Within hours of President-elect Obama's victory, the nuclear industry was at it again:
spinning nuclear power and attempting to put the best light on the industry's prospects after the loss of their favorite candidate, Sen. John McCain. The President of the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), Skip Bowman, congratulated President-elect Obama and
Vice President-elect Biden on their victory and then he proceeded to mischaracterize their position on nuclear power.
According to NEI, Obama's campaign noted that, "It is unlikely we can meet our aggressive climate goals if we eliminate nuclear power as an option." But just as the Republican's campaign selectively edited Obama's comments to suit their ends, so too has the nuclear industry selectively edited the Obama/Biden campaign message.
Here's the part of the Obama/Biden platform that the nuclear spin-doctors at NEI left out:
However, before an expansion of nuclear power is considered, key issues must be addressed including: security of nuclear fuel and waste, waste storage, and proliferation.
So rather than calling for an expansion of nuclear power, the Obama/Biden campaign actually acknowledged the dirty and dangerous downside of nuclear power and the risk that expanding nuclear power would lead to the spread of nuclear weapons.
It was this same threat of nuclear proliferation that led Stephan Pacala, author of the climate wedges articles to reject nuclear power. Pacala & Robert Socolow of Princeton's Carbon Mitigation Initiative published a paper four years ago that identified 15 existing technologies that could each prevent one billion tons a year worth of carbon emissions by 2054. In an interview Pacala was asked, "What wedges are the least worth pursuing?"
I personally think nuclear is a non-starter. In the article we were not trying to choose sides, only to point out the mitigation technologies that are already in place. However, I cannot imagine that in this era of concerns about terrorism that we are going to start the production of fissionable material all over the world. It is disingenuous when the Bush administration says that the way to solve this problem is through coal and nuclear....If you try to solve even one wedge of this problem with nuclear, it would require a doubling in the amount of nuclear power deployed. Solving the problem entirely with nuclear means increasing deployment by a factor of 10, and if you calculate how many of these plants would have to be in countries like Sudan and Afghanistan, you are just not going to do it.
It is not just the threat of proliferation that makes nuclear power a "non -starter." Eight years of inaction on global warming by the Bush/Cheney administration have put America and the world well behind the climate curve ball. In order to address climate change we need energy choices that are fast and affordable and nuclear power is neither.
In fact, the price tag for new nuclear power is so prohibitively expensive; $11 to $12 billion per plant, that one U.S. corporation has already rejected building a new nuclear plant. Last December, MidAmerican Energy Holdings, a subsidiary of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc., became the first U.S. corporation to reject plans for a new nuclear reactor. A MidAmerican spokesperson said, "the company's due diligence process has led to the conclusion that it does not make economic sense to pursue the project at this time."
Fortunately for America and the world, there are safe and affordable solutions to our climate change conundrum that don't threaten our planet with the prospect of nuclear annihilation. And if we are to abate the most catastrophic impacts of climate change we must avoid false solutions such as nuclear power.
Even before the Bush administration's near decade long denial of the climate change crisis, the US government had shown how we could dramatically reduce CO2 emissions and reduce our dependence on foreign oil. An exhaustive technology assessment conducted by five Department of Energy (DOE) laboratories concluded that we could reduce U.S. global warming emissions to below 1997 levels by the year 2020 while reducing oil imports by 2 million barrels per day without resorting to any new nuclear plants.
Similarly, a new report by Greenpeace and European Renewable Energy Council shows that investment in renewable power and energy efficiency worldwide would create a $360 billion a year industry, provide half of the world's electricity, and slash $18 trillion in future fuel expenditures -- all while protecting the climate and phasing out nuclear power.
Nuclear propagandists have and will continue to attempt to spin the climate crisis to the advantage of nuclear corporations. They will continue to claim that we can't address global warming without more nuclear reactors.
Fortunately for America and the planet....Yes We Can!
This post was written with Jim Riccio, Greenpeace's Nuclear Campaigner.
