Nuclear scientist

Another unsolved problem is how to safely transport nuclear material across the country. During the decades long debate over storing the nation’s radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain, transportation experts estimated that waste disposal from existing nuclear plants would require 1 truck, every 4 hours, 24-hours a day, 365 days a year for 38 years. They estimated that over the same period there would be 130 truck and 440 rail accidents. Each transport container heading to Yucca would hold enough radiation to create a devastating dirty bomb. Shipments would need to travel through 43 states, within one half mile of the homes of tens of millions of people, and through more than 100 of America’s largest cities. Barge shipments would move through 17 port cities on the Atlantic seaboard and through the drinking water of the Great Lakes via Lake Michigan. Do we want to build new nuclear power plants when we have yet to figure out a safe way to transport radioactive material across the country?

China, India, the United States, and several Middle Eastern countries paused their new nuclear programs for a safety review after Fukushima, but all have gone forward with planned nuclear plant construction. Even Japan, which shut down all of its 54 nuclear power plants immediately after the earthquake, has begun to restart its reactors.

Germany did accelerate its nuclear phaseout after Fukushima, but this had been under way since 2000. Not a single country cancelled a new nuclear power plant in response to Fukushima. Several countries, like the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and Jordan, are currently moving forward with plans to build their first commercial nuclear power plants.

Spent nuclear fuel rods have a half-life of nearly 30,000 years; depleted uranium will remain toxic for an estimate 4.5 million years. After decades of scientific research at locations like Yucca Mountain in Nevada, no one has figured out how and where to store the radioactive waste created by nuclear power generation. Energy Secretary Steven Chu recently admitted that he has no firm plans for the radioactive wastes created by the proposed new reactors, or by the 104 currently licensed. And according to CBS News, waste is currently leaking from a quarter of US nuclear power sites. In the last three years alone, cancer-causing tritium was found in the water and soil around nuclear sites in New Jersey, Massachusetts and Vermont. How can we move forward with more nuclear power plants when we do not have the capability — or even a plan — to safely store existing toxic waste?

Most people on the planet actually need to consume more energy, not less. Energy consumption is highly correlated with better health outcomes, longer life spans, and higher living standards. High-energy societies have liberated billions of us from lives of hard agricultural labor. More than a billion people around the world still do not have access to electricity at all. Ensuring that there is abundant energy to power the planet over the coming century promises to unleash the creative potential of billions more. But the basic math of global development and global warming is unforgiving. If we are going to meet the needs of a growing global population while keeping global warming in check, we will need technologies that can produce enormous amounts of energy without emitting carbon.

However unlikely, the potential damage that something goes wrong with nuclear power is way out of proportion to the other risks we choose to take as a society. The Chernobyl disaster continues to teach that lesson: the radiation cloud spread over 27 countries; 500,000 people are estimated to have died from radiation exposure over the last two decades; 1,100 square miles surrounding the reactor remain uninhabitable; 5-8 million people continue to live in the contamination zone causing a surge in infant mortality and children born with deformities. The scale, deadliness, and unstoppability of radiation after leakage or an accident at a mine or power plant make nuclear energy unique. Dare we create an energy system where one mistake could turn an entire American region into another Chernobyl?

Installed nuclear generation in the United States is among the cheapest sources of electricity we have—cheaper even than coal.16 France, which generates over 80 percent of its electricity with nuclear energy, has some of the cheapest electricity prices in Western Europe.17 Nuclear plants cost a lot of money to build up front, but they operate for 60 to 80 years, producing massive amounts of energy with virtually no fuel costs. Over the long term, this makes them a bargain.

The Olkiluoto-3 nuclear power plant in Finland—the poster child of expensive nuclear—is $6.5 billion over budget and six years behind schedule. Even still, recent analysis shows that this beleaguered plant will produce electricity at almost one-fourth the cost of Germany’s solar program. These are good technologies to compare, as the Finnish plant is a first-of-a-kind design—an Areva EPR—which is significantly safer, more reliable, and more efficient than existing nuclear power plants. Successive builds, such as the second EPR under construction in France, are expected to be cheaper. But even this extreme case isn’t unreasonably expensive when compared to another innovative carbon-free electricity source like solar PV.

In order to meet our climate goals, nuclear will need to get cheaper. A new generation of advanced nuclear designs is presently under development. They will be simpler, safer, and can be constructed modularly and shipped to the site. All of these features give them potential to be significantly cheaper. Nevertheless, these powerful and complicated machines will require federal help to develop and commercialize.