There’s been a of talk lately about nuclear power being a good way to fight climate change, so our crew at RAN made the latest “Greenwash of the Week” about why it isn’t. We should support alternatives that will (1) not screw up the environment and (2) work.
To see all of the GOTW videos (this is the ninth), click here.
This video offers a lot of important facts on the dangers, expenses and inadequacy of nuclear power including the motivations of the energy corporations in promoting it.
But the talking heads presentation with no graphics would be hard enough for most people to follow without the silly poses and distractions by the presenters.
A couple of points they missed were the dependence on foriegn uranium and the role played by 1970s grassroots organizing in turning the tide against nuclear power plants – mass civil disobedience had more to do with stopping proliferation than did Three Mile Island.
This is indeed a very serious issue, and more efforts to educate the public are needed now.
IMHO, this segment exaggerates the dangers of nuclear while downplaying issues with renewables. Every major study (e.g., Paul Scherrer Institute) indicates that nuclear is among the safest ways to generate electricity 24/7. I still do not see why this is an either/or situation: renewables generate swing load and nuclear generates baseload.
Hmm, well I agree that things aren’t so black and white as presented in the video, but I’ve gotta agree with the folks at RAN on this one. Concentrated solar is better, it just is.
The nuclear industry is a threat to our health, safety, and way of life.
Even counting uranium mining from the ’40s and ’50s, the deaths per unit energy for nuclear is very low. Most large scale technologies envy the nuclear safety record.
Concentrated solar is nice, but it has limitations. It needs land and it needs natural gas to heat the coolant for the few hours prior to sunrise (i.e., it cannot be used everywhere and is not 24/7). To replace the coal baseload we will either need better (and cheaper) energy storage technology or some nuclear. My guess is that we will need nuclear while we figure out the energy storage issue.
It’s true that there’s work to be done making renewables work for baseload, but indications are that it can be done. Biomass might work as a direct replacement for some coal capacity. But the second point we made is also important: e.g. currently, there is one steel plant in the world that can build a solid steel containment vessel, and they can make about four a year.
More background from Climate Progress:
http://climateprogress.org/2008/06/13/nuclear-power-part-2-the-price-is-not-right/
http://climateprogress.org/2008/06/02/the-self-limiting-future-of-nuclear-power-part-1/
I believe you are referring to Japan Steel Works as the main supplier of forgings for reactor vessels (these hold the fuel assemblies and are not the steel shells forming the contaiment building). Currently, AP-1000 vessels are being supplied by Doosang and the Chinese are learning how to fabricate them. Other countries are boosting their forging capacity as well (e.g., UK). The supply bottlenecks are beginning to disappear.
Yes biomass can help as well, but to really replace the baseload with low carbon energy, some nuclear is likely needed for such a large shift in energy supply.
Nuclear won’t be ready in time to help shift our energy sources. It takes nuclear plants around 10 years to be built, and we need to dramatically change our energy portfolio WAY before that. Nuclear is a dirty, expensive, unsafe and unjust distraction from pursuing truly renewable and smart energy options. Go Greenwash of the Week!
The question is whether the cost is worth it compared to alternatives; if we could build 2-3 times as much distributed wind capacity with the same money, it’s not, even with consideration for baseload requirements. And that’s about how the numbers shake out.
Also, it only takes one nuclear accident to blow that safety record out of the water. And what’s the plan for all of the new nuclear waste?
Amy –
Nuclear plants have been built in Japan in as little as 39 months. As for changing over the US to an all-renewable grid in 10 years, no one has tested a “smartgrid” with all renewables and energy storage combined. Such a combination must first be proven (I am all in favor of the Xcel smartgrid project in Boulder CO) before any regulators will allow wholesale transformation of utility grids. Yes, nuclear is controversial and has its issues, but it has a much better safety record than most fossil technologies. It can make a contribution to solving the carbon conundrum.
Luke -
The Oklo phenomenon is proof that nuclear waste can be sequestered for very long periods of time. It will be easier to sequester nuclear waste than the huge amounts of carbon (though that is probably doable as well). As for accidents, even with Chernobyl (and nobody advocates building THAT design) the deaths per unit energy of nuclear are much less than most fossil technologies.
–proof that it MIGHT be, not that it WILL be. And it’s pretty tough to quantify how many years of life were lost due to increased local and global ambient radiation after Chernobyl; is that part of your calculation?
I recently read that salvaged steel from pre-war battleships is in high demand for shielding radiation-sensitive facilities (involving precise measurements) because all steel made after 1950 or so is mildly radioactive. Using nuclear has a longer impact on the global environment than any other human activity I’m aware of — the timescale is pretty much forever. It’s the standard-bearer for the twentieth century’s charge to dominate and utilize the natural world rather than align with its rhythms. It is, in a word, hubris. Believing the industry when it says “no, now we’ve got it figured out” is silly. They had it figured out in 1950, too.
Mercury (compact fluorescents) and arsenic (photovoltaic cells) are still used in industry and their half-life is infinite. Somehow the impression is that if someone is killed by radiation they are more dead than by some other means.
The advantage of radiation is that it has been studied more in depth than more other phenomena. It is easily measured and tracked. There are places such as Kerala, India where natural doses as high as 3 rem (i.e., higher than most of the Chernobyl contaminated areas) are measured yet no discernable effects have been found (i.e., linear no-threshold model is for making regulations not predicting cancers at low doses). If more certainty is needed for nuclear waste, one can use deep borehole technology (~5 km instead of 800 m). I am not saying nuclear is perfect [after all, then I could retire...], only that it is good enough to be on the list of low carbon baseload options.
Yeah, the ever-increasing background level of toxins is a problem across the board. I have to say, if it were a choice between nuclear or coal+CCS, I personally might pick nuclear. But the timeline issues in the US are real, the cost-efficiency vs. renewables is not in nuclear’s favor, and I think that now is the time to invest in a more distributed model of power generation. And just like with coal extraction and combustion, those with the least means to fight back (like people living on the edge of a “national sacrifice zone”) will be the ones most impacted. If instead we could move to localized power generation with a smart grid to balance supply and demand, a whole different group of people would benefit from less capital-intensive energy development. That, more than anything, is why I think that McCain et al would rather see nuclear baseload than renewables: nuclear does more to benefit entrenched interests.
Hey R Margolis
Can we build a reactor in your back yard? Maybe we can store the nuclear waste there, too. Nuclear, to me, makes no sense, as a 21 year old who already has to deal with the effects of a insane energy system and will be for the rest of my life. I’m about to go to an Indigenous Environmental Network conference, where a lot of workshops will be focused around the nuclear renassiance and its terrible, unjust impacts on native communities, from uranium mining to nuclear waste storage. Pine Ridge reservation in the Dakotas has water so contaminated from uranium mining that women spontaneously miscarried. Solving global warming won’t happen if we continue to treat people as trash and disrespect the earth.
I for one am not down for an energy future where we spend billions on an unjust and unsafe form of power because we don’t have the vision to see truly clean, just alternatives.
Amy -
I am not arguing that nuclear is green, only that its impacts are less than other baseload sources. Personally, I would choose a deep borehole (~5 km hole per MIT) next to my house over a chemical plant to make PV cells. At that depth in crystalline granite, the stuff is not going to come back. Of course, risk perception is highly individualized and nuclear’s old history (especially old mining) burned a lot of bridges with local communities.