Published on Thursday, July 17, 2008 by TruthDig.com
Don’t Drink the Nuclear Kool-Aid
by Amy Goodman
While the presidential candidates trade barbs and accuse each other of flip-flopping, they
agree with President Bush on their enthusiastic support for nuclear power.
But nuclear power is not a solution to climate change — rather, it causes problems. Amory Lovins is the co-founder and chief scientist of Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado. He makes simple, powerful points against nuclear: “The nuclear revival that we often hear about is not actually happening. It is a very carefully fabricated illusion … there are no buyers. Wall Street is not putting a penny of private capital into the industry, despite 100-plus percent subsidies.” He adds:
“Basically, we can have as many nuclear plants as Congress can force the taxpayers to pay for. But you won’t get any in a market economy.”
Even if nuclear power were economically viable, Lovins continues, “the first issue to come up for me would be the spread of nuclear weapons, which it greatly facilitates. If you look at places like Iran and North Korea … how do you think they’re doing it? Iran claims to be making electricity vital to its development. … The technology, materials, equipment, skills are applicable to both. … The president is absolutely right in identifying the spread of nuclear weapons as the gravest threat to our security, so it’s really puzzling to me that he’s trying to accelerate that spread every way he can think of. … It’s just an awful idea unless you’re really interested in making bombs. He’s
really triggered a new Mideast arms race by trying to push nuclear power within the region.”
Along with proliferation, there are terrorist threats to existing nuclear reactors, like Entergy’s controversial Indian Point nuclear plant just 24 miles north of New York City. Lovins calls these “about as fat a terrorist target as you can imagine. It is not necessary to fly a plane into a nuclear plant or storm a plant and take over a control room in order to cause that material to be largely released. You can often do it from outside the site boundary with things the terrorists would have readily available.”
Then there is the waste: “It stays dangerous for a very long time. So you have to put it someplace that stays away from people and life and water for a very long time … millions of years, most likely. … So far, all the places we’ve looked turned out to be geologically unsuitable, including Yucca Mountain.” Testifying at a congressional hearing this week, Energy Department official Edward Sproat said the price of a nuclear dump in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain has climbed to $90 billion. Slated to go online a decade ago, its opening is now projected for the year 2020. And even that’s optimistic. Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, wants to block nuclear waste from passing through Utah entirely, and most Nevadans oppose the Yucca waste plan.
The presidential candidates are wrong on nuclear power. Wind, solar and microgeneration (generating electricity and heat at the same time, in smaller plants), on the other hand, are taking off globally, gaining billions of dollars in private investments. Lovins summarizes: “One of the big reasons we have an oil problem and a climate problem today is we spent our money on the wrong stuff. If we had spent it on efficiency and renewables, those problems would’ve gone away, and we would’ve made trillions of dollars’ profit on the deal because it’s so much cheaper to save energy than to supply it.”
The answer is blowing in the wind.
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 700 stations in North America. © 2008 Amy Goodman
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4 comments:
I have disagreed with Amy Goodman on a lot of issues before, and I have to disagree again. The reality, as I see it, is that if we are serious about dealing with climate change, nukes have to be on the table. Yes, they are problematic, but less so than in the 70's. Yes, there's the issue of waste. But the sad thing is that it is currently the fastest way to generate power without releasing greenhouse gasses. does that mean that we should not try to get as much renewables up and going as soon as we can?-no, of course not. but the danger of a runaway greenhouse effect is much higher, and much more globalized, than that of nuclear meltdowns.
Nukular sux; Chernobyl anyone? How can you argue that nuclear meltdowns won't be global when after the Chernobyl blow up, the sheep in Wales were glowing as was half of Norway and anywhere else the fallout went in the upper atmosphere. Clearly not 'global' but surely 'regional' and what if it had been worse? And fastest way? How long does it take to build a nuclear plant versus develop some wind farms/solar? I don't have the figures, but I am guessing those plants take a long time to build. Anyway, put down that nuclear crack pipe Alex and smell the plutonium-238, baby!
I think there is some common ground here to work with. I think we must simply start off by saying that nuclear energy currently is in the mix, and that any growth in nuclear capacity should remain on the sites currently producing nuclear energy. I think this is a reasonable starting point. There are host of followup requirements... but I don't see the argument for increased the nuclear power plant footprint, except at the immediate margins.
First, you will create more spaces vulnerable to transportation hazards with spent waste, if that is the direction they decide to go with waste (which BTW is a bad direction: waste should remain on site, and not be tossed around on the roads and rails; think Cosco Buscon, Exxon Valdez, Homer Simpson). Every new site is a new road that could be logged onto the nuclear waste disposal network.
Second, the creation of what Rebcaa Solnit calls new "sacrifice zones" is a terrible mistake in my view. It leaves a legacy that cannot be remediated. What will happen to these old contaminated sites anyways? If any industry should be concentrated, it should be nuclear (physically and political economically). But we want to talk about much higher safety and compliance records.
Third, the issue of cost never goes away. Price-Anderson is a huge distortion, and even we wanted this to be artificially competitive, I am not sure that other low carbon options on the immediate horizon are better suited for that market distortion given the distortion's size.
Finally, the question of runaway climate change versus nuclear meltdowns make for frightening prospects. The threat of nuclear weapons proliferation by far outweighs the two and in the next 100 will continue to be the biggest threat of the three for human civilization. They are all obviously fates we want to avoid. It would be naive to detangle nuclear weapons proliferation from nuclear energy production. There are simply too many assumptions about peace, science & technology, stability, and good intentions that must be made otherwise.
2 mikeg: I specifically said that we need to consider the type of reactors (chernobyl was a mistake of stupid people heading the project, and negligence of the workers. I know, I was about 1000 miles away from there). and that nuclear tech has gone a long way since 70's tech (take a look at france)as far as speed- nukes have a very small physical footprint, compared to an equivalent generating solar/wind farm, and has significantly higher energy density factors than either of the big renewables
2 Dustin: Well, that's sort of what I'm saying, it has to be a mix, but to completely rule out new construction I think is a bit premature. Once again, look at the greenhouse gas reductions in france. Oh and as for nukes as weapons- that's an entirely different story :-)
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