Follow Daniel Kessler on Twitter: www.twitter.com/dkess
2. And if the plutonium from nuclear power were recycled for fuel then the residual waste would decay to such a degree over the next few hundred years that it would actually be less radioactive than the uranium originally mined from its source, actually reducing radiation in our environment in the long run.
3. We had a nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island and nobody died because we house our reactors in containment structures so strong that no even a flying 747 could penetrate them.
4. And there's enough uranium in seawater to power our entire human civilization for more than 3000 years.
5. There's enough room at current nuclear sites to more than triple our current nuclear capacity which could allow the US to supply at least 70% of our electricity with nuclear power.
If wind power can be expanded to 20% by 2030 and hydropower and biowaste power can be expanded from their combined 8% of our current electrical capacity then we should be able to supply all of our electricity without carbon dioxide pollution in less than 25 years.
Additionally, the clean off-peak electricity could reduce petroleum imports in half if plug-in-hybrid and electric vehicles become the dominant form of light vehicle transport in the US in 2030.
Marcel F. Williams
http://newpapyrusmagazine.blogspot.com/
That said, our window of opportunity to take expand nuclear power is shrinking. Solar, wind, and geothermal technologies are advancing. As they approach the efficiency of other power sources, the convenience of not having to mine for more fuel or deal with waste products will ultimately make them the more economical options.
Please do your own research and do not listen to this propaganda.
But like any sensible person they would rather have reactors over their own back fences than anything that pays large amounts of fossil fuel tax. So when their contractors in the Arctic ocean had the choice of getting on board diesel icebreakers or the nuclear icebreaker Yamal, up the nuclear gangplank they scampered. Quietly, of course.
--- G.R.L. Cowan ('How fire can be tamed')
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan
The idea that they are so expensive as to be meaningless is also silly. Sure, the construction costs of the first five or so nuclear reactors in America will be through the roof. But that is entirely because we have to rebuild a large part of our infrastructure before we can build the plants. Once this infrastructure is rebuilt it will not be difficult to produce nuclear power plants for the same price they were built in the 1970s. Those plants have more than payed for themselves and so will plants built today.
Unlike natural gas, which kills hundreds of Americans a year from explosions and asphyxiation, or coal and oil, which kill thousands a year from particulate and heavy metal pollution, the nuclear power industry in America has not killed a single member of the public from a release of radiation. That reason alone means we should be building them as fast as we can.
North Korea does not have any nuclear power reactors - the reactor they tried to use to make plutonium for a weapon was a small, primitive natural uranium, graphite pile research reactor.
However, I do agree with your end result. New nuclear plants are absurdly expensive to build, in large part because of all the legal red tape and licensing issues that are the result of Three Mile Island.
Here's a question everybody needs to ask themselves.
A nuclear power plant with two 1100 MW nuclear power reactors operating with a 90% capacity factor generates 17.4 terawatt-hours of electrical energy per year.
OK, very well, you can assume that that costs $12 billion, or $14 billion, or what ever.
But how much will it cost to build the total amount of wind turbine or solar power or geothermal generation infrastructure that will give you the same amount of energy generation in any given year?
I don't see how domestic nuclear expansion could have anything to do with nuclear weapons proliferation. Terrorism vulnerability might be an issue, but reactors and storage facilities can be designed to withstand airline crashes (and subsequent av fuel burning), mortar attacks, etc.
The bigger issue domestically is probably long term storage.
It may surprise many, but Virginia has the most nuclear power plants in the country, there can be dozens operating in the Hampton Roads area on any day. The Navy has been operating nuclear power plants since the 50's. Instead of constructing the massive nuclear plants envision, how about taking the already proven designs of the power plants used in the carriers and construct smaller, local areas power plants. These reactors are designed to a far greater level of safety than commercial plants -- there have been at least four nuclear powered submarines which have sunk and in all cases, the nuclear plant did what it was designed to do, shut down without release of radioactive pollution.
Uranium fuel, before it goes into the nuclear reactor, is minimally radioactive, and is essentially harmless, and after it is removed from the reactor, it is still a chemically and physically stable material which has been safely and successfully transported across the United States and across the world for decades, and hasn't ever hurt anybody.