These days there is a constant drip of news about other countries planning their energy future around nuclear power. Today, for instance, there’s an announcement from India’s prime minister that his country wants to build 470 gigawatts of generating capacity over the next few decades. That’s 100 times more than the country currently has.
Of course, in the US there is just deafening silence. GOP senator Lamar Alexander has been pushing for a major new commitment to nuclear, but calls like his haven’t been getting much traction. Maybe because lots of Americans think that nuclear power is scary, evil and kind of laughable, as branded by Mr. Burns and The Simpsons. That view is a wee bit dated at this point, but because so many of us take our worldview from sitcoms it’s proving rather durable. Which might be why Obama is so loathe to mention new nuclear plants. Or even T. Boone Pickens, who (rightly) pushes for better integrating natural gas into our economy, totally brushes aside nuclear.
All of us know the RFK Jr argument that nuclear power is scary and dangerous. And that view greatly informs our regulatory process, which is absurdly lengthy and expensive. And, perhaps, in some perfect world, that would be the appropriate view. But the reality is that nuclear power is very very safe. Today’s plants are virtually foolproof. And even in the improbable case of a mishap, the risks pale in comparison to the risks of global warming. Power generation pumps more greenhouses gases into the atmosphere than any other human activity, of course.
Let’s compare: We all saw Chernobyl. Now, an event like that wouldn’t happen in modern nuclear plant, but for the sake of simplicity let’s use it as our model of what a serious accident looks like. A town is functionally destroyed. There are lots of cancer cases that there wouldn’t have otherwise been (in the case of Chernobyl, estimates range from almost nil to 300,000).
But let’s compare that to the potential effects of a 6-degree centigrade rise in global temperatures — something that we could potentially be looking at this century if climatic warming effects start feeding on themselves:
If there is one episode in the Earth’s history that we should try above all not to repeat, it is surely the catastrophe that befell the planet at the end of the Permian period, 251 million years ago. By the end of this calamity, up to 95% of species were extinct. The end-Permian wipeout is the nearest this planet has ever come to becoming just another lifeless rock drifting through space. The precise cause remains unclear, but what is undeniable is that the end-Permian mass extinction was associated with a super-greenhouse event. Oxygen isotopes in rocks dating from the time suggest that temperatures rose by six degrees, perhaps because of an even bigger methane belch than happened 200 million years later in the Eocene.
Sedimentary layers show that most of the world’s plant cover was removed in a catastrophic bout of soil erosion. Rocks also show a “fungal spike” as plants and animals rotted in situ. Still more corpses were washed into the oceans, helping to turn them stagnant and anoxic. Deserts invaded central Europe, and may even have reached close to the Arctic Circle.
One scientific paper investigating “kill mechanisms” during the end-Permian suggests that methane hydrate explosions “could destroy terrestrial life almost entirely“. Acting much like today’s fuel-air explosives (or “vacuum bombs”), major oceanic methane eruptions could release energy equivalent to 10,000 times the world’s stockpile of nuclear weapons.
Now if we weigh the relative risks of fun stuff like that against an aggressive nuclear buildout in the next decade or so and… uh, yeah.
Conservation is still the first and best option, blah blah. And everybody loves solar and wind, but solar and wind in present form still suck pretty hard. Maybe they’ll get good enough to play more than a niche role in our energy future… but maybe they won’t. The thing about nuclear though is that it works very very well, and it’s very very low carbon. That fortuitous combination for some reason hasn’t yet been mentioned on an episode of the Simpsons.
UPDATE: We meant to include mention of today’s WSJ story about how China’s push to build out its wind capacity has involved building more coal plants:
Wind turbines with a combined capacity of 12.7 gigawatts are due to be installed there by 2015—more than the country’s present nuclear-power capacity. But the Jiuquan government wants to build 9.2 gigawatts of new coal-fired generating capacity as well, for use when the winds aren’t favorable. That’s equivalent to the entire generating capacity of Hungary.
They should really just be building nuclear.
September 29th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
Oh boy.
“But the reality is that nuclear power is very very safe. Today’s plants are virtually foolproof.”
Did you really just say that?
September 29th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
but what to do with the waste? the best idea we apparently can come up with is transporting it cross-country by rail, burying it under a mountain and hoping somebody in the future will figure it out.
