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Nuclear Power Isn't Clean or Cheap
An Eagle-based company wants to build a 1,600-megawatt nuclear power plant in Elmore County.
The U.S. Congress is considering a bill that proposes the nation build 100 new nuclear power reactors over the next 20 years.
Idaho Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Simpson has embraced nuclear power, and like others, promotes it as cheap and clean. They argue also that nuclear energy emits no greenhouse gases. But it is unclear which part of the nuclear energy cycle they're referring to. Nuclear power is neither cheap nor clean.
The two main reasons no new power plants have been built in the United States since the late 1970s are the high cost of construction and the uncertainty of the regulatory approval process. Only federal subsidies make nuclear power "cheap."
The nuclear fuel cycle starts with mining, which relies on trains, trucks and heavy equipment that run on diesel fuel. Refining the ore and turning it into nuclear fuel creates large amounts of radioactive and toxic tailings and waste. Uranium, for example, gives off radioactive radon gas, the second leading cause of lung cancer in this country.
And operating a nuclear power plant requires an outside source of electric power. Reactors emit small amounts of radiation and heat in the form of steam or hot water, and they produce waste for which we have no disposal solution.
Uranium mining and milling have a sordid history in the West. In the Southwest, Navajo homes once were built of radioactive mine tailings, and their land is riddled with more than 1,000 abandoned mines. Mining companies hired local residents to work at low wages without telling them of the health risks. When the ore played out, some companies simply walked away.
In one example, Uranium Reduction Co. began processing ore from the Moab area's rich uranium ore deposits in the 1950s. In 1962, the company sold the mill to Atlas Minerals Corp., which ran it until declaring bankruptcy in 1998. The federal government took over the site in 2001.
Today a 94-foot tall pile of radioactive and toxic mill tailings covers 130 acres and holds 12 million tons of radioactive waste - about 750 feet from the third largest river in the West, three miles from Moab, less than a mile from Arches National Park and across the mouth of Moab Wash.
The unlined pile leaks an average of 57,000 gallons per day into the Colorado River upstream of Lake Mead, which supplies drinking and irrigation water to southern California, Las Vegas and parts of Arizona. Similar piles at 38 mill sites in the West - 22 of them abandoned - hold 140 million tons of radioactive tailings.
The story doesn't end with refining the ore. Producing reactor fuel involves a process that concentrates one form, or isotope, of uranium that can sustain a nuclear reaction. The leftovers, known as "depleted uranium," remain radioactive. About 750,000 tons of depleted uranium already awaits disposal. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently issued warnings about disposing of large amounts of this material as "low level" waste - the current proposed practice.
Most industry supporters - who claim nuclear power produces no greenhouse gases - want to ship spent fuel from power plants, mainly in the eastern part of the country, by diesel-powered trains to a proposed waste disposal facility in Jackass Flats, Nev. - a site known as Yucca Mountain.
14 Comments so far
Show AllExcellent article.
How can US cons refuse to negotiate with terrorists and appease and fund homegrown nuclear terrorists?
Too bad that Americans always want a silver bullet to solve problems. Americans love nuclear plants because they look clean and nuclear waste disposal is providing 500,000 years of job security for anybody willing to work in that field.
One additional note to this very well organized article: No railroad currently serves Yucca Mounatin disposal site and the government has already surveyed a 300+ mile route for a new railroad that will connect with the existing Union Pacific Railroad with construction costs estimated in excess of $3 billion taxpayer dollars.. Google YUCCA MOUNTAIN RAILROAD for more info. Constructing and operating the new railroad will waste a lot of scarce water and produce additional greenhouse gas.
So who is pushing for nuclear energy and why? People tell me that wind and solar technologies are not adequate for demand and will not be for along time. I am told that it makes sense to build nuclear power stations in the meanwhile. I can't seem to get through to them that nuclear power stations will cause much more harm than good. Anyone got data that will prove that solar and wind technology isn't that far behind as a possibility for global energy?
As long as you ignore the massive taxpayer subsidies nuclear receives, nuclear will always look better than renewables.
Big, centralized, publicly subsidized, uninsurable nuke is doing the pushing.
Check out geothermal:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power
Who is pushing for nuclear?
General Electric, Bechtel and Westinghouse...two of whom coincidentally own most of the TV and radio stations in the U.S.
