Why Is America Afraid of Its Best Energy Option?

America is an energy-hungry nation, no doubt about it. In a very short period of time we will be making long-term decisions about how to feed that hunger. The money will be flowing soon and once we settle upon something it may be hard to take it back. So we need to think fast and clearly.

Renewables have a great popular appeal these days and certainly must have a place—even a large place –in any solution. But the people who think that we can run an nation like the United States on diffuse energy sources such as wind, solar and tidal flows are being, to put in kindly, a little unrealistic. We need a concentrated, reliable and proven source of energy as the backbone of our electric grid. For that we only have a few choices. Coal, is the current option and that won’t change anytime soon. Coal has long been reviled for its pollution, however, and that was before concerns arose about global warming. So just to make things interesting, let’s also suggest a competitor – a hypothetical energy source that, like coal, is plentiful and reliable enough to power a national electrical grid but also has some other interesting properties.

OK, then, the candidates:

Coal is plentiful and easy to transport and right now meets half the country’s electric needs with about 600 power plants in operation. The average among these produces about 1000 megawatts of electricity. To feed it, a 110-car “unit train,” each car containing 20 tons of coal, arrives at the plant every 30 hours.
All coal produces some fly ash and sulfur. There was a time when all of that went straight into the atmosphere, but now most of it can be captured by electrostatic precipitators and baghouses. This precipitated material forms a “sludge” that must be trucked every half hour or so to a landfill. These landfills soon fill up with noxious, toxic material and must be isolated from the environment forever. (The dam holding up a sludge repository in Tennessee just broke, flooding 300 acres and causing an environmental catastrophe [For more on this, see our report by Summer Rayne Oakes -Ed.])

All the particulate matter cannot be filtered from the exhaust, however, and unfortunately that which escapes is the most dangerous. PM 2.5 – particulate matter 2.5 microns wide or smaller — also gets past human nose and throat filters and into people’s lungs, where it causes a variety of diseases, including asthma, emphysema, and cancer. The EPA estimates that each year 28,000 people die each year from these emissions.

Finally, as any elementary school student knows (or should, anyway), when coal is burned it releases a proportionately large amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which contributes to global warming. U.S. coal plants now emit 3 billion tons a year of CO2. That makes up 40 percent of our carbon emissions and 8 percent of the entire world’s. There is talk of “clean coal,” but there is also talk of putting giant mirrors in space to cool the planet. One must be very wary of counting the development of hypothetical technologies.

Now let’s take a look at the alternative. Let’s be really outlandish and say that instead of once every 30 hours the fuel has to be renewed only once every 18 months. Instead of a 110-car unit train, let’s say all this fuel can be transported in a single tractor-trailer. Let’s get really greedy and say it emits no sulfur, no sludge and – just to be really ridiculous – no carbon exhausts.

Nothing can be perfect, so let’s say that when the fuel is finally used up it is potentially dangerous – but let’s also say that most of the dangerous portion can be recycled to generate a great deal more electricity. And let’s say that other portions of the spent fuel can be turned into useful products for industry and medicine. Finally – and this will really be a stretch– let’s say that by the time all this useful material is taken out of the spent fuel, the “waste” that remains is so miniscule that 30 years’ supply for a major industrial nation can be safely stored beneath the floor of a single large room.

Sound promising? Well what we’ve just described here is nuclear power.

For thirty years Americans have fought nuclear power as something sinister, dangerous, and likely to cause the end of the world. In a way, this is understandable. The world’s first introduction to nuclear energy came with the explosion of the bomb at Hiroshima, which indeed caused more death and destruction than anyone had ever thought possible from one device.

But what Hiroshima and Nagasaki obscured is that the development of nuclear weapons was always a sidetrack to the real potential of nuclear energy. A nuclear power plant is not a bomb. It cannot explode. The fissionable material in a reactor makes up only 3 percent of the fuel material as opposed to 90 percent in an atomic bomb. Even then the bomb-grade material in a weapon must be shot together at the speed of a bullet in order to reach a “critical mass” to cause a nuclear explosion. Worrying that a power plant is going to blow up is like worrying that the jar of Vaseline in your medicine cabinet is going to blow up and set your house afire because it is “petroleum jelly.” It is, after all the same material as napalm – just a different concentration of explosive material.

In all of the world’s commercial reactors, there can’t even be a runaway nuclear reaction Chernobyl was a Soviet-style weapons-producing reactor that used carbon instead of water to “moderate” the neutrons, which is essential to continuing the nuclear reactions. The carbon caught fire and spewed nuclear material all over the world. All commercial reactors, however, use water instead of carbon as the moderator. Water can’t catch fire and if the cooling water is lost, the reaction can’t continue without it. There will never be another Chernobyl.

Nuclear energy is with us every day. It is as natural as the heat in the ground beneath our feet. The center of the earth is heated to 12,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hotter than the surface of the sun. Where does all this energy come from? At least half and perhaps as much as 90 percent (no one knows for sure) comes from the breakdown of uranium and thorium atoms in the earth’s crust. When we build a nuclear reactor, we simply bring the source of that heat to the surface and repeat the process in a controlled environment. If we were being truly accurate, we would call it “terrestrial energy,” because it is the only source of energy we have that does not come from the sun.

Early pioneers of nuclear energy in the 1950s used to say that nuclear power had come along “just in time” because the world would soon push up against the limits of fossil fuel resources. It is hard to argue they weren’t right. And they didn’t even consider the perils of global warming.

Nuclear has everything we need for an energy source:

• It is plentiful. World uranium supplies will last for centuries and reprocessing will extend them ever further than that. Many scientists argue that thorium, twice as abundant as uranium, is an even better source of nuclear energy.
• It takes up very little space. It would require 50 square miles of solar collectors and 125 square miles of windmills to equal the output of one nuclear plant
• It has almost no impact on the environment. You could live all year round on the property line of a nuclear reactor and experience less radiation than you get from one airplane trip across the country. People who work in nuclear reactors or nuclear shipyards actually have lower rates of cancer and better health than workers in other industries. In terms of accidents and workplace injuries, nuclear is safer than real estate and finance.
• Power is constantly available and scalable. Unlike wind and solar there’s is no need to have back-up power plants in case the sky clouds over and the air gets still. Those 50 square miles of solar collectors and 125 square miles of windmills only produce when the wind blows or the sun shines. Storing electricity for those non-producing intervals would double or triple the land requirements.
• And there’s strong precedent. France has used nuclear to meet most of it’s electrical needs for decades. There has been no meaningful mishap. There is little controversy over what to do with the infinitesimal amount of waste (it’s stored under the floor in a large, well-secured building). And, not incidentally, its citizens have carbon footprints about one third the size of an American’s.

The only real problem with nuclear is bad PR. People just refuse to accept it for what it is. After all, how could something so dangerous in one form be so benign and useful in another? So we invent all kinds of disaster scenarios. Chernobyl is undoubtedly the worst catastrophe that could happen and it only killed 60 people, mainly because the Soviets sent in soldiers to clean up the debris with their bare hands. (Compare that against those 28,000 people that die ever year in the U.S. alone from coal.)

It was a hundred years ago that Albert Einstein posited the famous equation E = mc², which expresses in one simple formula the essence of nuclear’s remarkable concentration of energy. After many decades of misapprehension, it is time for Americans to see the big picture.

William Tucker has written about environment and energy issues for twenty-five years. His work has appear in Harper’s, The Atlantic, National Review, New Republic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. His most recent book Terrestrial Energy (Bartleby) is about nuclear power.