September 29th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
Ok — or we could reprocess it like France does. But, again, a different question. The point is that the relative risks of nuclear waste (reprocessed or not) are still, I would argue, much much less serious than the risks of coal plant emissions.
Jebedaih
September 29th, 2009 at 3:26 pm
What about nuke plants are not safe and fairly foolproof Rockfish? I’d love to hear real answers on that.
I can tell you for a fact that the basic design of the Chernobyl plant was seriously flawed and that we do not replicate those errors.
It was sodium moderated instead of water.
And it had a positive coefficient of reactivity, (also known as fishy thing). Basically meaning that the higher power and temperature got, the more fission reactions would be created. It is a MAJOR factor in the runaway out of control meltdown leading to issue from Chernobyl.
Guess what two things US nuclear plants don’t use?
September 29th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
Comments 2 and 3 were not present what I was writing my above so here goes on those.
Jason. You’re right. Its not a perfect technology. There are down sides. But those down sides are a lot better than continuing on the way we’re going.
And again this brings up the point, why does EVERYTHING in this country these days have to 1 way or the other way? Its always Bush yelling you’re with us or against us.
One of the most stupid things EVER said on was actually not even from GWB. It was from Jane Fonda when she that 99% of all reactors in this country are operated at critical and that has got to stop.
More misinformation from people who don’t know jack, but are in the public eye creating scare tactics.
So I agree with Jebedaih on this one.
September 29th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
“What about nuke plants are not safe and fairly foolproof Rockfish? ”
How about the regulators, builders and operators?
September 29th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
CANDU reactors - these reactors can A) use un-enriched Uranium B) spent fuel from a US PWR reactor or EPR reactor C) have the longest continual uptime records for nuclear powerplants in the world. Also, all the uranium and deuteurium is produced to your friends in the North, Canada (largest accessible supply of uranium in the world).
Oh, and 1 cubic metre or waste per yer per reactor tube. Very manageable.
Anyone look at France? They have a fantastic nuclear storage facility that is monitored to the highest standards. Also please note the difference between waste and pollution: Waste is manageable, pollution is not - which would you rather have?
Next time you’re finishing a pint, look at the bottom of the glass 10:1 it says, ‘Arcoa’, a French glass maker — making glass is highly energy intensive, do you wonder why they make them in France?
September 29th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
Basic reactor design in this country is to allow nature to shut them down. The higher the temperature gets the more it naturally shuts down. The only movable rods are control, not fuel. Gravity forces a shut down.
I know this doesnt say much for my education but the fact is a trained monkey could have done my job in a plant.
Accidents can and do happen. But a Chernobyl never will.
And I could be wrong but I think the point that needs to be made is Even a Chernobyl sized disaster is still better for the planet than continuing on the path we’re on.
I agree other changes need to be made at the same time.
Tidal and River power. Wind power. Solar power. Getting off the lazy american rear end and unplugging items instead of just clicking them off from the remote control. Reading. Walking outside. Insulating your house. Etc.
Its not a 1 solution to save us thing. It can’t be. But nuclear power is safe. It was better for the environment on a whole than the current oil/gas/coal sources, and like so much is only held up by NIMBYs and the uneducated (90% of this country)
September 29th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
Apologies - I meant Arcoroc, not Arcoa.
September 29th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
More to the point: U.S. utilities have a hard time building any plant, let alone a nuclear one. Most people do not take nuclear power seriously enough. Alvin Weinberg, longtime director of Oak Ridge National Labs, called it a “Faustian bargain” — and he was one of nuclear energy’s biggest proponents. He meant that society had to learn to deal with the social implications of the technology.
We haven’t.
In the United States, we don’t have a system for waste. We only have six utilities with a market value greater than the cost of a single 2 GWe nuclear plant. We don’t have a banking system that wants to finance them. And we don’t have a political system that can get these things sited. That doesn’t bode well for the nuclear industry and no amount of technical grousing by engineers is going to change that. For a project as large as a nuclear plant, some of the limits that end up mattering are social.
Would you trade the fairly decentralized American electric system for France’s centralized, technocratic, one-utility program? Just asking.
September 29th, 2009 at 4:48 pm
What kills me though is that every coastal city wants an aircraft carrier in their city during fleet week.
