclear proliferation.
Rising energy prices, and especially the need to find alternatives to fossil fuels that pour out greenhouse gases, have put a fresh focus on nuclear power. “We are facing a nuclear renaissance,” the head of a French nuclear energy company said recently. “Nuclear’s not the devil anymore. The devil is coal.”
Today the world’s 439 nuclear plants provide about 16 percent of electricity, a percentage that has altered little over 20 years. But that’s changing.
Britain recently announced that it will look favorably on companies that apply to build new nuclear plants there. Finland and France already have active building programs. Italy, which banned nuclear plants after Chernobyl, is now engaged in a debate on the subject, and interest in the US appears to be reawakening, too. In all, more than 100 new plants are being built or planned, about half of them in developing nations such as India and China.
This nascent boom comes despite the known shortcomings of nuclear power. Radioactive waste from nuclear plants, such as plutonium-239, can remain toxic for thousands of years. And no permanent storage facility to keep it safely sequestered indefinitely has been built anywhere in the world. The American site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada has proceeded at a snail’s pace and is opposed by that state’s most influential politician, US Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D). Its opening remains at least a decade away.
Plant accidents remain a real concern, too, especially in developing countries where official corruption can go unchecked and safety standards and public accountability may be lacking. Reactors are tempting targets for terrorist attacks. And they have the potential to produce weapons-grade plutonium, another obvious concern.
Together, these considerations provide ample reason to give pause.
But the time for weighing alternatives is running out. Unabated building of coal-fired power plants would produce a level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that could usher in unacceptable changes to the world’s climate. Technologies that could capture carbon emissions from coal plants and bury them underground are only in their experimental stages.
Some environmentalists argue that turning to nuclear power could siphon off government support for other fossil-fuel alternatives – wind, solar, geothermal, tidal, and so on.
That shouldn’t be allowed to happen. Neither should it stunt initiatives to cut energy use through conservation and more efficient products. Ramping up efforts on these preferable alternatives can keep the building of new nuclear plants to a minimum.
Governments must take a gimlet-eyed look at nuclear power. They must insist that operators have strong safety plans and adequate funding for the entire life cycle of facilities, from construction to proper decommissioning and storage of hazardous waste.
Nuclear power is a friend that bears close watching.
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Comments
2. OldStone50 | 11.17.08
I believe that systems that are decentralized are likely to be the most robust. Nuclear power will always be a source of centralization due to the need to closely control its use and out of regulators’ natural tendency to extend their purview.
The technical aspects of nuclear power can probably be resolved, but the means of doing so require that economic and political power be concentrated. Such concentration is both unappetizing and, ultimately, unstable.
3. Bob Whitman | 02.23.09
The technical aspects of nuclear power have been resolved; it is the political aspects that hinder our path to energy independence. We don’t want transmission towers, unsightly windmills, and please no solar farms to mar the landscape; the objections go on and on. People opposed to a nuclear burial site should consider that we already have high-level waste, which is stored at each nuclear site and generated by industrial and medical sources as well. We need the 350 to 700 billion spent importing fossil fuel to stay in our country, it’s time to get real and become energy independent using resources we have, such as wind, solar, and nuclear.
4. JJM 63 | 03.05.09
Mr. McGuire: I want to say three words to you. Just three words.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Thorium salt reactors.
Benjamin: Just how do you mean that, sir?
5. Bob Vessels | 05.06.09
The French muclear energy people have also said something else. They are the leaders and they have indicated “We’re just putting into practice what you invented.” They frankly can’t understand how we dropped the ball and let them build a valuable industry — they are now building facilities in the Us rather than GE, Westinghouse, Combustion Engineering, and others. Let’s all agree to stop talking about burying a valuable energy source in the spent fuel and bring back fuel reprocessing like the French and others so that we can take the radioactive material left in spent fuel and make mixed oxide fuel MOX to use a valuable energy source that is available to us. High level waste disposal is a mistake and has only become a problem because this Country banned reprocessing. The initiative for this action by Ford, Carter, and others was based on concerns about nuclear proliferation. We now know that was a mistake since there is no bomb grade material immediatly available in spent fuel rods. However there is material that will allow us to continue to fuel existing power plants. Please let’s stop beating dead horses and move ahead with what is acceptable nuclear technology in the rest of the world. As we fight about non-issues the rest of the world is moving ahead and laughing at us.
6. markie540 | 07.25.09
Shouldn’t we (the US) clean up the mess left by the first uranium boom and the contaminated sites from nuclear arms production before we even consider getting further into nuclear development? How many years has it been? People are still dying from that. Also, why would we want to generate more nuclear waste that will remain a highly toxic presence for thousands of years? Makes no sense to poison ourselves.
7. jrariz | 08.18.09
I’ve wondered why in the 2 years or so since I discovered in my ‘net browsing, Thorium Reactors that they have not entered serious public discussion. There’s much to love about them, including:
Can’t run away and meltdown like Chernoble, but have a triggering mechanism that regulates their reaction.
Will use spent Plutonium as a fuel.
Do not produce materials that can be processed into bombs.
And there is a good supply, my readings suggest,of Thorium here in the USA.
Evidently there are a couple of Thorium prototype plants operating in the world. It seems that there’s ample incentive to see if they could be developed.
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1. charvar | 08.13.08
“One offers an energy source that won’t cause global warming”
Really? Have you looked at the _waste_ heat from existing nuclear plants? Compare it to the average amount of solar insolation New Mexico receives daily