Nuclear Power is NOT the Solution to Our Global Warming Woes
[Editor's note: The following is a guest-post from Low Impact Living]
As our presidential campaign season draws towards a close and the attacks / counter-attacks reach a fever pitch, it’s almost impossible to separate fact from fiction. So many contradictory proposals, so many disparate numbers — I wouldn’t be surprised if someone says the sky is bright pink before we’re through.
The debate about energy policy is a case in point: the proposals so far have ranged from sound (invest in multiple forms of renewable energy) to questionable (clean coal, 45 new nuclear power plants) to the insultingly cynical and foolish (Drill Baby Drill!).
With most of these energy proposals, we’re being asked to take a leap of faith. Can coal ever be clean, or will carbon dioxide just leak back to the surface from the underground reservoirs where it is stored? Will battery technology advance enough to have one million plug-in hybrids on the road by 2015? Can we make the technology changes and corn-subsidy reductions required to develop ethanol sources that are at least carbon neutral if not negative?
There’s one area, however, where we seem to have a long enough track record to know: nuclear power. If you listen to the McCain campaign, nuclear power (second only to drilling) is a key solution to our energy dependence and global warming woes. Remove a few regulations here, provide some tax credits there, and poof! — energy independence, clean power and new jobs flow forth like oil through a pipeline.
>>More on nuclear power at RG&B
There are a number of assumptions that underlie this proposal. One is that nuclear reactors can be operated in a safe manner, which in turn assumes that our government has a strong enough regulatory system to avoid even one small failure (since there really isn’t such thing as a small failure with a nuclear reactor). There are plenty of reasons NOT to believe this, most recently the meltdown of another sort that has crippled our financial system.
You also have to believe that we’ll figure out a way to store and process our nuclear wastes. We’ve been working on that for several decades, and political hot air is the only measurable result.
And, you have to believe that investing in nuclear power makes economic sense as compared to other options available. Fortunately, the Rocky Mountain Institute, one of the leading voices worldwide on energy efficiency and our energy economy, has published a study that addresses this very issue. Some of the key findings:
- Long term, nuclear offers the most expensive way to generate power. When you factor in all of the costs associated with electricity generating options (construction, maintenance, transmission, etc.), even industry-sponsored research suggests that nuclear power is likely to be the most expensive source of electricity we have over the long run. It is 50% more expensive than large coal or natural gas plants and twice as costly as large wind farms or energy efficiency projects. If you don’t see that extra cost in your electricity bill, it’s only because it’s hidden away in your tax bill via government subsidies.
- Per unit of carbon dioxide avoided, nuclear power is also the most expensive option. Nuclear power doesn’t emit much if any carbon dioxide, but when you compare the cost of each pound of carbon dioxide avoided from nuclear power to wind power, energy efficiency or cogeneration plants you once again end up with a loser.
- Even with existing favorable subsidies, nuclear power is not attracting the private investment that renewables are. This means that the costs of developing nuclear power (as mentioned above) will be borne by tax- and rate-payers alone, rather than shared with private investors.
There are many reasons not to like nuclear power. It increases the flow of very dangerous nuclear materials across the planet. Nuclear accidents can be catastrophic, whereas accidents with other energy sources merely reduce the electricity available. We still haven’t found a good way to deal with the waste generated.
In the end, though, they just don’t seem to pay off. Renewable prices will only fall as economies of scale develop and new technologies flood the market, whereas projections for nuclear prices rise with each new report. In these hard economic times, we can all agree regardless of our political or environmental leanings that saving money makes the most sense of all!
Gas shills expressing concern that nuclear energy programs “just don’t seem to pay off” are expressing a point of view that is not widely shared. When government and industry take big tax revenues and profits on oil and gas, most of us are paying those revenues, not enjoying them.
Recent US$ prices, inclusive of royalties but not of taxes per tonne-uranium-equivalent: uranium itself 114000, natural gas 3900000 million, petroleum 7200000. Does “Low Impact Living”’s mother know how he’s paying the rent?
