Here in the Boston area we sit in the geographic center of two aging nuclear plants and there’s a third just over the border in Western Mass. The Pilgrim Nuclear plant and VT Yankee have the same General Electric Mark 1 reactor as the troubled Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan and to make matters worse, the NRC rated Pilgrim Nuclear as the 2nd most risky plant in the nation in terms of earthquakes.
VT Yankee on the Mass border is nearing the end of its 40-year license so applied for a 20-year extension and has recently been found to be leaking radioactive tritium from a pipe the plant previously claimed didn’t even exist.
The failure of the Yucca Mountain project, imperfect as it was, at least would have allowed for dry storage away from population centers as opposed to spent fuel storage on site at every plant. Earthquakes aside, the pools that store the spent fuel are ten times the hazard of protected reactors in terms of security, terrorism, and volume of fuel.
While I fully respect the potential of nuclear power, it is an elaborate, risky, and expensive way to boil water to turn a turbine. A recent report by the Union of Concerned Scientists documents fourteen “near-misses” at US nuclear plants during 2010 and evaluates the NRC’s response in each case. The events exposed a variety of shortcomings, such as inadequate training, faulty maintenance, poor design, and failure to investigate problems thoroughly. Recent history is enough to shake anyone’s faith in our ability to deploy this sophisticated technology safely but for the awesome responsibility of keeping us safe, it’s time for the NRC to renew its mission.
Not only should we take a closer look at safety measures at the vintage fleet around us but the federal government should consider tabling and re-evaluating plans to construct 100 new nuclear plants in the US. A map that shows just 20 of the 100 nuclear plants on track to be built shows that most are concentrated along the east coast. Many of these proposals have active applications before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and this new construction plan, proposed in 2009, is showing no sign of abatement even with the backdrop of the unfolding catastrophe in Japan.
Politically, we need to immediately stop propping up this industry with our desperately needed tax dollars. In spite of deep and painful budget cuts that will have far reaching consequences for essential government services, President Obama has unfortunately budgeted another $36 billion dollars of market-distorting loan guarantees for the nuclear industry.
The groundwork for these subsidies was laid years ago when, at the urging of the nuclear power industry, a one-sentence provision was buried in the 2005 energy bill and inserted without debate, making nuclear plants classified as clean energy, ensuring eligibility for tens of billions of dollars in government loan guarantees.
Clean? Not by a long stretch. I visited Chernobyl in 1992 shortly after the nuclear disaster that led to the death or cancer diagnosis for several hundred thousand people. The “Red Forest”, as it was dubbed when area evergreen trees turned red from radiation, had already been taken down and buried. The desolation in the plant’s “Zone of alienation” and other well-documented impacts offered a powerful cautionary tale I’m afraid we have forgotten.
It is a time for clarity of thought and communication. No matter how proponents spin it, nuclear power generation is not safe or economic and will never be until the waste problem is solved. Congressman Ed Markey (D. Mass) has been on the forefront of holding plant owners accountable and keeping us informed. I would like to see similar activity from President Obama beyond a tacit embrace of this industry.
Simultaneous to this impressive nuclear industry lobbying effort, the fossil fuel lobby has marginalized renewable energy efforts and badly distorted US energy policy. Elected officials need to be more skeptical and Americans need to do a better job of recognizing clever PR campaigns. Rather than subsidizing nuclear power plants, oil companies, or offshore drilling, we need to find a way that we can safely coexist with the energy production upon which we rely.
Early signs at reconsideration are evident. In light of this catastrophe in Japan, Germany has taken the bold step of calling for closure of at least seven of its oldest nuclear plants. Renewable experts in Germany claim to be able to supply up to 47% of Germany’s energy needs with renewable sources by 2020. Energy-thirsty China has just tabled its plans for 28 new reactors and Russia and France have announced moratoriums.
It’s time for American innovation to kick in.
It will take imagination, new business models, new financial tools, and new information systems to move away from the point source model we’ve known for most of our lives. If we do so, there’s nothing to stop us from, perhaps, lining our network of interstate highways with solar arrays and turbines. We already own the right-of-ways and since highways pass through cities that need electricity we would have connectivity.
