Dick Cheney should be delighted with Nick Kristof, who in a
April 9th column in the NY Times
picked up the energy company talking point:
Every year that we continue burning carbon makes it worse for our descendents. ...
Only one immediately available source does not cause global warming, and that is nuclear energy
While the argument is superficially sensible, the details are full of significant scientific and political flaws.
As with Social Security Privatization and Iraq, the Right is attempting to magically transform
legitimate concerns about the future into support for policies that benefit a select group of
their cronies while doing little to deal with the original issue...
Nuclear technology has become far safer over the years. The future may belong
to pebble-bed reactors, a new design that promises to be both highly efficient
and incapable of a meltdown...
To put it another way, nuclear energy seems much safer than our dependency on coal,
which kills more than 60 people every day.
The notion of safety is always based on a balance of benefit and danger.
If you think it's so safe, do you want one across the street from your house?
Do you want to breathe the air wafting across it's deadly nuclear pebbles? I know I don't.
The pebble-bed
reactors
Kristof and many others hail as the future of nuclear power are certainly
safer than the light water reactors we have come to know and hate.
But far from being a radically novel technology, the basic design concept of a high-temperature
gas-cooled reactor has been tried and abandoned numerous times over the past 35 years in
Europe and the United States.
NIRS points out
that the safety of a pebble-bed reactor relies on the integrity of the fuel pebbles...
something that can't be guaranteed with 100% certainty.
The need for convection cooling prevents use of a containment building, thus
providing a significant potential for radiation release in the event of a pebble problem.
As awful as a coal-fired power plant is for the environment, nothing
a coal plant can do comes anywhere close to the potential (however remote) for
disaster from a nuclear plant. My feeling is it would be better err on the side of life.
Radioactive wastes are a challenge. But burdening future generations with
nuclear wastes in deep shafts is probably more reasonable than burdening them
with a warmer world in which Manhattan is submerged under 20 feet of water.
I don't know where Kristof is getting his idea for deep shaft burial,
but America's current plan for it's nuclear waste is an ill-conceived
centralized storage facility deep inside
Yucca
Mountain.
The geographic choice to "screw Nevada" was made primarily for
political reasons
and the whole project has been mired in the same
deception, secrecy, incompetence and dubious science that always seems to haunt nuclear projects.
Serious questions remain about the potential for catastrophic ground water pollution,
geological stability, and long-term container integrity. For current Yucca Mountain news coverage, see
here and
here.
As awful as the effects of
global warming
will be, nuclear waste is a multi-generational nightmare since it will remain
deadly for thousands of years.
220,000 tons of the stuff were produced in 2000
and output increases each year. The only thing you can do with it is
store it,
and the longevity of its radioactivity means it will
almost certainly outlive the language of its warning signs, the government of its
protectors and the containers used for its storage - presenting almost
certain disaster to the people of the future who happen to stumble
upon it or drill into it unknowingly. Nuclear waste can certainly be used by people with
sinister intensions and, therefore, requires tight security, at high cost to present and
future Americans. It is IMMORAL for us to choose to satisfy our gluttonous
desires for energy and pass on horrific environmental costs to COUNTLESS
future generations.
If Kristof's description of a Manhattan "submerged under
20 feet of water" is hyperbole, it's a reckless literary choice,
and if it isn't, it's a complete misrepresentation in
an article that claims to present an honest argument.
Predictions are for a 20 INCH rise in sea levels by 2100, not 20 FEET.
This would leave
Manhattan well above sea level, although storm surges would cause more serious
flooding in lower Manhattan. The bigger threat to Manhattan may, counter intuitively,
be frigid temperatures caused by the shutdown of the
Oceanic Conveyor Belt that moderates Manhattan's weather.
American coastal wetlands and
Island nations
in Oceana like the Marshall Islands will be flooded, but Manhattan is comparatively safe.
It's time for the rest of us to drop that hostility to nuclear power. It's
increasingly clear that the biggest environmental threat we face is actually
global warming.
False choice.
It is already too late to prevent global warming and the climate change it sets off.
Humanity has been pumping massive amounts of buried carbon into the atmosphere since the dawn of
industrial revolution. While we certainly should stop doing that,
the damage has been done. So even if the nuclear energy industry has its way, we will be passing on
both serious coastal flooding and tons of deadly radioactive waste.
I say we only give them the former.
Global energy demand will rise 60 percent over the next 25 years, according to
the International Energy Agency, and nuclear power is the cleanest and best
bet to fill that gap.