See the MIT study showing that Nuclear power was more expensive than any other. The study actually recommended using it because of its carbon neutral status but still cautioned that it was of limited use. http://web.mit.edu/nuclearpower/
This has been my fear all along. That in our quest to reverse global warming, we'd end up pushing nukes. As someone who studied nuclear engineering I became convinced that it was unsafe and poses an unacceptable risk.
We have already had several nuclear accidents here in the U.S. We've got plutonium in the Columbia River from the Hanford reactor. We simply can't go on polluting our land with radioactivity that has a half life greater than recorded history.
I think one ought to be suspicious of any party that chooses to pass over a business proposal because the demand will clearly and inevitably outstrip the supply. It suggests to me that this is not (as many astute observers have stated frankly enough) as much about greed and profit as it is about control, which obviously entails a great deal of both.
It's not really an energy company's job to ensure that global power demand is satisfied, nor is it particularly in their interest to do so.
This problem is encouraged by our incredibly flawed economic system, which fails to accurately assess what opportunity cost means and refuses to assign a realistic cost to the resulting externalities.
The negative externalities associated with an economic agenda that prefers the ability of a product to subject its consumers to centralized control (and dependence) over the semi-autonomous exercise of self-reliance and relative stewardship of the environment, can hardly be overestimated.
Almost every power company that owns a nuclear plant across the United States is currently suing the US federal government over waste disposal.
They have been paying a fee towards a waste solution for several decades; no solution has arrived. They have also paid to store tons of waste, so they're suing.
At least one power company hired information processing towards this lawsuit (and others) as early as 1986.
- US citizens pay for the storage in their electric bills.
- They pay for the federal storage plan in their bills
- They will pay the government tab for the lawsuit, since the government has indeed breached its contract and anything close to a legal solution will favor the companies.
- The waste is still not properly stored or dispensed with.
- Background radiation and related illnesses continue to climb.
- Storage facilities continue to rot.
Why are the power execs considering doing this again?
Let's guess that they feel fine about it because taxpayers pay them, the lawsuit becomes profit above regulated rates, and the dividends will allow them to live further from the radiation trails of their plants.
Solar and wind power allows for decentralized investment and ownership, which would create broader competition and likely a more equitable share of benefits.
Yucca Mountain has never officially opened (proposed in 1989) due to continued delays from politcal/engineering/environmental groups, each with their own concerns (demands).
The Federal government's only role to date has been to fund the endless committees to address the grievances from each of these groups appearing to testify about the proposed site's safety, construction etc.
In the new 2009 Federal Budget the formal end to the sites construction approval phase has been submitted with only a reduced budget to continue these endless debates about the site itself. The Obama administration has said that "the site's construction is no longer an option".
So, without being overly drawn-out and testing your patience, how then does the Nuclear Energy Industry propose to continue with their campign to fund Nuclear facility construction?
I confess I don't get it, they just keep hammering on it.
There is a possible answer that might be at the heart of it, but it's not a very smart move.
They (The Nuclear Energy Industry) continue to ask for the money for subsidies from the Fed gov and use their political capital with lobbyists and Congress to trade those talking points like cash with Energy industry lobbyists.
This isn't smart in the sense that they would have to attach the cost of those talks to an Energy company that hires these Nuclear Energy employees.
If it didn't sound so familiar I wouldn't even believe it, but there it is, the only possible solution and it's all smoke and mirrors at the expense of the taxpayer.
I wish I knew the date of the last construction of a nuclear facility, in America, but I'm a little nervous about trying to ask about Nuclear facilities across the internet.
Maybe one of you guys can look that up for me.
If democratic process were calling the shots, and The People were more knowledgeable, and if scientists weren't justified in ringing the alarm bell ever more loudly about the planet reaching its atmospheric failsafe point of heat holding gases, then the growing political pressure to build more and bigger Nuke plants wouldn't get much traction -- and conservation retrofits and decentralized renewables would take the day as they rightly should.
If if if.
Given all of the present givens (corrupt economic, corrupt political, corrupt creaturely-perceptual/appetitive drives, etc.), a profusion of new nuclear electricity plants is pretty much guaranteed to be in the US's near-term future.
No matter that even the furthest-projected model sophistications of 'better' nuke power plant design and 'better' radioactive waste disposal can NEVER make this particular energy technology clean, or safe, or cheap, or decentralized, or renewable: the USA will probably make the mega mass-nuke power mistake nevertheless.
