Nuclear energy supplies about 20% of the energy needs of the United States. The technology has been proven to be safe over many decades. Yet nothing seems to stir the fears of people quite like the idea of nuclear power. The idea of radioactive material contaminating citizens is not a thought most folks want to consider. The cries for increasing our nuclear energy capability have been increasing in frequency and pitch in recent years.
Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of nuclear energy.
Cons of nuclear energy
- Building and maintaining nuclear power plants is an expensive proposition. No utility company since the 1970s have attempted to build one.
- Nuclear safety. The big concern with nuclear plants is their safety. Nuclear accidents have the potential to be enormously dangerous. There have been nuclear accidents that have caused severe damage to the environment.
- Nuclear waste. The waste products of nuclear energy don’t just go away. They have to be stored for thousands of years. They also have to be safely transported from one location to the next through populated areas. Any nuclear waste accident could be devastating. Plus, if the wrong people get their hands on nuclear waste, they could “weaponize” it.
Pros of nuclear energy
- Nuclear energy is a technology that can be easily deployed.
- Nuclear power doesn’t emit greenhouse gases. A switch to nuclear from coal could reduce the effect of global warming instantly
- A large percentage of the country’s energy needs could be met with an ambitious construction program. Most other green tech ideas like solar and wind most likely can’t provide the same amount of electricity as coal-burning plants do.
- The nuclear power industry creates high paying, high skilled domestic jobs that won’t be “offshored.”
The nuclear industry has atrophied in the United States and will need to be re-invigorated. Direct investment in nuclear plants has been low, and less people are learning the skills needed to work in the industry. That could change easily, especially with so many unemployed Americans currently looking for new careers.
Where nuclear energy seems to excel is that the technology can be employed relatively rapidly and can make a massive change to the carbon footprint of the United States. Wind and solar energy will be able to do their share to help make America a greener place, but they lack the capacity to supply 100% of our nation’s energy.
Since greenhouse gas emission has become such a problem throughout the world, many governments are creating “carbon taxes” that will hammer the profits of carbon polluters. When their profits begin to dry up on coal-producing plants, these businesses will begin to look for alternatives. Carbon taxes should promote a high growth period for hydro, wind, and solar energy producing plants. Even more likely to benefit would be nuclear power.
President Barack Obama has shown a willingness to consider a revamp of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), an organization he called “moribund.” As a candidate he described himself as “agnostic” on nuclear power and said that there’s no such thing as “perfect power.”
In early speeches as President, Obama has seemingly ignored nuclear in favor of the more politically appealing wind and solar solutions. However, with job creation being such an important stalwart of his campaign and early presidency, it’s doubtful he’ll be able to ignore nuclear power for long.
A revamped nuclear industry with an emphasis on safety could solve the problem of greenhouse gases as well as stimulate employment of high-paying and stable jobs. Both of these possibilities are critical to the development of the United States.
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What an excellent article! Thanks for putting forth a balanced comparison. I think your conclusion is exactly right: new reactors that have comprehensive safety provisions could make a huge dent in the world’s environmental problems.
If I may, I’d like to put the cons in perspective.
Cost: Actually, all kinds of new energy construction are terribly expensive. We’ve been using coal because it’s cheap and our present costs are low because we’re coasting along on plants or hydro dams built decades ago; costs were much lower then and anyway the construction costs have been paid off. The key point is that there aren’t any cheaper alternatives. Wind energy costs as much as nuclear and solar costs several times as much.
Accidents: Actually, there’s only been one accident that caused harm, the one at Chernobyl. That plant was a Soviet monstrosity with literally no safety features. It was made of graphite, a flammable material, and covered by a sheet-metal shed to keep the rain off. Western reactors are made of steel and are built below ground and are encased in layers of steel and concrete. The Chernobyl reactor had instability built into it and at the time of the accident its emergency shutdown system and its emergency core cooling system were both disabled. No one in the world is planning to build that type of reactor in the future. In contrast, the accident at Three Mile Island destroyed the reactor but didn’t harm anyone. No one was injured or made ill by that accident. The difference was the layers of safety.
