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Why Nuclear Power Is Not a Global Warming Solution

2008-06-19T17:08:36Z

When people learn that I spend a lot of my working hours battling global warming, one of the first questions they ask is, “What do you think about nuclear power?”

This is how I reply: I think it is important to look at every available option to meet our energy needs without disrupting the climate. But when you run the numbers on new nuclear power plants, you find a long list of better solutions--solutions that are cheaper and cleaner and will deliver the emission reductions we need much faster.

This week, Joe Romm writing on Gristmill offers several examples of just how expensive new nuclear power is.

One industry-funded analyst told Romm that a new nuclear power plant would likely charge 20 to 29 cent per kilowatt-hour in the first year of operation, then shift to an average of 12 to 17 cents over the plant’s lifetime.

Compare that to renewables: Electricity from concentrated solar power plants costs about 10 to 14 cents per kilowatt-hour, while wind power hit a low of 4 to 6 cents per kilowatt-hour way back in 2002.

In Florida, utilities can now recover construction costs during the time a nuclear plant is being built. This means ratepayers will have to pay an estimated $9 extra a month for years long before these plants even generate one kilowatt-hour of electricity.

The soaring costs are just a part of what makes nuclear power so troubling.

To displace enough emissions worldwide to avoid just four-tenths of a degree of warming, we would need a new nuclear plant every 3 weeks for the next 40 years. Right now, nuclear power generates only 20 percent of America’s power needs, and we will need major investments to stay even at that level.

Nuclear power is a gold-plated energy path that is dangerous and impractical, especially since we have still not licensed a single safe place to permanently isolate radioactive waste, or developed workable international safeguards to prevent nuclear proliferation.Last year, Congress set aside $10 billion to build just a handful of reactors. Just months later, the industry lobbied hard for $40 billion in additional loan guarantees.

It’s time to put a limit on global warming emissions and let nuclear compete openly in the energy market with genuinely clean, renewable investments like wind, solar and energy efficiency and address its issues of safety, waste, and security that continue to cause real concern.

Anything to Declare? Or, Radiation Monitors Cannot Reliably Detect Highly Enriched Uranium at U.S. Ports and Border Crossings

2008-03-25T21:34:54Z

I have personally lost about a dozen pocketknives and six pairs of nail scissors to the good folks from TSA at airport security checkpoints, working to make sure that terrorists do not once again attack the U.S. I don’t complain, they’re just doing their job.

But what I am losing sleep over is what isn’t doing its job: the Radiation Monitors at U.S. Ports and Border Crossings, which we now learn are not capable of detecting Highly Enriched Uranium if it’s smuggled into our country.

Two of the biggest brains at NRDC, Thomas B. Cochran, Ph.D., senior scientist and Wade Green Chair for Nuclear Policy; and Matthew G. McKinzie, Ph.D., senior scientist in the nuclear program, have an article out today in Scientific American that shows that Americans are spending billions for machines that don’t reliably detect the most dangerous nuclear material, making it possible for terrorists to smuggle in the uranium needed to build a nuclear bomb in the United States.

And to think, I was busted trying to bring a coconut back from Jamaica when I was 14.

In the article, Tom (pictured at left) and Matthew tell the tale of their “coke can,” a slug of depleted uranium about the size of, you guess it, a can of coke, that traveled across the US border undetected by the supposedly-sophisticated detectors you and I bought with our tax dollars to protect ourselves and our families from nuclear terrorism.

Tom and Matthew go to prove that their coke can actually sent out a stronger signal to the detectors than highly enriched uranium would have, and then they reveal some really frightening calculations to show that even a small amount of highly enriched uranium could be used to make a crude bomb that could do massive damage in any U.S. city.

But don’t fear, Tom and Matthew have a solution, and a pretty sensible one at that. Rather than invest in expensive machines that don’t work, why not spend our money securing the highly enriched uranium that’s strewn about the world, unprotected from terrorists who wish to do us harm?

There are two paths to making this happen: securing so-called “loose nukes” in other countries and making sure that highly enriched uranium is also under lock-and-key here in the US. To that end, NRDC just filed a petition for rulemaking with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) requesting that NRC establish a date after which it would no longer license the civil use of highly enriched uranium or authorize its export. (link)

By doing that, and working with other countries to secure uranium abroad, we would be a lot safer than by buying more detectors that provide nothing but a false sense of security.

Read all about it here.

Smells Like Radioactive Pork. Ew.

2007-12-11T17:53:58Z

We can’t waste time around here patting ourselves on the back, and never is this more apparent than in the case of the relentless attempt to get American taxpayers to dole out even more cash to the world’s most environmentally problematic and fiscally disasterous source of energy: nuclear power.

We yelled ourselves hoarse getting the nuclear loan guarantees out of the energy bill passed by Congress last week. Folks thought there was no way we could do it, but we did. The bill passed without a dime for nukes.

But now, a whole week after that vote to make investments in new, renewable energy, we hear that Congress – that’s right, the one with the Democratic majority elected a year ago to bring change to Washington– has stuck the $25 billion for loan guarantees in the omnibus spending bill. This is an eighth night of Hanukah/early Christmas present from Congress to an undeserving and degenerative industry. This is a gargantuan public policy failure. And guess who pays? You and me.

