In order to combat global warming, provide our future energy needs in a sustainable way, reduce respiratory and heart diseases, and gain energy independence simultaneously, the United States must adopt nuclear power as a primary part of an energy strategy including wind, solar, hydroelectric, and biomass while eliminating fossil fuel sources such as coal and natural gas. The times of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island have passed. Redundant and modular reactor designs have taken the majority of the human effort out of maintenance and control. Waste management solutions such as pyroprocessing have reduced overall waste by a factor of over 100. Dry cask storage allows for safe, on-site storage of waste until a national solution is found. New reactor designs such as PBMR and IRIS are cost competitive with wind. The benefits of this shift would affect all social classes over many years, and the shift from energy consumer to energy exporter would give us an edge in the world energy markets.
It's time that environmentally conscious progressives reexamine the conventional wisdom on nuclear power.
It is important to understand how nuclear power works in order to understand the issues surrounding it. The primary fuel for nuclear power plants is the element uranium. The atomic structure of uranium is slightly unstable. It decays and emits particles in the form of radiation. This radiation carries energy that can be exploited under controlled conditions. It also leads to a variation among types of uranium present in a mine. The fuel for nuclear power plants goes through a process called enrichment. Enrichment increases the amount of a less stable isotope of uranium, usually to about three to four percent. By comparison, the enrichment that we use for bombs is closer to ninety percent. The uranium is then placed inside of a graphite moderator, which keeps the atomic reaction stable inside of what is called the fuel rod. Each reactor has a number of these fuel rods position between what are called control rods. Control rods made of absorbent metals that capture stray particles. The control rods are used to slow down and effectively stop reactions (although it is not possible to stop it completely). The reactions heat boiling water or pressurized gas, which travels around a series of pipes. These pipes contain water or gas which is heated by the water or gas heated by the reactor. The water and gas in these pipes turn the turbines that generate electricity. The reactor itself is sealed in layers of reinforced concrete and steel, designed to contain overreactions and if they occur. The primary byproducts of this process are spent fuel, contaminated maintenance equipment, and water vapor.
Here's a short video that explains how a particular type of reactor, CANDU, works.
It is also important to understand the current energy policy of the United States and the effects those policies have on the environment and the public. According to the Department of Energy, coal provides forty-eight percent of the electricity in the United States, followed by natural gas at twenty percent, nuclear at nineteen percent, hydroelectric at seven percent, and renewable sources such as wind and solar at around four percent. Electricity generation is responsible for over a third of the annual greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. Fine particulate air pollution from fossil fuel electricity plants, coal and natural gas, causes an estimated thirty thousand additional deaths per year in the United States in the form of heart and lung diseases. The number reaches into the millions worldwide. Thousands of coal miners are diagnosed with silicosis, or black lung, each year in the United States. According to a study done by the International Atomic Energy Agency, nuclear power has the fewest direct deaths among the four largest electricity sources. Even when comparing long-term death from potential nuclear accidents to other electricity sources, it is favorable for nuclear.
Critics will contend that the true solution to this energy policy is the promotion of wind, solar, hydroelectric, and biomass. The problem with this view is that it is very unlikely that these sources can provide for our future energy needs by themselves. If wind power capacity doubled every four to five years like it has, it would take twenty years for the capacity to reach nuclear power’s current capacity. Hydroelectric is very costly to develop, and the number of locations where it can be employed where it is currently not are slim. There are also major environmental concerns with hydroelectric power due to habitat loss. Solar is likewise very costly, but the problem with solar is that it is difficult to maintain and transport the electricity it produces. Massive, currently undeveloped batteries and enormous transmission lines would be needed to make it commercially viable. It would take nearly a century to switch completely to these technologies at an enormous cost. Left to the markets, the percentage of electricity from renewable energy will actually decrease in favor of more coal.
That is unacceptable given the necessity of action needed to reduce greenhouse gasses. Renewable energy will not be able to eliminate our need for fossil fuel sources of electricity without the aid of more abundant nuclear power. Even the most progressive plans that have been proposed only get us to 25% renewables by 2025. That will still require a large percentage of our electricity to come from fossil sources, especially if you eliminate nuclear from the table. Do not take this to mean that these should be abandoned. These technologies should be developed alongside one another in order to hasten the end of fossil fuel electricity. Rather, they should be incorporated with nuclear to reduce our need for fossil fuels and more rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. To say we have to do one or the other is a false choice. There is no silver bullet to solving the energy situation. There is, however, silver buckshot, and it is in our best interest to use as many different sources as we can.