Waste: Let me first point out that nuclear-energy waste has never caused harm to anyone. If you were to make a list of all the things that have harmed people the list would be very long, in fact many thousands of pages long. And nowhere on that list would be nuclear-energy waste. Presently the world faces a threat to its continued habitability greater than any it’s faced since the last ice age. Yet political activists oppose one of the most important solutions available to us because of some imagined fear that isn’t even on the list.
I would like to comment on the issue of nuclear waste. First, we need to remember that no energy production system is without waste. Even wind turbines have an environmental cost: they require fossil fuels in order to be manufactured, transported and assembled, which is made worse by the fact that they require several times more steel and concrete per continuous MW delivered without even considering the environmental cost of practical storage systems that don’t yet exist. Every option has some form of environmental cost. This trick is to honestly evaluate the true costs of the various options.
The advantage of nuclear waste vs. fossil fuel waste is that it is easily contained and isolated, and the amount of it is at least one million times smaller by virtue of energy-density difference. Moreover, technology exists for reactors that burn what is currently considered ‘spent’ nuclear fuel, which still contains more than 95% of the potential energy content of the original uranium. The Integral Fast Reactor can ‘burn’ spent fuel from Light Water Reactors, with a 100-fold improvement in resource utilization, and provide a corresponding 100-fold reduction in waste. This technology further mitigates the waste problem as what is left is comprised only of fission fragments, which decay rapidly and are virtually harmless after a relatively short period of time (measured in decades). It should be a national priority to put the IFR, or a related design, into large-scale commercial service ASAP.
I just wish many environmentalists would be as concerned about the real threat of fossil fuel waste, which is pumped directly into our environment in incredible amounts, instead of being worried about the hypothetical and virtually non-existent threats of nuclear waste, which is miniscule in volume and easily contained; and, what little waste there is can be eliminated through the deployment of known technology. Given this logical disconnect, I can’t help but wonder if fear of waste as a means to discredit nuclear power is promoted by those with agendas other than finding the best overall solution to our energy / environmental crisis. Nuclear power doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be a lot better than the alternatives, which it is!
Steve – “[..]several times more steel and concrete per continuous MW delivered[..]”
I think you wanted to say “more … than a nuclear power plant”. Also the calculation is not per continuously delivered energy, just per total energy produced. Wind energy needs 5-10x more steel and concrete than nuclear.
Article – nice read. You are right that there are issues with contemporary nuclear power, which design originates from early 1950s. Since then we can do much better, however fossil fuels are still so cheap, and nuclear energy systems over-regulated (esp. in USA) close to death. This shall change, hopefully.
Major drawback I see with contemporary nuclear power is its inefficient use nuclear fuels, which (along with large capital requirements and over-regulation, and other minor issues) does not allow for a very quick ramp-up of new generation capacity to replace fossil fuels quickly. With closed nuclear fuel cycle, virtually 100% of mined heavy metal fuels is utilized, compared to 0.2-0.5% now.
This makes fuel costs (and the fuel amounts needed per energy generated) so insignificant in the total cost of power produced, that even a ~10 fold increase in costs (thus similarly higher energy and material needs) of uranium recovery from oceans, compared to contemporary mining, will be insignificant in the final cost of energy from a closed nuclear cycle system, such as IFR/PRISM/… .
It should be noted, however, that we already have technology to recover uranium from copious deposits of higher concentration than oceans, besides typical lower concentration ores (such as phosphates, coal ashes, tailings from other minings etc.), and it would take us tens of thousands of years or fueling all the civilization needs by closed cycle nuclear power to exhaust these resources. Therefore it is quite likely that fusion will be tamed, before it even comes to ocean mining.
http://nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/UraniuamDistribution
Detailed discussion here: http://world-nuclear.org/info/inf75.html
However even with technologies that we already decade ago proved, albeit at small scale only (ocean recovery of uranium), and which we certainly have an extremely long time to perfect (with IFR/PRISM style reactors there is no need to mine uranium for centuries, besides what is needed for the contemporary LWR plants, before their useful lifetime expires), we have enough uranium to fuel our civilization for as long as the Sun will support/allow-for the life on Earth.
And then there is thorium, which is about 3.5x more abundant in Eath’s crust than uranium. Reactors that can run thorium were successfully built and operated in the 1960s (MSRE and others)…
Therefore it makes sense to consider nuclear power as sustainable and renewable (by breeding), if advanced technology is put in place, and fuel cycles is closed. This is feasible, but currently discouraged by policy priorities.
