Yesterday I mentioned a number of big-ticket reasons to think that nuclear power is a very bad bet indeed: It bleeds money from smarter, cheaper and much more climate-friendly options; it’s dangerous; it’s radically inefficient; it’s not, at the end of the day – that is to say, through the whole life cycle – a particularly low-carbon approach, certainly relative to wind and solar; and we don’t have an inexhaustible supply of fissionable material.
There are many more reasons why nukes are the wrong path: waste for instance. Here is an FT article that talks about some of the problems in the US. After spending nearly $9 billion on Yucca Mountain, the proposed long-term high-level disposal facility, President Obama pulled the plug last year. (Politics? Don’t ask.) Meanwhile, there are tens of thousands of tons of radioactive waste languishing at civilian nuclear reactor sites in the US alone, not to mention “22,000 canisters of solid defense-related radioactive waste for future disposal in a repository,” according to the DOE.
And, according to UNEP here: “Since the 1960s, more than 200,000 tons of spent fuel have been produced by 400 reactors in 30 countries, and every year 10,000 tons are added.” UNEP also estimates the global waste plutonium burden from nuclear weaponry in excess of a thousand tons.
Is there a safe, environmentally acceptable way to dispose of nuclear waste? Not yet, according to Greenpeace here. What about reprocessing the waste into fuel? “Reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel would increase, not decrease, the total volume of nuclear waste.” That’s what the Union of Concerned Scientists says here. Oh, by the way, any idea how long you need to keep the high-level waste fully isolated in order to protect public health? Well, just one constituent of this waste among many, Plutonium-239, has a half-life of 24,000 years. That means that you have to think in terms of segregating it safely for hundreds of thousands of years.
Can you watch over and protect this waste for all this time? See this new movie, Into Eternity, about long-term radioactive waste storage. The director was interviewed recently on NPR. From the interview: “But in 1995, the Academy of Science was asked whether it is possible to, on a scientific ground, to say that it is possible to communicate to the future and it is possible to deter inadvertent human intrusion. And the question – the answer on that was, in both cases, no. It’s not possible to, on a scientific ground, to guarantee this.”
So, even John Rowe, the CEO of Exelon, the utility with the largest nuclear fleet in the US, said “Until we have a plan in place to store waste in the long term, then we ought ‘to go slow’ on expanding nuclear power.” This from someone who has a rather large and serious vested interest in nukes!
Logically, to what might you think all that highly radioactive material in all those places all over the world would lend itself? The threat of nuclear weapon proliferation and terrorism, perhaps? Others would agree. Among these are the very good people at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The group was founded “…in 1945 by scientists, engineers, and other experts who had created the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project. They knew about the horrible effects of these new weapons and devoted themselves to warning the public about the consequences of using them.” Since then, their sense of responsibility has expanded to nuclear energy, biosecurity and, perhaps not surprisingly, climate change.
In A call to resist the nuclear revival, they say, in no uncertain terms, that:
Oh, and by the way, the threat of terrorism does not come only from the theft of weapons-grade materials. It comes from the specter of sabotage at nuclear power facilities. That’s a happy prospect considering how close to major population centers many power plants are.
Meanwhile, the mining of uranium is itself a dangerously unhealthy enterprise. Ask the Navajo in Arizona or the miners in Niger and their families.