We USA'ers simply haven't changed enough in our crudely appetitive thinking to do otherwise.
Then too, there's the [seeming?] cultural paradox of the French and the Japanese, whom you might have expected to know better, but who have nary-a-bump against madly running-on with this same, wrong-on-all-counts technology.
The alleged viability of Franco/Nippon nuclear power industries will, of course, be used by propagandists in the US --you can be sure --as the final fall-back 'proof' that it's OK for the US to follow suit in the presently pressed context.
But no argument in the useful present can ever make nuke plants a sane or humane energy policy for any nation or individual human.
And it's not me who says so.
It's the chthonic physics of radioactivity that says so.
The trucks, and other equipment will all be electric in the next few decades. Just as our cars and everything else we use. To waste oil creating gasoline, and other fuels is a crime. It is much to valuable a resource to waste in such a manor. We will build these plants because industry, true manufacturing takes real power, constant power. Nuclear is the cleanest because time and advances in our technology will ensure it. We have got to learn to balance thing better as a society. We can and should have the benefits of our constantly evolving technology and better scientific understanding of the earth around us, while becoming closer to the earth as individuals. We as a family have changed the way we consume. we are committed organic home gardeners now, joining many of our neighbors in learning to take care of our place on the earth. We walk more and drive less. Our home is in the beginning stages of being greener. More insulation, etc. Also a solar oven is in the works. Well you get the idea.
Oh by the way, don't mind the rambling words, I'm add :)
If the 9/11 terrorists had flown into the Indian Point Nuclear Plant spent-fuel building, instead of the Towers, the resultant nuclear fire would have rendered Manhattan and the TriState area completely uninhabitable for around five hundred years.
If the water is drained from the spent-fuel storage pools in any and every nuclear facility, an unquenchable nuclear fire will begin equivalent to setting off a radioactive dirty bomb that will contaminate a massive area determined more or less as the wind blows. The pools must be attended constantly and water circulated... more or less forever, or until further notice.
If all the electricity now consumed were generated by nuclear plants, all the known uranium on Earth would last about ten years.
Unless the uranium fuel was reprocessed to the radioactive superpoison plutonium. By every nation on Earth. Which then can be used for nuclear bombs. Or very nasty dirty ones. By every nation on Earth.
There are still missing and lost atomic bombs. So why would less stringent civilian control over more complex systems be safe over long periods of time?
The Sun is a nuclear plant... its powerful nuclear radiation creates our daytime, even though it is 94 million miles away... as it should be. Not near any living thing. Nor run by fallible human animals.
Just a few thoughts on nuclear power vs. conservation and new forms of renewable power.
I was going to comment that this is one of the first times this subject has come up without the pronuke trolls showing up ..... until tictac above.
Well honestly, I have no idea that he is a pronuke troll but he like all those "green" oil ads is drawing a rosy picture of how concerned they/he are/is about the earth, butterflies and all the rest of the sacred souls and beings that inhabit this precious earth .... Just as long as they make a hefty profit with little or no risk (financing with public funds and profits in their pockets). Then when the hole sack of shit starts to leak and really stink - just hand it back to the tax payer and move on to the next big profit orgy.
I'm so glad tictac believes in the magical miracles of the religion of "science" when he states that "Nuclear is the cleanest because time and advances in our technology will ensure it." Isn't that cute and maybe we'll all have our own personal little rocket ships to escape this poisonous pit if his timing beliefs are a little off.
I always remember when both of my grandparents (fathers side) died of cancer in the late forties. The doctor told my father that if they could have just lived another 5 years they will have a cure for cancer. Oh, a few million cancer victims want their money back from that check up and a check perpetual money making machine that is modern voodoo medicine.
Best way to keep cancer and most illnesses at bay is stop poisoning ourselves from the inside out and outside in with crap food, crap medicine and fowling our own little earth nest so that there's hardly a pure blue sky anywhere on earth. Oh, I live in Hawaii, one of the most remote places on earth. The sky just isn't as blue as it used to be and no it's not because of my tired blue eyes.
Let's face it: our democracy has been ripped off. We, the people have no power and exist at the whim of the "haves" in power, or die of starvation. The last sardonic laugh will be ours, however, when the NUcleAR option explodes in the faces of those who stood to make the most $ from it because although we will die from it, so will they.