I however have to disagree with the “safety” point of yours. Safety of a systems makes sense in comparison with other systems, as every large scale industrial energy production system comes with some risk. This risk can be enumerated in deaths/TWyears of produced energy. In such comparison nuclear including Chernobyl (which was a completely different deign than LWRs, and was banned in the West due to known safety issues…) with 10 deaths/TWyear is clearly the safest option available, wind has about 600, and coal over 2000 deaths per TWyear of generated energy.
Nuclear power does not need to be risk free and emission free to be the best of all the available options to produce energy. Absolutely nothing is risk free in reality. Nuclear energy merely has to be better than all the other alternatives, which it is, by a wide margin. Good to see that more people recognize it.
I’d like to congratulate you for taking the step to support nuclear energy. You make the point that “nothing seems to stir the fears of people quite like the idea of nuclear power”, to which we must ask “why?”, given its excellent safety record in the USA relative to other energy sources and all industrial safety. I believe the reason why people are afraid is because they lack the scientific literacy of radiation and nuclear technology. For example, the “waste products” are actually a very small quantity that does diminish its radioactivity dramatically in its first 5, 10, & 20 years. It has a reverse exponential curve. Nuclear by-products have been safely managed with simple principles of time, distance and shielding. The robust containers contain solid material, not some green goo seen on the Simpsons.
Another misconception is “Plus, if the wrong people get their hands on nuclear waste, they could “weaponize” it.” Well if these people are the type of “evil-doers” that want to do things the hard way and prove their idiocy to the rest of the world, then they would attempt this. It would take nation-level resources to organize the effort to process such material to “weaponize” spent reactor fuel. If such a group already had those type of resources, they would take an easier route – build a research/breeder reactor to turn U238 to Pu239. This could be done in a more clandestine way without attracting undue attention and risk with far greater chances of success. Building a generator for electricity production would be the wrong way to go about making bomb material. Making electricity just gets in the way of that task.
Keep in mind many of these concerns can be greatly diminished with newer reactor designs. The light pressurized water reactor is one of the oldest reactor designs around. Reactors based on the thorium cycle would burn fuel more completely, be safer, are more sustainable and produce far less waste material.
Though current designs are adequate and have safety amazing safety ratings, they are quite expensive. Nonetheless, that expense is an investment that can be paid back over the long expected lifetime of the plant. I see no other effective or cost effective means other than nuclear to stop the burning of coal which is the real culprit to tackle first if we are to reduce emissions.
USA has been for decades the leading nation in technology. USA CAN show the rest of the humanity how to tackle the global energy problem …
Now guess what this time the Chinese (with some Russian help) and Indians are even faster than you …
So as outsider watcher from Europe the question is not IF but more like HOW FAST AND EFFICIENTLY ?!
I have to disagree with your comment that fuel that has passed once through a reactor can be “weaponized”. It cannot. A weapon needs a means of delivery, a means of ignition, a means of storage along with an explosive payload. None of these systems can be put together without testing. Testing without being noticed in our monitored world is impossible. The propaganda about weaponizing slightly used fuel makes a good scary story but just does not stand up to thoughtful analysis. Also the isotopes in the barely used fuel are not suitable for making explosive devices – by far the most likely outcome would be a device that does nothing or at best fizzles instead of explodes because the builders will use a cautious approach that minimizes the chance of blowing themselves up. This is not an approach that makes sense when there are so many other ways to do it that are so much easier. There are more difficulties still – how does someone get this material without being noticed, and work on it for years to make the weapon without having anyone leak the story out for cash? There may be some cons associated with nuclear power ( I cant think of any however ) but weaponizing the fuel is not one of them. What you can do with USA used once fuel is feed it into Canadian CANDU reactors to get a second use of it right away. You should think of your used once fuel as valuable fuel. It is not waste.
Enjoyed the article and comments – particularly the civil tone. What about the risks of dirty bombs? A person or group uses conventional explosives to disperse radioactivity in a city. The technology should be fairly simple. It seems that contaminating 10 city blocks in the financial district of New York or London could be pretty disruptive, and very expensive to clean up. Thoughts?
wind farms are great but they also take up a large land area`~*