Gap to what? Why does there need to be a gap?
Renewables are available now and all they need is investment and government promotion.
Aside from wind (discussed later),
two biologically based technologies previously mentioned on MyDD are ready to go.
Thermal Depolymerization uses heat and pressure to break down pretty much
any organic material (such as offal from meat processing, sewage sludge or municipal garbage)
into short-chain hydrocarbons similar to petroleum.
A small-scale TD plant is already
in operation next door to a turkey processing plant in Missouri.
Biodiesel can be created from algae,
among other sources.
I would argue that the obstacles to widespread adoption of renewable
fuels are the energy companies, who prefer known technologies based on
expensive, easily controllable raw materials (i.e. coal, uranium)
to disruptive technologies based on universally-available renewables.
And while nuclear plants are comparatively clean, uranium mining and processing is even more evil
than oil drilling and mountaintop-removal coal mining. 20 years of uranium mining on a
Navajo
reservation in New Mexico has resulted in significant groundwater contamination
stemming from discharges of mine wastewater. Many of the Navajo
who worked those mines have died of lung cancer and other mining-related diseases.
The Jaduguda uranium mines are the heart of the Indian nuclear program and
the 30,000 villagers surrounding the mines have paid for this program with 30 years of
shortened life spans, miscarriages, congenital birth deformities and mental retardation.
And if you want to see how clean nuclear fuel processing is, take a gander at the mangled residents of
Mayak
As with fossil fuels, there is a finite amount of nuclear fuel in the world,
so nuclear isn't the final solution.
Choosing the expediency of nuclear simply delays the inevitable development of renewable energy sources.
Aside from Canada and Australia, most uranium supplies are held by a handful of
third-world countries, continuing the same geopolitical problems associated with oil extraction.
For now, nuclear power is the only source that doesn't contribute to
global warming and that can quickly become a mainstay of the grid.
It depends on what you mean by "NOW".
Nuclear plants take time to build and certify.
While the technology is available now, you can't just throw a plant together
overnight and flick it on in the morning. Past history with light-water
plants probably gives some indication that even if community and activist opposition
could be crushed, there would be still be a considerable delay between the decision
to start building plants and the beginning of commercial operation.
Indian Point II and III
both took seven years to go from construction permit to commercial operation.
The much-vaunted Millstone II plant in Connecticut took five years to build.
The Shoreham Nuclear Plant on Long Island
took 11 years to build and was so bedeviled by the incompetence of its owners and
community activism that it never came on line.
And I feel pretty certain that anti-nuclear activists aren't going away.
Just because you have a plausible argument for nuclear power doesn't mean that
those of us who disagree are going to stand aside quietly while the power
companies turn our kids into glowsticks. Unless the Republicans succeed
in turning the courts into complete vassals of the state, legal challenges
by community groups and anti-nuclear activists will represent significant
delay and cost in finding places to build plants.
Wind is promising, for its costs have fallen 80 percent, but it suffers from
one big problem: wind doesn't blow all the time. It's difficult to rely upon a
source that comes and goes.
The fact that wind is not constant in most geographic areas does not mean
it can't be a source of steady power. It simply means that energy must be
stored when the wind is blowing that can be used when the wind stops.
Hydrogen produced by electrolysis of water using electricity generated by wind
turbines can provide inexpensive storage both for grid generation and
remote power generating situations.
Proposals have even been made to use the wind turbine towers themselves as
hydrogen storage tanks.
While developmental issues with fuel cells are often mentioned as retarding
the adoption of hydrogen, hydrogen can also be burned in
conventional internal combustion engines and turbines.
And far from being a complex, nascent technology only available to big
energy companies, wind/hydrogen is available now
directly to consumers.
A sensible energy plan must encourage conservation -
far more than Mr. Bush's plans do - and promote things like hybrid vehicles
and hydrogen fuel cells.
Kristof's passing comment about Bush's plans for hydrogen implies a
common misconception about hydrogen.
Hydrogen
is simply a STORAGE MEDIUM, not an energy source. Some other source of energy (fossil, nuclear or
renewable) is needed to create hydrogen. The only value of hydrogen is that
it can be stored and used for powering vehicles without polluting emissions.
Hydrogen is part of the solution, not the solution itself.
Bottom Line: Renewable energy sources are the solution to future global energy needs.
Nuclear is neither safe, secure or vital.
A wise man has great power
(Proverbs 24:5)