Dont worry, i know NYC doesnt allow the nuclear ones here. Which is stupid since we have a nuke plant just up the river about 25-30 miles.
September 29th, 2009 at 5:09 pm
Alexis,
Thanks - all very good points.
Without going too far afield, I think the central question concerns those social limits. If we made a political decision for a streamlined approval process as part of a broader climate strategy, that would change the economics and capital would look a good deal more favorably on these projects. Harry Reid has even spoken about making siting and construction for both transmission lines and generating plants much faster and less susceptible to appeal and delay. So it’s in the discourse.
Without making a value judgment on the point, I think the 21st century will require America to be a good deal more technocratic than it is now. That’s a shift that we’ve naturally made at moments of societal crisis in the past (e.g. during WW2). It’s not hard to foresee circumstances that could require more centralization in any number of arenas in years ahead, certainly including infrastructure construction. That probably sounds a bit ominous, and it should.
Jebediah
September 29th, 2009 at 5:49 pm
No one has addressed the massive capital investment a large shift to nuclear power would require. A legitimate question is wouldn’t those billions of dollars be better spent on further R & D of renewables and a huge increase in wind power - which is already a viable energy alternative.
September 29th, 2009 at 6:10 pm
Figgles -
Check out the update to the story.
September 29th, 2009 at 8:07 pm
1) Name the leading sources of radioactive pollution in the U.S. (Hint - it’s not a nuclear reactor or processing plant.)
2) There is a gap between the SNAP / atomic battery systems and the water-moderated jumbos that cost so much to build (LNa’s are usually military). Where are the prototypes of smaller, cheaper reactors that use non-U/Pu fuels ? The designs have been made but no one seems to building the prototypes that would validate those designs. Perhaps Uncle Sam could fund the prototypes to power remote military bases (e.g. Shemya or Thule if they are still active).
My objection to current era reactors is mainly cost. They are too big and clumsy. I’m willing to do my part by using better light bulbs and more efficient appliances. But there needs to be an all fronts approach to solving our energy problems. Heck, let’s dust off the Tom Swift solar battery factory in space concept and see if we can cut the costs down on that. Seriously, there’s an opportunity in the coming years to link remote bases in the CONUS with compact nuclear power to electrified railroads.
P.S. Ans. to #1 - coal-fired power plants.
September 29th, 2009 at 9:18 pm
“How about the regulators, builders and operators?”
Damn “The China Syndrome” ruined everything.
From what I know, Chernobyl was built on the Soviet plan for nuclear power plants, and ours is simply better (because we use water). Also, Chernobyl only happened because the plant engineers purposely turned off the safety controls to perform some kind of test that literally blew up in their face. That simply cannot happen here.
September 29th, 2009 at 11:17 pm
All this talk about safety gets a little repetitive after awhile (23 years) so I’ll leave those issues off the table for now. What does interest me is the idea that nuclear power can be suddenly built everywhere at the same time. If India is building 470 gigawatts, and China is building plants, and so are Finland, France, Italy, and Britain (among others) there is a long line for the steel, cement, fuel, and personnel needed to actually make all these plants come online over the next decade. These aren’t simply policy concerns that can be determined with a vote but rather systemic issues that will require a vast expansion of industrial/educational capabilities worldwide.
Among many hundreds of articles on the interwebs, see the below link and don’t miss the photos:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aaVMzCTMz3ms
I just seems silly to advocate for a path that will end in a positive feedback loop of stagnation and increased cost with every additional nuclear facility we plan. I fully support the idea that nuclear power needs to be built but not everyone can eat from the atomic pie and expect things to run smoothly. We are better off allowing developing countries to invest in nuclear so that they can legitimately combine their economic growth goals with large-scale electrification goals all the while emitting little CO2. Allowing India to leapfrog over oil, coal, and gas right into nuclear is a sound bet for a country whose grid infrastructure is so fragile that wind/solar power on a hundreds of gigawatts scale would cripple the entire country. As the richest country we can certainly avoid some of the political deadlock nuclear power brings with it and invest our money more wisely than Lamar Alexander’s misguided call for 100 nuclear plants by 2030.
