Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee is on CSPAN right now, advertising his new Blueprint for 100 Nuclear Power Plants in 10 Years. As with other such calls, Senator Alexander handwaves the issues of storage and disposal of nuclear materials, the key environmental issue with nuclear power.
Alexander's blueprint says in part:
First, a failure to appreciate just how different nuclear is from other technologies - how its tremendous energy density translates into a vanishingly small environmental footprint. A uranium fuel pellet the size of a thimble contains the energy equivalent of 1780 pounds of coal, 149 gallons of oil, or 17,000 cubic feet of natural gas. France, which gets 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear plants, stores all of its unusable radioactive waste – from 30 years of producing – beneath the floor of one room at their facility in La Hague.
I find it interesting that he mentions France; exactly one year ago, in July 2008, France suffered two spills of radioactive material from power plants into its water supplies within two weeks. I don't know if it made the news here in the U.S., but I was in Israel, and the stories were all over Euronews. He also says:
American utilities built 100 reactors between 1970 and 1990 with their own (ratepayers’) money. Why can't we do it again?
Well, here on impossible-to-evacuate Long Island, we ratepayers are still paying for the Shoreham nuclear power plant, which was tested (therefore irradiating it) but never put into operation, and closed 20 years ago.
The challenge, of course, is that from a carbon-generation and economic perspective, nuclear power is better than non-renewable sources like coal or (even worse) oil. It's also much more efficient than wind or solar in most locations. It's just...messy, with its waste products staying lethal for the next few thousand decades.
The Yucca Mountain repository is not the right solution, given that absent the sudden invention of teleportation, all the nation's waste would have to be trucked or sent by railroad across the rest of the states before arriving at the (possibly) safer Yucca location. Just do a quick Google News search to see how common tractor trailer accidents are every day, and you'll see why this is a problem.
I would love someone to look at a solution I've proposed here before: to the extent Yucca makes sense as a strategic location, why not locate the power generation there rather than just the storage, and distribute the power throughout the rest of the nation? A network of smaller, safer pebble bed reactors located at Yucca would be easier to build, easier to secure, and avoid any transportation of nuclear waste. That type of innovation, rather than restoring our distributed, risk-intensive nuclear power infrastructure of previous decades (Three Mile Island was 30 years ago this year), would be a better approach. In the meantime, if Senator Alexander wants to build reactors and store their waste on site, let him volunteer his home for the first site. {ProfJonathan}