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In the 1960s, there were two things of which Sierra Club members were sure. One was that Earth was threatened by an imminent Ice Age. Global Cooling caused by jet contrails and dust particles from smokestacks would have us all living in igloos by the 1990s. The other certainty was that nuclear power was needed to get rid of air pollution from fossil fuel power plants. The Sierra Club was at least half right. Money from various interests (notably fossil fuel companies) flowed into "environmental" organizations in the 1970s. Coincidentally, the leadership of the Sierra Club and other environmentalist organizations had sudden, simultaneous revelations. According to the new dogma, nuclear power was inherently evil. The solution was to repent of nuclear power and return instead to fossil fuels. This dogma is nearly unquestioned in the United States of 2002. Thanks to the opposition to nuclear power in the name of environmentalism, the US today remains heavily dependent on the burning of coal. Methyl mercury pollution from US coal burning has raised the levels of mercury in Atlantic salmon. And of course, US dependence on fossil fuels produces an ever-increasing buildup of greenhouse gases. Developing nations find it difficult to buy nuclear technology because of US "antiproliferation" regulations. (BTW, this "antiproliferation" is technically obsolete. Nations who actually want quick nuclear bombs today can use laser isotope separation, not invest in power reactors.) Sixty years after the first experimental nuclear reactor was switched on in Chicago, nuclear power is still a minor energy source except in Europe and Japan. A haze of pollution now known as "the Asian Brown Cloud" wreathes India and China, maintained by coal and cow dung smoke from hundreds of millions of cooking fires. Now, I am no friend to the nuclear power industry, as it exists today. I see no need for electric power companies of any kind to be granted monopolies backed by government force. The Price-Anderson Act that excepts nuclear utilities from liability is inexcusable special-interest subsidy, no different from the dairy or cocaine industry price supports. But the problems of government-granted monopoly apply to all forms of power production in the US. The question is, is nuclear technology more dangerous and polluting, or less dangerous and polluting, than the alternatives? In my view, governments should not attempt to play favorites between technologies. If there are emissions and safety laws, they should apply to all technologies. The anti-nuclear-power meme claims that nuclear power is too dangerous to use for three reasons: routine emissions of radioactivity, catastrophic meltdowns, and waste disposal difficulties. Let's take each concern in turn and compare it to the alternatives: 1. Routine emissions. There is radium and polonium in coal. The routine radioactive emissions from coal plants are between 100 times (for anthracite) and 400 times (for bituminous) more intense than the permitted releases from US nuclear plants. If the NRC regulated coal plants, every single one would have to shut down immediately. And of course coal plants release millions of tons of dangerous chemical pollutants, the effects of which are not even well quantified. Nuclear plants release no greenhouse gases or acid rain. Nuclear plants do not cover up vast areas of growing area, as do solar plants. Nor do they swat down migrating birds like so many windshield bugs, as do the megawindmills. A nuclear plant's routine emissions, even right next to the plant, are orders of magnitude smaller than the radiation dose you would get by moving from New York to Denver. Routine emissions are a non-problem, even for the old technology plants in use today. And if you don't trust the plant's figures, you can easily and cheaply get a good radiation meter and check them for yourself. How would you check your neighboring coal plant's chemical emissions for carcinogenicity? Hire a thousand molecular biologists? (And why bother? You know ONE of those multi-carbon-ring chemicals has to be bad for your DNA…) 2. Meltdown. Low-paid third-shift Soviet workers using graphite-moderated reactors have demonstrated that air-cooled reactors can indeed be made into crude weapons if mixed with sufficient vodka. However, meltdown is not a necessary risk of nuclear power. Nuclear fuel provides millions of times more energy per pound than coal or oil, so thousands of times more inherent safety could be built in. One feasible solution is simply to use an alloy for fuel rods that has a sufficiently high modulus of expansion that it moves the fissioning atoms apart so much when heated that they lose critical mass. You can't get any power source safer than that (a solar panel could fall on your head, right?) Of course the light-water reactors in the US now were designed in the 1960s and 70s, so they aren't inherently safe. They are, however, safer than many of our other power