There is another aspect to understand here to get a full grasp on why renewables alone won't work anytime soon. That is what's called "Base Load Power". What this means is that in order to keep our grid operational and avoid outages, there must be a power source that can operate without interruption. Hydro, Tidal, and Geothermal are too localized to be effective nationally. And Wind and Solar are still too unpredictable to be relied on for baseline power without overbuilding the resource, thus making it too expensive to use. The only non-fossil solution to this that can be used anywhere in the US is nuclear.
There would be sizable public benefits from a wide-scale adoption of nuclear power. Fewer fine particulate emissions would mean less asthma, heart disease, and lung cancer. Less fossil fuel consumption would reduce urban smog. Ironically, there would be less public radiation exposure, since fossil fuel plants emit radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere. Lowered domestic demand of coal would allow coal producers to export to countries that currently have riskier mining practices. Lowered domestic demand of natural gas would allow us to compete with the former Soviet nations on the world market. In concert with an increase in other alternative energy sources, conservation, adoption of smart grid technology, and advances in electric hybrid cars, greenhouse gas emissions can be drastically reduced. New plants would also provide an opportunity for high tech job creation, as most of the jobs related to a nuclear plant require a significant amount of training and expertise.
There are three main concerns that have helped to halt the expansion of nuclear power: accidents like those at Chernobyl, the short and long term storage of waste and byproducts, and the cost of building new nuclear plants. Advances in technology and changes in energy markets have transformed nuclear power. Reactor engineers and designers have taken the lessons of prior accidents and applied it to their work, resulting in safer and less wasteful reactors. Regulatory boards, both government and industry run, have stepped up enforcement and standardization, resulting in a spectacular safety record for the last twenty years. Increases in fossil fuel costs and federal loan guarantees will help cut into the huge-upfront costs of the plants. Storage can be solved in a number of ways, the only issue is not science but finding the correct political solution.
The accident at Chernobyl can be blamed on three key elements. The first was the reactor design. The design used at Chernobyl has never been built in the United States, due to its insufficient reactor containment. This was the source of the public radiation exposure. The type of containment used at Chernobyl has never been and will never be used in the United States. The next element is the poor training of the staff at Chernobyl. The engineers and maintenance workers had almost universally been trained on coal fire plants, with minimal or no prior training at nuclear plants. This lack of training went as high as the plant chief, whose only electricity experience was with coal. This contributed to the rapid escalation of the meltdown and the initial deaths from radiation exposure. The final element was poor governance and regulation. The initial problem originated when lax safety standards facilitated the understaffed and untrained night shift at the plant to perform a risky and unnecessary test on the reactor. The redundant systems that control the speed of the fission were disabled, allowing the reaction to become uncontrollable. This caused pressure to build in the reactor, which exploded, exposing the flammable graphite moderator to oxygen, resulting in a meltdown. The long-term consequences of the Chernobyl disaster are still affecting the area, resulting in somewhere between 2,500 and 30,000 additional cancer deaths. Due to the secrecy of Soviet records, exact numbers are difficult to pin down exactly. It is important to put this into perspective. At the lowest estimate, it would take a dozen Chernobyl-level accidents to reach the same number of deaths from American fossil fuel electricity generation. Even at the highest estimate, this is less than annual deaths in the United States from fossil fuel.
To test if the containment we use could handle an airliner hitting it, a F4 was propelled into a small section of one. You can see the results here.
It's also important to realize that a nuclear reactor is quite small, and is partially underground. It would be very hard for an airliner to directly hit a containment building, let alone damage it.
The situation at Three Mile Island was significantly different. The safety precautions built into the design prevented a large radiation leak. Some radiation was leaked into the public, but the immediate and long-term effects were minimal. Also, the leak was purposely done by the plant staff, not through accidental means. Studies done after the accident have concluded that the excess deaths associated with the accident totaled one additional cancer death per 325,000 people. This is higher than the population of the affected area at the time, which was about 160,000 people. Given the yearly toll that a single fossil fuel plant incurs in the form of tons of mercury, nitrous oxide, fine particulates, and radioactive isotopes, Three Mile Island can hardly be classified as a disaster.
