Nuclear power was sold in the United States as being "Too cheap to meter." This miracle power source that harnessed the might of the atom to light American homes and power their TVs was seen as a way to put a happy face on the horrors visited upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Lewis Strauss who chaired the Atomic Energy Commission in 1954, the predecessor of today's Nuclear Regulatory Agency (NRC), spoke of an era when "atomic furnaces" from fission and fusion reactors would provide clean, safe, reliable, abundant and cheap power for generations to come. It hasn't been the panacea he foretold. In fact, it's been a train wreck of accidents, cost overruns, nuclear weapons proliferation and an ever-growing waste problem that is always on the verge of being solved.
This hasn't stopped the nuclear power industry from promoting its product as the safe, clean alternative to coal for a green future. Wrapping nukes in a green cloak and declaring their oneness with those concerned with climate change has helped to sway public opinion. The banks are still skeptical but the industry, like their friends on Wall Street, has turned to the government for support. The Bush and Obama administrations have kept the light on for nuclear power with loan guarantees, federal dollars for research and foreign policy initiatives like the treaty with India that forgave its transforming a research reactor into a bomb factory.
The impact on the industry of the Japanese reactors destruction as a result of the earthquake and tsunami may reverse the tide of support built by the nuclear industry. But trust me, they won't give up. They'll try to spin the disaster as proof that nuclear power is still safe and that if anything can be learned it's that we need newer nukes, with more safety features, not alternatives. So, to arm the public with some mental shielding from the thought rays likely to be beamed by the misconstruers of fact and swayers of emotion here are 10 myths of nuclear power you need to know.
Myth #1: Nuclear power is safe.
The experience at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power complex, the Russian reactor at Chernobyl and the meltdown at Three Mile Island in the United States, the nuclear Trifecta, are the most well known nuclear accidents but there have been numerous accidents, thousands of "incidents" and near misses -- many of which could have led to a disaster.
The biggest fear, in all of these cases, stems from the fact that a nuclear power plant has about as much radioactivity inside it as the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. There is more sitting in the adjacent pools where the used nuclear fuel rods are stored. In Japan, we've seen what happens when there isn't enough coolant to cover the fuel rods. The rods start melting and, in a worst case scenario, the China Syndrome, the core melts down and breeches the containment facility. The heat build up can stop short of a China Syndrome but can get hot enough to melt the metal around the fuel rods and create a reaction that produces hydrogen gas that triggers an explosion. Which is what happened in Japan. Having redundant safety measures, a plan B, C and D, doesn't mean they can't all fail.
"The only safe nuclear reactor is 93-million miles away, the sun," said Daniel Hirsch, president of Bridge the Gap, a nuclear policy organization.
Myth #2 Nuclear power will help us kick our addiction to foreign oil.
Senator Charles Schumer (D, NY) on last Sunday's Meet the Press cited our need to get off of foreign oil as a strong reason for pursuing nuclear power. He's wrong. We don't use oil to produce electricity in the United States, we mainly use it to power our cars and trucks and to a much lesser degree, to heat our homes. Unless we're proposing to put a nuke under the hood of our cars this "argument makes no sense," said Hirsch.
Of course, if we all switched to electric cars we'll need power to charge, them but this can be provided by wind, solar and other sources. We don't need nukes.
Myth #3: Without nuclear reactors, the U.S. cannot hope to combat climate change.
It would be like "using caviar to fight world hunger," said Peter Bradford, former Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner and current staff member of the Environmental Law Center.
The least expensive and most productive way to reduce our carbon footprint is to be energy efficient, not to build expensive nuclear power plants.
"The money that was sunk into building the reactors in Japan should have gone into something that would really have helped us combat global warming like solar or wind power," and improving the national energy grid so that it's integrated, said Hirsch.
We can't spend money on everything we should spend it on solutions and not on technology that creates more problems.
Myth #4: The U.S. is in the midst of a nuclear renaissance.
We've had a nuclear bubble but "when builders came to realize the costs it started to dissolve," said Bradford.
The myth of the nuclear renaissance has been an effective public relations ploy of the nuclear industry but we've seen the operators at the Calvert Cliffs, Maryland reactor pull out and the backers behind a proposed reactor in Houston, Texas have also pulled out. Things are sputtering.
"If this is what the original renaissance looked like then we never would have had Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci," said Hirsch.
Myth #5: Without new nuclear reactors, we won't have enough power in the United States.
Dave Freeman, who calls himself the "green cowboy," knows something about large-scale power generation. He ran the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the municipal power department in Sacramento and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP). He says this is completely false. The best way to generate new power for the long term is not to build nukes but to invest in large scale solar and wind, coupled with natural gas as a transition in the short term.