sources. So far no one outside a US nuclear plant has been killed or injured in a catastrophic event, even when Homer Simpson was working at Three Mile Island. Coal plants are so bad when they're working properly that it's hardly worthwhile to worry about "catastrophic" problems, but if the plant's coal supply were set afire during a temperature inversion it could cause a severe air pollution episode. Oil-fired plants have the same problem, as does petroleum fuel storage in general. Natural gas is shipped around in tankers that carry hundreds of thousands of tons of liquid natural gas. If one of these ships were sabotaged it could blow up a good part of a harbor city. Some of our hydropower dams are horribly dangerous. There are dams in California that would kill a hundred thousand people if terrorists used a bass boat to tow a shaped charge into position below the waterline on the upstream side of the dam. Solar plants have to use an energy-storage system for nighttime power. The usual power-storage system for electric utilities is hydropower dams and pumps, so then we're back to dams again. But this problem only comes up if we are forced to use solar power exclusively. Solar power in conjunction with nuclear power doesn't really add much in the way of potential catastrophes, and I fully expect that solar power cells will cover a lot of roofs in the coming decades as an adjunct and emergency power source. 3. Waste disposal. Waste disposal is the least troublesome technical aspect of nuclear power, and the subject about which the most confusion has been generated. Man cannot create radioactivity out of nothing. In principle (and in practice, in many countries), human beings would just take uranium out of the random locations where nature put it, remove much of the radioactive energy, and then put the radioactive decay products where they are less likely to get into the biosphere. Nuclear power plants use up radioactive elements, after all. In a free-market world, that is… but in our world the US government has created an artificial radioactive waste problem. Jimmy Carter started the problem in 1977 by making it illegal to recycle nuclear fuel. This completely anti-environmental policy has been maintained by every President and Congress from that time, whether Republican or Democrat. Nuclear fuel rods are about 3% uranium-235 when they go into a reactor. They quit producing energy when they are roughly 1% uranium, 1% plutonium, and 1% radioactive elements like strontium-90 and cobalt-60. Then, in most countries, the rods are removed from the reactor, the uranium and plutonium are recycled into new fuel rods, and the other radioactive elements are used by industry for various purposes. Excess radioactive elements can be mixed with molten borosilicate glass (i.e., Pyrex) and made back into radioactive "rocks", which could then be put back into the mine they came out of. Or some more stable storage area can be selected. But in the US, none of this happens. In the US, no recycling is allowed! In United States, plutonium and uranium in used fuel rods were declared to be nuclear waste by Jimmy Carter in 1977. Carter claimed that this was an "anti-terrorism" measure, to reduce the amount of plutonium available to terrorists. In fact, it greatly increased the plutonium available to terrorists, because Carter also vetoed the operation of plants to process the nuclear waste into glass blocks. So now we have old fuel rods lying around in aboveground storage areas near nuclear plants all over the country… Not that this matters in the least. No terrorist is going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to build a reprocessing center so that he can recycle the plutonium fuel rods. Any terrorist that wants a nuclear bomb will just walk into Kazakhstan and buy an ex-Soviet nuclear bomb. Carter wrecked the US nuclear industry for no gain in security. The point is not that nuclear power plants were such a great idea in 1960 (they weren't). The point is that the market was overridden by political power. The Price-Anderson Act and other pro-nuclear industry government subsidies pushed nuclear power into the US market before it was ready for prime time. Now that nuclear power actually is workable, political power has pushed it out of the US market. Nuclear power should be allowed to compete against other energy sources, as long as its producers bear full liability. It is morally obscene to force human beings to burn coal and animal droppings in the name of environmentalism. Real environmentalism takes energy. It takes energy to recycle, it takes energy to build up economies to the point that people can afford to care about the environment, and it will take even more energy to build a real civilization that can protect the Earth. The human race isn't going to deflect any killer asteroids with cow-dung powered rockets.
Bill Walker is a Research Associate at the Shay-Wright lab at UT Southwestern Medical Center.
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