Be it this vision or another, America should have a sustainable vision and our leaders should be able to articulate it clearly. Our current energy plan more closely resembles a wrestling match for subsidies than a well thought out and strategic plan.
While the nation appears to be coming out of a period of nuclear amnesia President Obama has a great political opportunity to articulate a long-term vision we all can live with.
Just a personal note: Seeing Chernobyl made the half-life of my nuclear memory long. This map will give you some idea of the scope of the desolation. I don’t have the technical ability to do so, but what would this map look like over a similarly scaled map around any other plant in the US? As President of the Kennedy School Energy Caucus a few years ago, I was able to tour Seabrook too. All food for thought.
A nuclear expert just let loose an astounding fact while speaking with Chris Matthews on Harball. He said that the one unit at Vermont Yankee has more spent fuel and radioactivity than all of the 6 units at Fukushima combined…and more than Chernobyl had. Until we’re able to address the spent fuel storage issue, I think we need to think of these 104 plants in the US as waste dumps for radioactive material that just happen to generate some power on-site.
Yucca just isn’t going to happen, at least not within a decade or more. There are two reprocessing facilities in tUSA, both military: one in Washington, the other in Georgia. Just as nobody wants all that nuclear material passing by their city on the way to Yucca, nobody wants all that nuclear material passing by on the way to WA or GA. There’s also tremendous foreign policy considerations with reprocessing.
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p>To be frank, there is not, nor is there any prospect, of dealing with nuclear waste except leaving it on-site.
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p>Having written that, I’m not opposed to new nuclear. Here’s what I’d like to see:
1. A requirement that new nuclear is sited at the same place as old nuclear.
2. The new plant must have a larger capacity than the old plant.
3. The old plant must be decommissioned.
4. At least one old dirty coal fired plant within 250 miles must also be decommissioned.
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p>In this way, we don’t expand the locations of nuclear reactors, nor the number of nuclear power plants. We don’t have to deal with tremendous problems with siting nor with transmission. We get to upgrade the safety standards of the nuclear power plants. We get to significantly reduce the emissions of CO_2, NO_x, SO_2, Hg, and other baddies.
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p>Sure, it doesn’t solve the waste problem — but there is no near-term solution for that problem anyway. Nuclear power provides about 20% of the kWh of electricity consumed in tUSA. We can’t just turn nuclear off without replacing those kWh, and we’re currently growing renewables at a rate of about 1% per year. Furthermore, if we use renewables to replace nuclear, we’re stuck with that old coal too.
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p>Finally, and with complete respect for a Rep who is doing great work, the following strikes me as silly:
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p>That’s tremendously wasteful, ugly, and inefficient. You don’t want to ground mount that much solar along highways. Instead, consider putting PV on buildings. It’s true that we can’t provide 100% of our electricity needs using just PV on roofs, but it’s also true that the vast vast majority of usable roof space currently doesn’t have PV on it. Why would we put PV on ground which isn’t level, doesn’t have footings, isn’t within 100 feet of the mains, and which could obstruct, obscure, or obfuscate the environment when we could put PV on our roofs?
Much forethought is put into designing the reactor cores are protected with primary containment. Spent fuel pools at all of the plants around the country are designed to be temporary cooling places before they can be dry stored somewhere else. (The spent fuel pool at Yankee was designed to hold about 800 spent fuel rods and are now holding nearly 4,000.) These are a huge risk in terms of security and terrorism, never mind earthquakes. Without that somewhere else, dry storage on-site is the best we can hope for and I greatly applaud AG Coakley and Senate President Murray for pushing for that.
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p>Considered! I’m not adverse to PV on rooftops, believe me. California had the million solar rooftop intiative which was very exciting. I’m just trying to get people talking/thinking. We can do better that $36 billion in nuclear subsidies and don’t even get me going on what we’re giving to the fossil fuel interests.
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p>Btw, Hi my old friend Stomv! Thanks for comment.
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p>It is worth noting that the reaction to Three Mile Island, which led to no nuclear plants being built in the US, also has led to an increased reliance on fossil fuels, probably more deaths, and certainly more contribution to global warming.