Comparing the operation of a nuclear reactor to the regulation of a modern economy is absurd. Nuclear fission is governed by natural laws that are known, predictable, and manageable – there’s not been a major nuclear accident in a modern Western economy in over 30 years. In contrast, the system that is a modern economy is many orders of magnitude more complex than nuclear physics – seriously. In fact, one of the “laws” of economics is that things are random – you cannot truly know what the price of an asset will be tomorrow, only guess. The safe harnessing of nuclear fission for productive energy instead of destructive power is one of the great triumphs of the 20th century – we in the 21st would be foolish to ignore it, especially when we can continue to find ways to improve it.
Nick Taylor, as I’m always anxious to learn more I looked up your links. They all point to mechanical problems that had no consequences. There’s this fundamental conceptual difference between scientific and political environmentalists. Politicals believe nuclear plants have to be perfect in order to be safe. Since, reasonably, they don’t expect anything to be perfect, they naturally are convinced nuclear plants are dangerous, and also the spent fuel in whatever situation it’s in.
Scientific environmentalists take a different view. Layers of safety make it implausible that nuclear plants could cause serious harm and unlikely that they could cause even minor harm.
The reactor at Chernobyl was inherently unsafe and didn’t have the layers of safety that make Western reactors safe. Indeed, the Chernobyl reactor had no layers of safety. It was made of graphite, a flammable material, and covered by a sheet-metal shed to keep the rain off. Western reactors are made of steel and are built below ground and are encased in layers of steel and concrete. The Chernobyl reactor had instability built into it and at the time of the accident its emergency shutdown system and its emergency core cooling system were both disabled. In contrast, the accident at Three Mile Island destroyed the reactor but didn’t harm anyone. No one was injured or made ill by that accident. The difference was the layers of safety.
It’s entirely possible that your perception of the Soviet Union is more accurate than mine. What I saw was the country with the most agricultural land and it couldn’t feed itself. The environmental damage done by its chemical plants and oil refineries was and is a health disaster. It put a basketball in orbit and then fell to last place in space research. As soon as people were offered a choice they chose to terminate it. But if you know of successes then by all means I should be corrected.
From a factual standpoint, this article is an absolute joke. Whether you choose to post my comment or not, I urge you to read this brief article:
http://blog.the-thinking-man.com/wind-and-solar-energy-versus-nuclear
And it’s not a plug. It’s an attempt to correct your shameless misinformation.
People like this “author” are the people truly responsible for damaging our planet: by halting progress and the conceptual mind.
Lets look at the facts. We have 7 ways to generate electricity, nuclear, hydro, oil, natural gas, coal, solar and wind. Cnsidering that the planet will run out of oil, using oil to make electricity is stupid. We will eventually run out of coal and natural gas but we have enough for about 300 years. Wind is not reliable making us have to use coal and gas burning plants as they can go up and down in generation rapidly. Hydro can also go up and down in generation rapidly. Nuclear plants cannot. They produce the same amount of electricity continually. Solar is also iffy.
At present coal plants are the cheapest to build. Nuclear and hydro plants should be the same price to build and they should be the mainstay of our electicity production.
My suggestion is to get rid of the red tape that makes nuclear plants so expensive to build and use both hydro and nuclear as electricity producing plants. We might as well keep the coal and natural gas plants for their lifetimes, they are not hurting anyone. Use solar for buildings and houses as per the owners decision. I would scrap wind power, too expensive and not reliable.
Perhaps going nuclear isn’t the answer…. But people need to stop looking for just ONE solution. It’s going to take a combination of different technologies to “solve” the problem.
[...] setup barricades and blocked roads in order to stop a shipment of approximately 123 tonnes of nuclear waste to a nearby waste storage facility. Sources say the protesters managed to delay the arrival of the [...]