The accidents at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island proved to be learning experience for the nuclear industry. New plant construction halted practically across the globe, and political pressures forced the decommissioning of plants across Europe and America. The industry was forced to examine these mistakes. With the help of lawmakers and advocacy groups, additional safeguards were designed, both process oriented and structurally. Redundancy became the predominant theme, with computer aided monitoring and sounder containment vessels. Plants were designed and improved to withstand enormous pressure and stress. Containment vessels that could withstand a direct impact from an airliner replaced the weak design that led to the Chernobyl disaster. The control rods, which broke during the Chernobyl disaster, now are controlled by a combination of reactionary computer software and constant human monitoring. Computer modeling has helped reactor staff avoid risky experiments like the one conducted at Chernobyl and assist in the design process to predict and avoid worst-case scenarios. Nuclear power, already relatively safer than alternatives, became even safer and more advanced. A study done by the journal Health Physics determined that the estimated loss of life expectancy attributed to nuclear power was significantly below that of more than forty common risk factors. They estimated that while the average loss of life expectancy of things like heart disease and cancer were best measured in years, it would only have to be measured in hours for nuclear power.
The next biggest criticism of nuclear power comes from the handling of waste products. Nuclear plants produce three general types of waste. Low-level waste is comprised of contaminated protective equipment and machinery. Intermediate-level waste is the corrosive radioactive material filtered out of the reactor’s water system. High-level waste refers to the spent fuel that must be routinely taken from the reactor. A typical reactor produces about 100 cubic meters of low-level waste, about 10 cubic meters of intermediate-level waste, and approximately 66 metric tons, or about 24 cubic meters, of high-level waste each year. Low-level and intermediate-level wastes are generally buried or sent to special landfills. The trouble comes with storing high-level waste.
The trouble isn’t that there is a lack of places to store the waste, since it would only take a facility about the size of two football fields to house all of the waste from current United States reactors over their entire lifetimes. According to retired Admiral Frank Bowman, the amount of high-level waste produced for a single person’s lifetime, if their electricity needs were provided entirely from nuclear, is about two pounds. If this was extrapolated to include every American, approximately 300 million people, it would work out to about 227 thousand metric tons. This amount could be stored safely, using Scott Haeberlin’s calculations, in an area about 1,200 feet by 1,200 feet, or approximately 33 acres. This is a trivially small amount of land, compared to the 1150 acres already proposed for the Yucca Mountain site. To give you an idea of how small of a piece of land that is, the DOE's experimental disposal site, WIPP, is larger than this. The trouble is that local politics and public misinformation has continually delayed the process and impeded the use of reprocessing.
Also, there is nothing to worry about transporting this waste. It is vitrified in glass and put in these:
The important thing to consider when discussing high level waste in America is that the United States employs what is called a "once-through" fuel cycle. This means the nuclear plants in the United States only use fuel once before it is stored long-term. The reason the United States uses this cycle is due to political pressures in the late 1970’s against reprocessing. It was feared that one of the byproducts of reprocessing, plutonium, would increase the likelihood of nuclear arms proliferation. However, with proper oversight and reactor designs, this does not have to be the case. There is a new process called pyrometallurgic reprocessing which removes plutonium from the fuel cycle by keeping it mixed together with the rest of the fuel. If the United States moved toward a policy of reprocessing all fuel, the amount of space needed to store waste would be reduced dramatically. Since only about three to five percent of the spent fuel is truly waste, over ninety percent of fuel can be recycled. Now you're talking less than three football fields worth of material for decades of energy.
But, for right now, we don't need to reprocess fuel. We could store the used fuel until we need it or until it becomes financially feasible. Because frankly, running out of fuel to use is going to take a long time. We have hundreds of years of fuel in the ground, more if we actually do go toward recycling. Even if the fears of "peak uranium" are true, reactors could switch to Thorium. Thorium is more abundant than Uranium, is less able to produce weapons-grade material, and has a fuel cycle that contains very little plutonium. India is already in the process of doing this.
