Experts: "Clean" Energy Standard Should Not Include Nuclear, Coal

WASHINGTON - If Congress and the White House intend to move forward with a "clean
energy standard" (CES), it will be a huge contradiction to include
nuclear reactors and coal-fired power plants, according to three
experts.

In the wake of President Obama's State of the Union
address embracing CES, the experts pointed to a long list of unresolved
waste, water and proliferation risks associated with nuclear power, and
unresolved problems with commercially untested "carbon capture &
storage" (CCS) for coal-fired power production.

Dr. Alan
Lockwood, professor of nuclear medicine and neurology, University of
Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, and past president of Physicians for Social
Responsibility, said: "We must guarantee that policy decisions
we make are based on the full range of health and environmental impacts
of our decisions as we devote scarce private and public resources to
meeting our needs for electric power. For example, coal proponents claim
that new technologies can turn coal into a source of clean energy. Yet
the technology they urge us to adopt is totally unproven at commercial
scale and over a meaningful time frame. In any case, coal plants under
consideration with carbon capture and storage would still rely on
outdated, dirty energy technologies of the past. Making matters even
worse, virtually none of the pending coal plant proposals in the U.S.
include any plans to capture and store carbon dioxide emissions from day
one of operation. If built, these old-style coal plants, with a
lifespan in excess of 50 years, would gravely diminish the prospects of
slowing global warming, while exacerbating air pollution-related disease
and death."

Dr. Arjun Makhijani, president, Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, said:
"The principle of clean energy sources should be that the main
environmental burdens should be borne by the generation that uses the
energy. Some of the largest environmental and health impacts of nuclear
energy and coal will be borne by generations far into the future. These
impacts cannot be internalized by spending more money, as they are
inherent in the technology. In contrast, the modest impacts of renewable
energy are borne by the generations that use the energy, so that future
generations can replace the facilities with better techniques as they
are developed."

Scott Sklar, president, The Stella Group
Ltd., adjunct professor at George Washington University, chairman of
the steering committee, Sustainable Energy Coalition, and former
executive director, Solar Energy and Biomass Industries Associations,
said: "Excuse me, but how is coal clean? Even if you could
sequester carbon, it emits mercury, carcinogens, requires much water,
emits other greenhouse gases, leaves us with coal ash waste piles, and
drives the blowing-up of our mountain tops ruining waterways and
farmland. Nuclear energy, with its multi-thousand year wastes, imported
uranium, and susceptibility to terrorism. Do we believe that the
technology terrorists employ is stagnant, even though experts in 2010
were able to cyber-penetrate a nuclear plant? Attempts to foster coal
and nuclear into a CES is another ploy to re-label non-renewable
technologies and ooze them into a "clean" brand. This reminds me how the
high fructose corn syrup industry has recently relabeled itself the
"corn sugar" industry."

NUCLEAR AND COAL: HOW UNCLEAN?

The experts cited the following concerns about relying on nuclear power:

• Long-lived Radioactive Waste: From mill tailing and
  mine wastes to spent fuel, there is no good solution to the very
  long-lived radioactive wastes that are created by the use of nuclear
  energy. Contrary to popular belief, the amounts are very large. In the
  United States alone, there are hundreds of millions of tons of
  long-lived mining and milling wastes, even though the United States now
  imports most of its uranium requirements. Nuclear energy mobilizes large
  amounts of radioactivity, including radium and thorium at mining and
  milling sites that will last for eons, creates huge amounts of very
  long-lived main-made radionuclides, like plutonium-239 and iodine-129.
  The half life of the iodine-129 is about 16 million years.
• No Spent Fuel Solution: The much cited number that
  France is recycling 90 or 95 percent of its spent fuel is incorrect.
  France uses no more than 6 percent of the weight of fresh fuel and less
  than 1 percent of the uranium that is mined. Moreover, reprocessing does
  not reduce the need for a geologic repository and the proposed French
  site in Bure faces opposition. French reprocessing operations discharge
  about 100 million liters of liquid radioactive waste into the English
  Channel every year which, together with British reprocessing discharges,
  have contaminated the ocean all the way to the Arctic.
• Proliferation Risks: The risk of nuclear
  proliferation is inherently associated with nuclear power techno logy.
  There is an enormous overlap between commercial nuclear power and
  nuclear bomb infrastructure (both technical and human). This has been
  recognized by the pioneers of the Manhattan Project, notably Robert
  Oppenheimer (1946), and by the former Director General of the IAEA,
  ElBaradei (2008), who stated that the rush to nuclear power
  infrastructure in some countries was a kind of "deterrence" policy.
  Nuclear proliferation can have the gravest health, environmental, and
  security consequences if it results in the use of nuclear weapons -
  perhaps a small probability, but one that cannot be ignored. This trend
  could become more dangerous if the push for small reactors that can be
  deployed in remote areas and in a much larger number of countries than
  the present large reactors becomes established as a reality. While US
  actions do not assure that others will follow, it is nearly certain that
  if the US defines nuclear as "clean" there will be no way to dissuade
  others from doing so. If nuclear energy becomes a principal part of the
  response to reducing CO2 emissions 2,000 to 3,000 reactors or more of
  1,000 megawatts each would be needed by 2050. This means tens of
  thousands of nuclear bombs equivalent of plutonium would be created in
  these reactors each year. If reprocessing takes hold, the problem of
  fissile materials accounting and proliferation would become even less
  manageable than it is today.
• Large Water Use: Nuclear power is the largest water
  consumer among all energy technologies. Reactors in the United States
  and in Europe have had to shut down during heat waves, when electricity
  demand is highest. In many places, this problem will be aggravated by
  melting glaciers, and extremes of weather that are estimated to be a
  part of climate disruption.