The problem has been coordinating the power produced when the wind blows and the sun shines, distributing the power and storage. There are solutions to all of these. "You need to link up the disparate sources to compensate for when the wind is blowing and the sun isn't shining," said Hirsch. He also pointed to new ways that we can store excess energy in batteries or use it to create hydrogen, which can also be employed as a power source.
The problem is "old people have forgotten about the dangers of Three Mile Island and young people never knew," said Freeman.
Nuclear power is a limited resource dependent on mining compared to solar power. An unlimited amount of solar power exists, "which would you choose," asked Freeman?
Myth #6: Why not fund nuclear power just to make sure we do have enough power since there's practically no risk of losing any money with government loan guarantees?
The nuclear industry has asked for loan guarantees from the Federal government because the banks looked at the risk and took a pass. With the loan guarantees in hand the companies can get financing and if they default, or walk away from the projects (which is what happened before) the taxpayers will be stuck with the bill. "It's the same as if you defaulted on your mortgage and the Federal government had to step in to pay the banks back," said Hirsch.
The problem is that these plants are so expensive, and it's not clear that they'd ever be profitable even with guarantees, that the likelihood of companies abandoning the effort mid way through is pretty high. Look at what's happened at Calvert Cliffs and in Houston.
Myth #7: The nuclear industry's past problems were caused by overzealous environmentalists, regulators and the public's fear after Three Mile Island.
"The industry's problems were the result of trying to build too many plants too quickly," said Bradford.
The industry couldn't compete in the marketplace in the US or anywhere else in the world. This is why it turned to loan guarantees that shift the risk to the taxpayers.
Pacific Gas and Electric (PGE) ignored the environmental concerns of one group, The Mothers for Peace, when it was building a reactor near Diablo Canyon in California. The Mothers said that the plant was situated on an earthquake fault and the company just plowed ahead. The Mothers were right and PGE had to go back and retrofit the plant to increase its safety.
"The safety of millions was put at risk to hubris," said Hirsch.
Myth #8: Nuclear power will be an important source for jobs and economic development.
It's true that building the reactors does create jobs, but these disappear when the reactor is complete. And there are staff positions for running the reactors, providing maintenance and security but not enough to warrant the high costs and risks. Building an alternative energy industry is a much better long-term proposition that will create more jobs in manufacturing and stimulate exports. People will need to build the windmills, the photovoltaic cells, install them, maintain them and even replace them as they wear out.
Ironically some fear that building new nukes will chase jobs away because electric rates will have to dramatically increase to pay them off. "No state ever created a net increase in jobs by raising electric rates to commercial and industrial customers. Such a policy drives jobs out of many businesses to create relatively few permanent jobs at the new reactor," said Bradford.
Myth #9: France has found solutions to all of nuclear power's problems.
France is pointed to as demonstrable proof that nuclear power can be affordable and safe. While it's true France gets about 75% of its electricity from nuclear power and that it has avoided a large scale disaster but we don't know very much about their accident record since its industry is nationalized and run behind a veil of secrecy. We've been told that Japan runs its program much better than France, so we can only assume that there have been problems.
One has to believe that their aging reactors are just an "accident waiting to happen," said Hirsch. "They are just playing a game of Russian roulette."
Many point to their ability to make nuclear waste disappear into easily stored glass balls while we continue to battle over where to bury our waste that piles up in temporary storage ponds next to the reactors.
"In high level waste, they are no further along than anybody," said Hirsch. "They just dissolve the waste in highly toxic acid and store it in warehouses in the glass. Which is still radioactive and the glass eventually disintegrates and has to be replaced."
The famous scene of 60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley lovingly holding one of the glass balls came to mind. "That was just a prop," said Hirsch.
They also reprocess their fuel to create new fuel but this still leaves "most of the radioactivity to be disposed of," explained Bradford.
It also adds to the costs of the producing nuclear power which is one reason French electric rates are 20% above U.S. rates despite subsidies, according to Bradford.
One big problem is that the French reprocessing creates plutonium that adds to the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation.
Myth #10: The growth of civilian nuclear power won't promote the spread of nuclear weapons, or as it's called, proliferation.
There is no "peaceful atomic power. If promoting nuclear power you are promoting bombs," said Freeman.
According to Victor Gilinsky, a former NRC commissioner, the "main obstacle to obtaining nuclear weapons is the material. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of America's nuclear program, feared that countries could too easily start with a civilian power program and then build a bomb. He proposed that an international authority handle all nuclear material. Eisenhower reversed course and launched the Atoms for Peace program that spread civilian nukes around the world and taught the basics of nuclear engineering to people in countries like Iran. This boosted the earnings of the contractors but laid the groundwork for weapons programs in all the countries that obtained nuclear weapons after the first five nuclear powers. There's "too much greed and too little fear," said Gillinsky. All civilian nuclear programs create spent fuel that can be reprocessed into weapons grade plutonium. This is what Iran, North Korea, India and Pakistan have done.