The financial feasibility of nuclear power is another topic of concern. The cost of building a nuclear plant is substantial, reaching into the billions of dollars. There are a few factors to consider about new nuclear plant construction that make the process more feasible. The first is federal loan guarantees. A loan guarantee is given to banks and consortiums that finance nuclear plants only if the plant does not repay the loan due to closure. The current guarantee given to these institutions is around four billion dollars a year. If these guarantees were increased, loaning institutions would be more likely to fund the production of new plants, because their liability would be reduced.
The second factor regarding financial feasibility is new reactor design. Two designs in particular, IRIS and PBMR, are approaching cost competitiveness with traditional sources of electricity according to Oak Ridge National Laboratory. IRIS, short for International Reactor Innovative and Secure, is a compact reactor that eliminates most of the catastrophic risks of larger reactors. Most importantly, it cannot meltdown. The steam generators are located inside of the reactor itself, eliminating the risk of steam breaks. Also, the fuel in the reactor stays in the reactor for up to eight years, which is over five times longer than traditional plants. PBMR, which stands for Pebble Bed Modular Reactor, is another new type of reactor that uses a matrix of small graphite "pebbles" with thousands of coated uranium fuel bits inside - like a fruit’s seeds - to create a stable reaction. The design of the PBMR prevents overreaction due to the lack of concentration of fuel. It is also much cheaper than traditional reactor types because of the simple design, lower fuel costs, and lower maintenance costs. As more reactors of this type are built, the costs to build them will be on par with traditional fossil sources. Also, since they are modular in nature, technicians trained to operate these reactors can work at different sites, eliminating one of the main problems with the nuclear industry.
The final thing to consider when discussing the cost of nuclear is the distinct possibility of a future carbon tax. There are two proposals that are gaining momentum in governments around the globe: a cap-and-trade system and a straight carbon tax. The cap-and-trade system would create a financial incentive for clean energy production. This creates a situation where the increased cost of clean energy would be offset by the sale of their allotted pollution. Not only would it make nuclear more viable, but biomass, wind, solar, coal gasification, and hydroelectric would become drastically more competitive, especially if the cap was slowly lowered over time. It is a market solution to the matter because the price of the permits would fluctuate as more producers find it more economical to build cleaner plants. A straight tax would tax producers based on their total output. The advantage to this system is that it still gives an economic advantage to clean production while providing polluters a defined yearly cost. The disadvantage, depending on a person’s perspective, to the tax is that it takes money out of the market and puts it into the hands of the Federal Government, of which only a small percentage may make it back to the market. It is very likely that one of these proposals will be adopted in the United States in the coming years, especially if a Democrat is in the White House. When it does, the viability of nuclear will become even more solid.
What this all boils down to are the practical barriers nuclear power faces are now mostly political in nature. Sensationalist media, waning public scientific understanding, and memories of mushroom clouds have created a climate where nuclear is unpopular and misunderstood. When most people think about nuclear power, they are reminded of Homer Simpson’s job as safety inspector or leaking metal barrels of green ooze which have no basis in reality. The irony of the anti-nuclear environmentalist movement is as a result of their pressuring governments to abandon nuclear, fossil fuels have replaced the demand instead of clean energy. The combination of anti-nuclear political pressures have caused many of the practical problems with nuclear, reducing the adoption of new technology that would make nuclear safer, cheaper, and more productive. Public opposition to long term storage sites and reprocessing has left thousands of tons of high level waste scattered throughout the country. The political gridlock caused by public paranoia and misinformation about nuclear, as well as the unfounded hope in the full adoption of renewables only, has caused a drastic upswing in the use of fossil fuels. By wanting both greenhouse gas reductions through increased use of alternatives and the elimination of nuclear power, environmental groups are doing more to harm the environment than nuclear power ever could. Instead of wanting to replace two-thirds of our electricity generation, they want to replace almost ninety percent without a solid baseline generator, which is not feasible. It is why former Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore has changed his position on nuclear power. In an editorial in the Washington Post, he writes,
Thirty years on, my views have changed, and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate change.
In short, nuclear power is the best solution to combating the issues of greenhouse gas emissions, public health and safety, and energy independence in regard to electricity. Further adoption of nuclear power would result in fewer deaths, fewer emissions, and less pollution. It is difficult to overstate these advantages, especially as the world draws closer to a point of no return with climate change and our energy demand increases. The time is right for the United States to take the lead and acknowledge the necessity of nuclear power and adopt it as our baseline energy source.