For more information on nuclear power, see http://www.ieer.org and http://www.NuclearBailout.org.

Noting
that no large-scale commercial CCS operation yet exists, the experts
highlighted the following problems with so-called "clean coal" solutions
and ongoing reliance on old-fashioned coal-fired power plants:

• Public Health Risks of CCS: The most obvious
  threats to health posed by CCS above would occur in the event of the
  release of large amounts of CO2. Carbon dioxide is a colorless, odorless
  gas that is heavier than air. It may cause symptoms or death by
  displacing oxygen from inhaled air, leading to hypoxia and asphyxiation,
  or by causing symptomatic or fatal acidification of the blood and body
  fluids after inhalation. Potential accidental releases could occur at
  any of the stages: at the site of CO2 capture, during transport or
  transfer, or during or after sequestration. The sudden release of large
  amounts of CO2 has the potential to cause large-scale death, as occurred
  on August 21, 1986 at Lake Nyos, a lake in a volcanic crater in
  Cameroon. About 1,700 people died when 250,000 metric tons of CO2 gas
  was released from the lake.
• Coal Mining Pollution: Coal with CCS does not
  address the environmental and public health impacts of mining coal. Coal
  mining leads U.S. industries in fatal injuries and is associated with
  chronic health problems among miners, such as black lung disease, which
  causes permanent scarring of the lung tissues. In addition to the miners
  themselves, communities near coal mines may be adversely affected by
  mining operations due to the effects of blasting, the collapse of
  abandoned mines, and the dispersal of dust from coal trucks. Surface
  mining also destroys forests and groundcover, leading to flood-related
  injury and mortality, as well as soil erosion and the contamination of
  water supplies. Mountaintop removal mining involves blasting down to the
  level of the coal seam and depositing the resulting rubble in adjoining
  valleys, which damages freshwater aquatic ecosystems and the
  surrounding environment by burying streams and headwaters. Coal washing,
  which removes soil and rock impurities before coal is transported to
  power plants, uses polymer chemicals and large quantities of water and
  creates a liquid waste called slurry. Slurry ponds can leak or fail,
  leading to injury and death, and slurry injected underground into old
  mine shafts can release arsenic, barium, lead, and manganese into nearby
  wells, contaminating local water supplies.
• Air Pollutants: Coal plants are the single largest
  source of sulfur dioxide, mercury and air toxic emissions and the second
  largest source of nitrogen oxide pollution after automobiles. Mercury
  exposure is particularly threatening to fetal and child development. The
  health effects of NOx exposure range from eye, nose and throat
  irritation at low levels of exposure to serious damage to the tissues of
  the upper respiratory tract, fluid build-up in the lungs and death at
  high exposure levels. Moreover, once emitted, these pollutants combine
  to form "secondary pollutants," such as ozone and particulate matter
  that pose an equally significant threat to public health. Ozone
  pollution, also known as smog, is a powerful respiratory irritant that
  can cause coughing and chest pain, and at higher concentrations, can
  lead to more serious effects, including lung tissue damage, asthma
  exacerbation, as well as increased risk of hospitalization for asthma,
  bronchitis and other chronic respiratory diseases.
• Post-Combustion (Coal Ash) Pollution: The storage
  of post-combustion wastes from coal plants also threatens human health.
  There are 584 coal ash dump sites in the U.S., and toxic residues have
  migrated into water supplies and threatened human health at dozens of
  these sites. In December 2008, an earthen wall holding back a huge coal
  ash disposal pond failed at the coal-fired power plant in Kingston,
  Tennessee. The 40-acre pond spilled more than 1 billion gallons of coal
  ash slurry into the adjacent river valley, covering some 300 acres with
  thick, toxic sludge, destroying three homes, damaging many others and
  contaminating the Emory and Clinch Rivers.

For more information on coal, see http://www.psr.org/assets/pdfs/psr-coal-fullreport.pdf