September 29th, 2009 at 11:36 pm
“That simply cannot happen here.” Riiight. That’s why the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania didn’t meltdown, it only “almost melted”. That’s why the “Slammer” worm’s shutdown the Davis-Besse plant in Ohio was an illusion. That’s why a leak at the Indian Point plant in New York that gave every union welder in the region the maximum legal annual dose of radiation before it was repaired, was unimportant — anyone can make a perfect high-pressure pipe weld with minimal training — Not!
Nuclear plants are like the Space Shuttle, they are designed and operated to such high standards that they never have serious problems — until they do.
Waste notwithstanding, the real problem with nuclear energy is that, terawatt for terawatt, there is even less uranium ore in the ground than there is coal. Only if we decide to give every pipsqueak country a plutonium fuel cycle that can be weaponized far easier than uranium, is nuclear energy a solution to the global energy crisis.
September 30th, 2009 at 4:41 am
France does a lot of bassackward stuff, but I have to give them props for their nuclear program. A standardized plant design lowers design and construction costs and also simplifies maintenance programs.
You would think an energy pig like the United States would be able to pull something off like that, but this is where ‘free market’ capitalism looks like a window-licker compared to European socialism. You have a bunch of greedy, private companies who all want to do things their own way instead of acting in the interest of the greater public good and a bunch of politicians government regulators who don’t know sh!t from clay who all want to things their own way instead of acting in the interest of the great public good. It is unfortunate a french style nuclear program will never happen here.
September 30th, 2009 at 9:39 am
Let’s face it, the core Democratic leadership in the US is opposed to ALL new energy production, clean, dirty, or otherwise, becomes it impairs their ability to regulate human behavior and lifestyles. For years they’ve been pushing renewables as the alternative to fossil fuels simply because the technology didn’t exist. Well, now wind turbines and some forms of solar are practical on an industrial scale, and blowhard socialists like John Kerry and Barbara Boxer are doing their best to stop new projects on their home turf. What utter hypocrisy.
September 30th, 2009 at 10:00 am
I’d like to see a more serious regulatory body come to be that is less prone to being meddled with by politicians. Look up Davis Besse to determine my reasons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis-Besse_Nuclear_Power_Station
September 30th, 2009 at 10:05 am
[...] Don’t let the Simpsons put you off nuclear power (Infrastructurist) [...]
September 30th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
“That simply cannot happen here.”
Funny, I recall reading a blog in 2006 called “Finacialist” where they were saying the exact same thing!
September 30th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
Damn, a good joke ruined by bad typing!
September 30th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
Nuclear is the best option while we transition to renewable energy. Keep in mind that nuclear fuel is a non-renewable resource that will be gone in a few decades.
September 30th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
To address one of the above questions about why The U.S. doesn’t recycle their fuel and use new gen reactors like CANDU, and GEN IV reactors rather than dumping all your waste in a mountain is (and I’m Canadian and my US history could by wrong) but Carter outlawed and signed a bill against the reuse of nuclear waste for recycling. To my understanding this is something that Obama could easily ratify with the stroke of a pen but is too busy at the moment with health care and Wind /Solar industry lobbyiest up his ass to deal with it. The French get 70% of their energy from recycled fuel rods, which use 96% of the energy in that rod, and shorted its radioactive lifespan. French have never had a melt down, never had a problem and have chopped their emissions by a ton from relying on the pragmatic solution to climate change and energy - nuclear.
The U.S. will make the same mistake my government is making right now
http://enviralment.wordpress.com/2009/09/23/ontario-blows-billions-of-tax-payer-money-investing-in-wind-power/
September 30th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
I do love you Infrastructurist guys, but one thing that irks is how you shrug off the anti-nuclear crowd like flies, when then actually have some very legitimate points. Here’s a laundry list of some reasonable and not aforementioned complaints:
- It takes insane amounts of carbon-producing endeavor to mine and refine the uranium ore (In Kentucky, four dirty-coal-fired plants were operated just to operate two uranium enrichment plants), build the power plants, and if we started tomorrow they wouldn’t be online anywhere soon enough to make a difference in the narrow window we’ve got. So even in carbon-emissions terms and the race to stop screwing up the climate, they’re not the one big answer.
