Should We Build More Nuclear Power Plants?

January 25, 2008

I have to admit that for a long time, I’ve had a lot of qualms about nuclear power as a source of electricity. I was in college in Pennsylvania during the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, and I remember being downwind as a pretty scary experience.  (The alarmist antinuclear thriller The China Syndrome, which I saw the weekend after the accident, added a bit to my anxiety, especially that line of dialogue about a nuclear meltdown’s potential to render an area the size of Pennsylvania uninhabitable.)  Fortunately, the partial core meltdown of TMI’s unit 2 reactor was brought under control before a disaster of gigantic proportions could occur. But seven years later, when a reactor suffered a steam explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the then-Soviet Union, the Soviets and their European neighbors weren’t so lucky. The accident spread radiation as far as the UK and Sweden, and a 2005 international report estimated that the area surrounding the stricken reactor will suffer as many as 4,000 additional deaths from cancer. After TMI and Chernobyl, I figured, nuclear power was pretty much dead. The only concerns left, I figured, were the problems of safely maintaining the aging nuclear power plants already in existence, and figuring out what to do with the radioactive waste building up on site at those plants.

But the rapidly developing global warming crisis has forced me — and a lot of other people, I suspect — to at least reconsider my opposition to nuclear power. Seventy percent of the electricity in the U.S. is generated by power plants that burn fossil fuels, and as a result, we’re pumping ungodly amounts of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. And the explosively growing nations of China and India are doing their best to burn even more coal to generate electricity than we do. Energy conservation on a massive global scale is what we really need, but good luck with convincing Americans — and everyone else across the planet who aspires to a blithely affluent U.S. lifestyle — to carpool or turn down their air conditioning in the summer, let alone unplug the appliances and electronic gadgets that turn into energy-wasting  “vampire devices” when they’re idle.

So what do we do? In 2006, one-time Greenpeace International director Patrick Moore wrote a Washington Post opinion piece advocating the building of more nuclear power plants as a way of reducing dependence upon fossil fuels and curbing climate change. Moore argued that nuclear power was a more viable source of greenhouse emissions-free power than other alternative energy sources:

"Wind and solar power have their place, but because they are intermittent and unpredictable they simply can't replace big baseload plants such as coal, nuclear and hydroelectric. Natural gas, a fossil fuel, is too expensive already, and its price is too volatile to risk building big baseload plants. Given that hydroelectric resources are built pretty much to capacity, nuclear is, by elimination, the only viable substitute for coal. It's that simple."

Moore discounted the criticisms that many opponents of nuclear power have raised. Even the horrific accident at Chernobyl, he noted, caused fewer deaths than the 5,000 deaths in coal-mining accidents worldwide each year. And as for the problem of disposing nuclear waste, he wrote that

"Within 40 years, used fuel has less than one-thousandth of the radioactivity it had when it was removed from the reactor. And it is incorrect to call it waste, because 95 percent of the potential energy is still contained in the used fuel after the first cycle. Now that the United States has removed the ban on recycling used fuel, it will be possible to use that energy and to greatly reduce the amount of waste that needs treatment and disposal. Last month, Japan joined France, Britain and Russia in the nuclear-fuel-recycling business. The United States will not be far behind."

He’s not the only one who supports building more nuclear power plants. According to this chart compiled by the environmental news and commentary Web site Grist, not only do all the remaining Republican presidential candidates support expanded use of nuclear power, but the two top Democratic contenders are at least lukewarm to the idea. (Sen. Barack Obama, whose home state of Illinois gets 40 percent of its power from nuclear plants, told CNN in November 2007 that while nuclear wasn’t his most favored option, “it has to be part of our energy mix,” while Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York  in August 2007 described herself as “agnostic” about nuclear power. (Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards is opposed to building more plants, and congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio wants to dismantle existing ones.)

So what do you think? Should we build more nuclear power plants? Or should we focus harder on energy conservation and developing solar, wind and geothermal technologies instead? Express your opinion below.