It doesn't take much. At first you needed a chunk of plutonium about the size of a softball now it's down to the size of a golf ball. "If a country has done its engineering, it can take about a week to go to a bomb," said Gillinsky. "Safeguard inspections are too late."
Currently there are plans to build new nuclear power plants throughout many unstable parts of the world like Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kazakhstan and more.
We need to stop looking at nuclear power and concentrate on real clean energy sources like wind and solar. But these aren't really fun challenges for scientists. Building a solar collector or an improved windmill is boring compared to unleashing the power of the atom. Especially, dabbling in that chimera -- the real Holy Grail -- fusion power. Can't beat that for a fun brain twister, one that's sucked up countless billions of federal research dollars but is still "the power of the future." While scientists like to do what's hard, exotic and new, people want and need what's simple, effective, reliable and affordable.
To paraphrase President Eisenhower's speech about the Military Industrial Complex, every dollar we spend on nuclear power is stolen from developing real solutions to our energy needs. Nuclear power, once touted as "too cheap to meter" is really too expensive and dangerous to use.
Many thanks to Peter A. Bradford, a former member of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission whose presentation "The Myths of the Nuclear Renaissance" inspired this piece.
Follow Michael Rose on Twitter: www.twitter.com/MichaellRose
Nuclear power electrical generation as currently constituted is dangerous as hell, but your thinking and prescriptions on the subject could, IMO, be even more dangerous.
The two of us are of a generation and even in the same media production business. I suspect that we have considerable agreement on a host of things political and economic, but neither of us are nuclear scientists or engineers. While I agree with a number of things you said here in your blog, I can't agree with many of the conclusions you arrive at. What with the ugly economy, I've had time over the last 3 years to put myself through a masters degree level course of reading, writing and reflection about energy and its off-shoots. I've come down in a considerably different place than yourself, a different way of viewing the nuclear energy puzzle.
If the moderator allows this through, I'll post a counter blog in parts to go beyond the 250 word limit, so that there is a more extensive answer to your own blog.
I'll call this counter blog, "The Danger of "NO MORE NUKES.""
With all due respect:
OK, here goes. (g)
I'm guessing that thorium nuclear energy would take a least 20, maybe 30 years to become a significant factor in the world's energy mix, 10 years for a pilot and another 10-20 years to ramp up deployment. What do we do in the meantime with all of these aging and dangerous light water nuclear plants? There's a technology for that in pebble-bed uranium reactors that could be brought on-line much quicker and start the clean-up of nuclear wastes around the world.
Pebble bed reactors have an almost 180 degree difference in design philosophy. All reactors use the heat from a controled nuclear reaction to heat water or some other element to create steam or gases to turn turbines to create electricity. Conventional reactors get a self-sustaining nuclear reaction going and then control that reaction by using water to bleed off excess heat to turn the turbines and keep the reaction controlled. If something goes wrong with the Rub Goldberg system of double redundant piping and primary and secondary control machinery, the nuclear reaction heats to intolerable temperatures, creates hydrogen from the water that can explode, the uranium rods start melting, and voila, a melt down, that can send the most radioactive substances known into the air and into the ground to fall on man, beast and vegetation, and pollute the ground water for millenia.
But this is in fact exactly the right thing to do. The ONLY way to meet the growing energy demands of a modern economy (which must now include India's and China's, not just EU and US), and at the same time cut carbon emissions -- is with nuclear power.
Why, this even justifies the questionable use of the word 'safe', since compared with the trifecta of war, famine and pestilence about to be caused by global warming, the risks of nuclear power -- serious though they are -- pale into insignificance.
1. Nuclear reactor can cause a nuclear explosion
2. The damage from nuclear reactors is worse or more widespread than other dangerous industries like pesticide plants, oil refineries, etc..
3. There are no safer designs available than Fukushima or Chernobyl.
4. A meltdown is as bad as a nuclear explosion
5. A meltdown could affect the WHOLE WORLD (instead of its local effect around the plant)
6. Nuclear reactors can't be passively safe
7. 3 Mile Island was an example of the failure of the industry instead of a success in safety.
8. There's no hysteria among the opposers of the nuclear industry
You're 2 short. You lose! Only kidding. It's a fine response in compact fashion. F&F
We support an automobile system that kills 50,000 lives a year. We support a chemical industry that killed 3 to 15 thousand people in India, and could conceivably do the same here. Imagine a chemical release in new jersey blowing into highly populated new York city.
Scaring people with the bad specter of nuclear power because we think death by radiation is worse than death by car, or death by chemical accident is irresponsible.
Instead of wasting your protest energies on outright bans that most Americans write off as fringe politics, focus on pressuring government and industry to make designs safe, regulator procedures transparent, and retiring and replacing old, less reliable reactors with newer ones.
