Yesterday Richard Garwin spoke in the Science Center about the role of nuclear energy in the country’s energy future, and I was once again amazed at how clearly the numbers demonstrate our nation’s strong need for nuclear energy. If we want to stem global warming and continue to grow our economy at a strong pace by continuing to provide low-cost energy to the nation, nuclear energy is the most vital part of the future energy picture. First, a note about what is perhaps nuclear energy’s best feature: nuclear electricity is clean. Really, really clean. It has no greenhouse gas emissions. It emits so little radioactivity that in fact coal plants emit significantly more radiation, because of natural radioactive materials mixed in with the coal. Nuclear energy production has an environmental friendliness comparable to that of solar panels, (because of the toxic chemicals used in the manufacture of solar panels). Only wind energy even approaches the clean energy offered by nuclear power, but wind energy is far more obtrusive and needs many hundreds or thousands of windmills to equal the output of a single large nuclear plant. Garwin’s presentation had a number of statistics but of these, three are by far the most important. First is the cost of nuclear energy. Nuclear energy is cheaper than its alternatives by an enormous margin, including coal, natural gas, wind and (by the largest margin of all) photovoltaics (solar panels are astronomically expensive for the amount of electricity they generate, and will continue to be so for the medium-long term future). Even with the very large costs assessed on the nuclear industry by the government to provide many orders of magnitude more safety than any other energy technology, it remains much cheaper than the alternatives, including coal. When the cost of carbon emissions is included the advantage of nuclear energy is even more pronounced. The second key point was that of general energy costs. Oil only costs around $25/ barrel to produce; any price above that is entirely profit for OPEC nations. While it is arguable whether it is desirable to have a higher price in order to push consumers onto other energy sources, it is unquestionable in a technical sense that there exists enough oil to provide for world energy needs for decades at or below the current price per barrel. If we wish to substitute for oil anytime in the near future, the energy source has to be both economically competitive with oil and environmentally friendly (else there would be little point in the replacement). Nuclear energy is the only energy source that meets both of these requirements, as it is cheaper than oil per kilowatt of energy and has essentially no impact on the environment. The third point was on a key component of nuclear policy that needs to change in order for nuclear energy to truly take off and become the central pillar of our energy policy that it needs to be if we’re serious about global warming. Specifically, this is the idea of commercially operated, competitive nuclear waste repositories. For decades the government has thrown away billions of dollars on endless studies on how to store nuclear waste, even though we have known how to do this safely since the 1960s. The real problem is political (as it so often is in technical debates). Nuclear waste depositories have been portrayed as the dirtiest, most awful places that people can construct. But in fact, nuclear waste can be safely solidified and stored in such a manner so that it can never enter a groundwater supply before it decays to a harmless level of activity; in this sense it is safer than chemical wastes, which never decay; the problem with nuclear waste is merely that it is more concentrated than most chemical wastes. In fact Japan, Canada, France, and the UK have been safely sending nuclear wastes around their countries and to each other without a single fatal accident for decades. Japan sends its nuclear waste by sea to France and the UK in order for it to be reprocessed (only 0.5% of the usable fuel is ‘burned’ in a reactor; reprocessing extracts the other 99.5% of good fuel from waste products). Proliferation, despite what one hears on the news, is not really an issue with these sorts of waste products; their heat, high mass, and dense packing make them virtually impossible to steal, and as mentioned above other major countries have safely transported these materials for decades. Such waste is also useless for development of a nuclear weapons program like that of Iran or North Korea. The other countries of the world have handled their nuclear waste in a safe and economically advantageous way for decades; its time for the US to do the same. By offering to competitively store waste by private companies using IAEA- approved containers and repositories, we save billions of dollars of wasted government money, provide more room for waste storage, and create an industry that can help support the growth of a carbon-free energy source. If we want to continue to provide energy at a cost that supports worldwide economic growth and get to work on saving our environment from the ravages of greenhouse gases, we must get to work on replacing coal and other carbon sources with nuclear as soon as possible. We have no other choice.
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