- Incredible contamination takes place at every stage of the nuclear cycle, from mining to waste disposal, even when there aren’t major accidents—and if you expand the scale of nuclear operations, you expand the chances of an accident. The state of Nevada estimates that if you actually ship all that waste to Nevada from all over the country, the waste routes pass within half a mile of 50 million Americans, and there would be ninety to five hundred accidents during the thousands of shipments. And, once it gets there, things can go very seriously wrong for the subsequent hundred thousand years before the stuff becomes less dangerous.
- Undoing the ban on recycling is key to any serious nuclear expansion. Yet reprocessing spent fuel still isn’t even an ideal alternative if you know about Sellafield in Britain, the largest experiment, shut down in 2005 after decades of leaks and contamination. A bigger-than-usual leak of fuel dissolved in nitric acid was found, it contained enough plutonium to make 20 nuclear bombs, and finally put the site to rest.
- How do you ensure the safety of the indigenous peoples whose land is on top of the uranium, and most surely will be the ones to mine it again? The Navajo are fighting right now to prevent uranium mining from resuming on their land, which was severely contaminated by the postwar uranium boom of the 1940s and 1950s. The miners got lung cancer. The children in the area got birth defects and a 1,500 percent increase in ovarian and testicular cancer. And the slag heaps and contaminated pools that were left behind will be radioactive for millennia.
- What is the plan to avoid derailing the conversation by politicians asking regular folks whether they’d like to have a nuclear power plant or waste repository in their backyard, which will most likely to halt nuclear plans for years to come.
September 30th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Rex -
Great comment. But the only one of those that fundamentally calls into question our argument is pt 1. I’ve seen so many versions of the numbers in pt 1 (lifecycle carbon emissions from U). But if we adopted an aggressive plan to build new plants and reprocess existing stockpiles of waste, it could meaningfully reduce carbon emissions w/in a meaningful time frame. Which is to say, that’s how we should do it.
Jebediah
October 1st, 2009 at 6:15 pm
history of solar power plant…
These days there is a constant drip of news about other countries planning their energy future aroun [...]…
October 1st, 2009 at 6:47 pm
Seems to me that a key point here is that we should, at the very least, be TALKING about this. Nuclear power does have some legitimate problems, but the fact that it is not even part of the energy conversation in this country means that we are falling far short of doing everything we could, and should, be doing to upgrade our energy infrastructure and combat climate change. To just think that we can get up and start building dozens of nuclear plants without thinking about waste, recycling, mining issues, etc., is pretty foolish, but to talk about energy while pretending that nuclear isn’t even there is downright negligent.
October 1st, 2009 at 9:26 pm
“Would you trade the fairly decentralized American electric system for France’s centralized, technocratic, one-utility program? Just asking.”
In a minute. And if we were hiring France to build our nuclear reactors and our waste reprocessing system, I daresay it *would* be pretty safe.
This is a case where America has a *notoriously* poor record, although the Soviets somehow managed to do even worse. I think the immense areas of ruined, unusuable land due to the military nuclear program — managed with maximum possibile irresponsiblity — followed by repeated nuclear plant management which seemed to be about as lazy as on The Simpsons — has soured people for a good reason. I just don’t trust American utilities to build or operate nuclear reactors, and I trust the US government even less. The French government? OK, I’d give them a shot.
October 2nd, 2009 at 12:41 pm
I didn’t have time to read upthread, but here is the bottom line on Nuclear: it’s the bottom line.
It’s insanely expensive. Colossal cost overruns plague the industry, on every project.
The nuke renaissance will never happen large scale for this reason.
Also, there may well be issues with global Uranium supply.
Tip: read http://www.climateprogress.org to stay on top of energy/climate issues.
October 4th, 2009 at 4:23 am
[...] Other Nations Expand Nuclear Power While America Keeps Watching The Simpsons – The Infrastructurist – 9/29/09 [...]
October 9th, 2009 at 12:40 pm
[...] Other Nations Expand Nuclear Power While America Keeps Watching The Simpsons – I’m not knowledgeable enough about nuclear power and the alternatives to have an informed opinion about whether or not we should build more nuclear power plants. That said, they are a comedy gold mine. [...]
October 14th, 2009 at 10:10 am
i think it’s vry vry dangerous n expensive…i’d rather go 4 solar n wind power..
November 23rd, 2009 at 12:08 pm
[...] Other Nations Expand Nuclear Power While America Keeps Watching The Simpsons A Plan To Knit Together The U.S Electric Grid [...]