How much is $25 billion in Washington, you ask? Are we talking about real money here? Well, President Bush is asking for $7.2 billion to fund the EPA for the next three years. So $25 billion in radioactive pork is three times what it costs to run the EPA for three years. Yeah, it’s real money.

What’s funny – the pathetic kind of funny – is that both the President and Congress are hollering about getting rid of pork, slashing earmarks, returning to the halcyon days of small government. Do where does $25 billion in loan guarantees for a handful of our nation’s most profitable companies fit in the quest for fiscal common sense?

Should Americans invest in energy? Absolutely. Clean renewable energy – the energy of the future – that will beat back global warming and free us from dependence on the Middle East. Wind. Solar. Geothermal. The next generation of cellulosic biofuels I like to call “grassoline” that will be cleaner, cheaper and far less resource intensive than corn ethanol. If we’re going to spend public money on energy, these are projects that deserve it.

As for the nuclear industry, how about borrowing money on the open market like every other business has to? What? No one will loan you money? How come? Oh, because you probably can’t pay it back? Because your business model isn’t viable? Well then, should you really be borrowing money? Can’t build new nukes without it? Well, maybe you should look into building something else. Ever hear of wind turbines?

Getting Our Priorities Straight

2007-12-07T19:51:25Z

A few weeks ago, I committed a cardinal sin – I didn’t call my mother on her Birthday. I was travelling with my family so I was rushing around packing, saying goodbye, trying to get to the airport and once we got back to DC, I was trying to get my very cranky kids home for bed. About once every hour, I would say to myself or to the nearest person in the vicinity, “I need to call my Mom.” In the end, I ran out of time. I didn’t have my priorities straight. I should’ve made time for my Mom.

In politics, I deal with a lot of people who don’t have their priorities straight. Folks get so involved with the “chess game” associated with passing laws; they forget why these laws are needed. They oppose proposals based on technicalities or they just completely start to lie when faced with the prospect of losing. The list of good bills that have died a slow and painful death due to misplaced priorities and trickery is a long one. One proposal that is currently at risk would clean up uranium enrichment facilities in Appalachia.

In the 60s, the feds and the nuclear industry made a deal. The government had a few underutilized uranium enrichment facilities from the WWII era. The nuclear folks were looking for a cheaper way to generate energy. It seemed like a good idea to let the nuclear industry use these plants. Everyone agreed that they would need to help the government clean up the sites later but no one had the forethought to actually require that the companies put something in the bank to make that happen. Flash forward to 1992, Congress tells the nuclear industry that they need to join the government and pay for about 30% of the cleanup of these sites. The industry complied and has been making payments for the last 15 years.

There are very few laws on the books that live on forever. Congress likes to revisit most laws every so often to make sure that they are working. So, this cleanup requirement is up for review right now and the industry is suddenly out there saying they don’t want to pay anymore. Ridiculous! The nuclear waste that they helped generate is still polluting these communities. The Department of Energy has said that it will take at least $11 BILLION more to decontaminate these facilities and that it will take until at least 2040 to get the job done. Still, the nuclear industry is trying to wipe their hands of these towns and the people who will pay for their pollution.

But, here is where it gets complicated. To date, most of Congress has been disinterested in hearing the industry whine about cleaning up their mess. So now the nuclear industry is making up stories about how people in CALIFORNIA are trying to steal the money that is meant to clean up these facilities. It is true that there has been talk about combining lots of bills into a giant package in order to overcome political and procedural huddles in Congress but come on – NRDC (and quite frankly, the bill's champion, Senator Sherrod Brown) is never, ever going to advocate selling out one community’s health and environment in order to help another. Bundling bills is a practice that happens every day in Congress. I guess desperate times call for desperate measures and these guys are just making it up as they go along. Unfortunately, if folks in Congress listen to these mistruths, these Appalachian communities are going to be left holding this radioactive bag.

It is time for all of us to get our priorities straight. If the nuclear guys want to be part of our energy future, they need to compete in the market; they need to obey the law, and the need to always clean up the messes that they leave behind. Just like I should’ve stopped rushing around and called my mother on her Birthday, it is time for these guys to stop playing games and start keeping the commitments that were made decades ago to the government and these communities.

Have a good weekend… and Mom, I am sorry.

Heather

The Galileo Syndrome

2007-07-31T03:23:49Z

There is nothing I find more annoying than bad reasoning by self-appointed “heretics.”

Unfortunately this tactic often gets a lot of attention. Witness Jesse Ausubel’s “Renewable and nuclear heresies,” which claims that renewable energy sources are not green, while nuclear power is.

Ausubel reaches this conclusion by elevating energy density (watts per square meter) to the only figure of merit for energy technologies. In doing so, he –

ignores economies of mass production in favor of economies of scale.
ignores opportunities to use land for multiple purposes (e.g. roof-top solar and wind farming on farmed land).
treats all land use as equivalent (e.g. an acre used for a nuclear power plant is equated to an acre of switchgrass used for bioenergy).

Finally, in assessing the land use impacts of nuclear power he only counts the power plant itself, not uranium mining or waste disposal.

The notion that supporting nuclear power is heretical is bizarre to begin with given the $85 billion in subsidies the industry has received over the last 50 years and the fact that it supplies 20% of U.S. electricity today, all without a single plant having been built in a truly competitive market.

Heretic or not, Ausubel simply gets it wrong. Less flamboyant, but better reasoned analysis of the potential for renewables can be found here and the liabilities of nuclear power here.