What's the energy policy (backed up by fact) that can replace 20% of American power, or 34% of Japanese power. Or 80% of french power?
Be responsible! Be constructive.
Mike
But, really, that's a quibble...
Otherwise, informative. I would wager that most conservatives who support nuclear power don't know about the taxpayer subsidies or the increase in electricity rates. Unfortunately this is more likely to get attention than the environmental hazards.
But as with everything, harnessing nuclear power is an art that has not yet been perfected. What would you say if I said that 100 years from now, we would be able to harness nuclear energy with zero safety risks? You wouldn't believe me, but, 100 years ago, we didn't believe in people splitting atoms for energy. As with everthing, we can only really learn and move foward only though experience and mistakes. Perhaps someday, we will be able to have safe nuclear power.
Of course, we will never get there by getting so caught up in the present moment and present knowledge, and not allowing ourselves to see the big picture and at least see the possibilities if improvements on existing knowledge are made. Let science and research do their natural course of action, which is to investigate, expand, and improve. Right now, whether you agree or like it, nuclear power IS the only FEASIBLE alternative to environment-damaging coal and oil.
Therefore, I find your article overall incredibly irresponsible for it's call-to-action to cease the expansion of knowledge and science. I don't want to close this book on nuclear power mid paragraph. I want to see it through to the end. You say, "Nuclear power is not safe." I say, "Yes, so let's make it safe. How?"
Wind and solar power are not sustainable considering our energy demands. If this was the case, we would have long ago abandoned our dependence on foreign oil without having to spend hundreds of millions of dollars building nuclear reactors (it's much cheaper to harness wind and solar energy).
Sometimes, things are the way they are despite the "obvious" solutions because the solutions aren't that obvious once you realize that you don't have all the facts. We can't all be experts at everything. You have done a considerable amount of research on this topic, but you are still not a power expert. Progress away from oil dependance and nuclear energy hasn't been made because there is no reasonable alternative.
"While it's true France gets about 75% of its electricity from nuclear power and that it has avoided a large scale disaster but we don't know very much about their accident record since its industry is nationalized and run behind a veil of secrecy. "
This is a very weak argument. France has been able to harness nuclear energy and maintain safety, but it must all just be a big lie, because there is absolute zero way it could be done? You don't leave yourself open to possibilities, which makes your view very biased.
His view may be biased, but at least he is providing a sound argument backed up by real facts and sources, where you are just spewing a clearly uneducated opinion.
You mean the way you don't leave yourself open to the possibility that we can make wind and solar feasible by investing in storage? That costs will come down with more R&D and economies of scale? Or how about the fact (re: MIT, 2006) that we can develop 10% of our energy easily with geothermal with an easy $1 billion R&D investment across 15 years (as a comparison... we subsidize fossil fuels right now at $10 - 35 billion / year, depending on what you include), and more if we further develop EGS.
How about the cheapest energy of them all (i.e. energy efficiency)? If we upgraded all our HVAC equipment, changed out all our light bulbs, etc etc, we could actually decommission the worst nuke and fossil fuel plants.
We don't need more nukes.
Sure, nuclear waste is its "big problem" but it isn't such a big problem that we can't deal with safely, effectively, efficiently and most importantly economically as we have been doing for the past 60 years or so. Also, let us not forget that today, nuclear science and reactor design is light years ahead of anything we had when Three Mile Island or Chernobyl happened.
Every engineer knows that at the end of the day, the bean counters make the final decision and the fact is that Nuclear energy is still the cheapest and most reliable way to produce energy. The day engineers can show the bean counters that running a solar plant is cheaper, safer and can generate the same capacity as a nuclear plant, you will see the power companies closing down all the nuclear power stations.
I don't recommend a "solar plant" which would indeed have a very large footprint. I recommend rooftop solar on the as built existing architecture which places the generation of electricity right where it is needed. The sun delivers the energy right to your doorstep so there is no need to beef up the infrastructure or displace animals or habitat.
A distributed architecture design creates a higher survivability rate because each rooftop has the capability of stand alone operation. With your centralized solution, when the plant goes down everyone goes down.
Safety and quality of life are much more important than efficiency. If we only try to be efficient and cook everyone in the process then we have failed. Money and efficiency are not important at all if everyone dies because of your solution.
Solar panels will last 30 years with almost no maintenance. Wipe the dust off the glass.
Wind generators require some maintenance but there is no core to melt down, no radioactive danger or threat that must be guarded for thousands of years.
We can't even agree on what should be done the next 4 years. How do you expect the coming generations to take care of nuclear waste for thousands of years, fix the leaks, not make mistakes. etc.
Nuclear is just another excuse for smart people to show how smart they are. Welfare for smart people. Trouble is they are not quite smart enough.