I know, kinda provocative. Still kind of mild compared to the hyperbole regularly employed by nuclear opponents.
At 9 p.m. EST, CNN will be airing the documentary Pandora's Promise. It raises the question as to whether environmentalists have been blowing it all along by opposing nuclear energy.
I haven't seen the documentary yet. It did get good reviews and high praise for its nuance and comprehensive overlook. Hopefully it won't contradict any of the things I'm writing here.
Disclosure: I work in the nuclear industry as a reliability engineer (think actuary, but for nuclear accidents rather than life insurance). Most of my work involves probabilities of equipment failures and frequencies of accident scenarios. I own some crappy uranium stocks but I am not being paid or otherwise encouraged to post this. I'm trying to enlighten, but I don't feel obligated to post both sides of every argument because:
1. I don't believe in false balance.
2. Nuclear energy is a complicated topic and there isn't room or time.
3. It is not hard to find diaries on Daily Kos written by people who oppose nuclear power.
Follow me below the Ochre Moebius Strip to learn some more background about the terrible scourge that isn't nuclear power...
First, an inconvenient truth from the climate scientists we like to quote when debating Jim Inofe:
Experts say nuclear power needed to slow warming
Do these guys have professional integrity all the time, or only when you agree with them?
I believe the relative worthiness of energy sources should be judged according to three main criteria: economics, safety and environmental impact.
Economics
There's no denying that nuclear power has high capital costs. Higher than any other source except large-scale hydro dams. Total costs vary greatly, depending on a number of factors:
- Interest rates on financing
- Decommissioning costs
- Capacity factor of running plants
- Licensing risk premiums
- Electricity rates for both peak and baseload power
The following chart shows the relative operational costs of our current baseload power generators. [Wind and solar propoents: please don't complain that your favorites aren't included here. They're hard to compare directly, and anyway if I tried you wouldn't like the answer.]
(source:
Electrical Information Institute)
Note that this data is from 2001-2011, before the fracking boom cratered natural gas prices. Nuclear has probably fallen behind both fossil steam and gas turbine plants. Which is why it's not surprising so many utilities are putting off new construction or shutting down plants. See, I'm not being entirely one-sided here.
Please note, however, that nuke plants are great economic stimuli. The quality requirements of the equipment make them much harder to offshore. Nukes require more personnel to operate than hydro dams for the same cost, which creates high-paying high-tech jobs. The two biggest producers of Uranium are Canada and Australia, and anyway the fuel is a small fraction of the operational cost.
Of course, this is sans carbon tax. The total costs of energy production have to take a lot into account. Without diving into all the details, let me first dispel a few misconceptions:
1. The long-term waste storage costs are not accounted for. Not true. Indeed nuclear power is the only energy source that does factor disposal into its production costs.
2. Nuclear Plants are uninsurable. Not true either. The Price-Anderson Actdoes provide stopgap liability protection in the case of a large-scale accident (and I mean LARGE, Three Mile Island payouts totaled a paltry $77 million and that was a core damage scenario that predated reliability engineering). But it also mandates that license fees be increased to the point where the licensees cover the cost of any cleanup, so the public really isn't on the hook at all. Insurers actually like covering nuke plants.
3. The waste will be around forever because of 5-digit half lives. Misleading at best. Waste disposal is not a huge technical issue; it's more of a political one. Long-half-life isotopes are not very radioactive and are easily shielded. Highly radioactive isotopes don't last long. After a hundred years, you're typically down to 1% of the radiation from a fuel rod fresh out of the reactor. You bury the stuff in a stable geological environment, it doesn't go anywhere, it's not useful for bomb-making, you forget about it.
Safety
I like to take a simple approach to safety: how likely is an activity will kill people? [Delving into Quality-Adjusted Life Years for overall health effects is a lot trickier, because you get into conundrums where not doing something can be worth hundreds of billions of dollars.] I'll let this graph do most of the talking on this one:
Source
No point in crowing about the marginally safer record of nuclear compared to wind and solar, but you can see that empirically, the dangers to human life may have been a tad overstated. And yes, this numbers account for everything including mining deaths. Please click through the links before attempting to dismiss the data.
The US has had one partial meltdown that didn't kill anyone (Three Mile Island in 1979). The jury is still out on Chernobyl and Fukushima, but please remember they are in other countries with different design and operational features. There's little the US government can do about safety standards in other countries. Conversely, it's not exactly fair to extrapolate the nature of these accidents into what's likely to happen here. Also bear in mind that fertilizer plants do not have the same standards as nuclear plants and the NRC is not Rick Perry.
Environmental Impact
Of course, the environment is related to safety. I've discussed the spent fuel issue above. There are other environmental concerns besides spent fuel, of course, but they don't tend to come up as much in public debates. I do remember one winter the plant I worked on had to shut down, and lots of fish died near the condenser cooling water outflow to the river because of the temperature shock. I suppose the plant was responsible for making the fish feel toasty in the first place, but it wasn't radiation that killed them.
I would not hesitate to move my entire family to the exclusion zone limit of any nuclear plant in North America. Similarly, I would have no issue with living right on top of a permanent spent fuel repository such as the one planned for Yucca Mountain. NIMBYism may work politically, but its also selfish and hypocritical (see RFK Junior's Opposition to a Wind Farm off Nantucket).
Since Climate Change is the pressing issue of the day and since coal plants are the #1 villians, let's compare CO2 emissions by energy source:
(Source:
IPCC)
The only large-scale competitor to coal and natural gas right now is nuclear power. Being anti-nuke and pro-climate action doesn't make a lot of sense to me. It's the biggest, greenest power source we have.
We know that it's safer to fly than to drive, per mile travelled. It's normal to be afraid of big, complex and high-energy systems (think jet engines and lightning) that are beyond our control or immediate understanding. Silent, invisible and odorless phenomena like radiation are a lot scarier than coal dust or roof falls. And yet it's clear which is more likely to harm us.