Hans Blix writing for Time:
Can we responsibly continue to rely on nuclear power after the big accidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima? Those were three grave accidents, yes, but accidents in any industry, whether nuclear, aviation or others, lead also to new, safer designs and dedication to safety culture. Plane crashes have not stopped us from flying, because most people know it is an effective means of traveling. They know that risks are rarely zero but also that safety is very high. We must arrive at a similar acceptance of nuclear power.
There was a time, in the early atomic age, when nuclear-generated electricity was expected to be “too cheap to meter” — that it would be more effective, in other words, to provide it for free than to charge. In the end, it did not exactly turn out that way. Nuclear power has never been cheap and today it struggles to be competitive on purely economic grounds with electricity generated by burning natural gas — especially from fracking in the United States. However, the story is very different if we see emissions of greenhouse gases as a cost in themselves. According to a 2011 study, taken on average over the lifetime of an energy plant, the burning of coal results in 979 tons of carbon-dioxide (per gigawatt hour) entering the atmosphere. Gas gives off 550 tons. The figure for nuclear power is just 32 tons.
Some people claim we can manage the world’s great and increasing hunger for energy by using wind and solar power. The call for “renewable energy sources” excludes fossil fuels, but it also excludes nuclear power, which is based on non-renewable uranium resources. It has been a smart but facile message, and we should be grateful that the world’s two most populous countries — China and India — are fast expanding their use of nuclear power as well as of renewables. Solar and wind power are great in many places and have gone down in cost. However, getting rid of technically sound carbon dioxide-free nuclear power plants, to replace them with carbon dioxide-free wind and solar plants, does not make environmental sense. And to reject nuclear power because uranium is not renewable is silly. With modern technology the global resources of uranium and thorium could fuel thousands of years of expanded use of nuclear power. Is it not enough that they are sustainable?
Mark:
ReplyDeleteI've not been following these debates over the years, but back in the 1970s I recall two issues with nuclear power not mentioned above:
1. Some of the nuclear power plant designs being promoted back then were said to have the property of generating the sort of nuclear waste that's not just poisonous but which could be used to make atomic bombs. A big concern about nuclear power was terrorism.
2. Again, back in the 1970s, I don't recall nuclear power being presented as a clean alternative to coal. Rather, I recall nuclear power being presented as a high-tech alternative to conservation. The idea was that we could have nukes and then we could consume all the power we wanted. After seeing the "build more, use all you want" approach applied so disastrously to cars and freeways (yes, I grew up in the suburbs with lots of traffic, so I understood that "build more" can be an ineffective treadmill strategy), there was some skepticism that this would work for power generations.
And items 1 and 2 go together. The logical conclusion of "nuclear power is the solution to our power needs" is to have a nuclear power station on every corner, and then you start to think about who's keeping track of all the fissionable material.
This is not to say that we should not have more nuclear power, just that the opposition in the 1970s to the push for more nuclear power plants made some sense. It was not just ignorant people being silly by "rejecting nuclear power because uranium is not renewable."
So, ok, now you have some pushback!
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