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p>I’m no apologist for nuclear power. But if we are to say that nuclear has no future in the US, we need a practical alternative — or else that “alternative” will be fossil fuels. Imagining a world of endless solar panels or wind farms is great, but unless we are willing to massively subsidize it (not politically possible in the current environment) and deal with the fact that these technologies are not currently efficient enough to deal with current energy needs, we also have to be open to nuclear power as an energy source.
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p>It’s temping, but wrong, to use events involving the Fukushima Daiichi plant to cast doubt on an energy source that could save more lives than our current energy sources.
Representative, great op-ed, and glad to see the nuclear power debate being taken on on BMG.
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p>Below are the key findings taken from the executive summary of Environment Massachusetts’ most recent study on nuclear power. Here, is the link to the full executive summary and report (PDF)
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p>Key findings from our executive summary:
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p>>Early action matters in the fight against global warming.
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p>>New nuclear reactors would be built too slowly to reduce global warming pollution in the near term, and would actually increase the scale of action required in the future.
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p>>In contrast, energy efficiency and renewable energy sources can make an immediate contribution toward reducing global warming pollution.
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p>>Nuclear power is expensive and will divert resources from more cost-effective energy strategies.
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p>>Nuclear power is not needed to provide reliable, low-carbon electricity for the future.
I guess this is popular mythology about the demise of the nuclear industry, but it does not square with the historical record.
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p>It was the financial melt-down, not the one in Pennsylvania, that put a stop to new nuclear construction in the U.S.
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p>I’m not saying that the accident helped the industry, but by 1979 the Public Service Company of New Hampshire (for instance) was already well on the road to bankruptcy.
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p>The $2B bond default by the Washington Public Power Supply in 1982 shook the industry far more profoundly than TMI. (That was real money back then, and there was no bailout.)
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p>Positive things we got from the demise of the nuclear industry include aggressive energy-efficiency programs and the growth of alternative technologies.
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p>Both had been stifled by a glut of nuclear capacity–indeed that was the deliberate strategy of the utility industry at that time.
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p>You final statement that there are no lessons to be learned from Fukashima is at best premature, since the accident isn’t nearly over yet and it is far too soon to congratulate ourselves on how safe we all are.
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p>But even apart from that your statement is a nonsequitur from the rest of your post for which you provide zero evidence or arguments.
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p>We ignore Fukashima at our peril.
Unlike nuclear power plants?
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p>Or did you miss the extra bonus cash the Obama admin is dishing out to the nuclear industry to build new plants, to the tune of $36 billion. Bottom line: nuclear power plants won’t get built without big federal subsidies, and it’s not going to be the power companies that own these plants who pay for them to continue to be staffed and guarded decades after they’re shut down and for thousands of years when it comes to the nuclear waste they produce.
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p>Compared to all that, wind turbines are a bargain. I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest we should close all nuclear plants immediately, but we certainly shouldn’t create any new ones and should do our best to retire those we have as quickly as we reasonably can (while also given them an intensive study to see which ones are too dangerous to keep open, whether they’re too close to major metropolitan areas or nearby dangerous fault lines, etc).
Of course, I did not say that nuclear plants were not subsidized (indeed, like just about all energy sources).
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p>But massively subsidizing alternative energy sources such as wind or solar — and they will have to be massively subsidized to be viable, at least until the technologies get better — enjoys less political support than subsidizing nuclear.
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p>Maybe that’s unfortunate. Maybe we have to change the political will to subsidize wind and solar. But in the meantime, nuclear energy remains as the most efficient and politically viable and alternative to fossil fuels. It’s unfortunate that (many, though not all) environmentalists interested in reducing carbon emissions have taken such an anti-nuclear stance. If there hadn’t been such an outcry over nuclear power in the past, we’d be in better shape dealing with climate change than we are now.
Did we (most environmentalists) historically oppose new plants being built because we foresaw disasters exactly like what happened at Three Mile Island, Chrenobyl and now in Japan? Yes. But we also consistently have opposed new fossil fuel infrastructure. Much to my chagrin, we enviros have about a fraction of the power attributed to us by Glenn Beck’s white board.
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p>See my above referenced report, nuclear fails on the economics, EVEN WITH generous subsidies they are not getting built, which just is not the case with most renewables (Deepwater wind in RI being a counter example).
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p>Also, I’d love to see a side by side comparison of public support for subsidies for renewables vs. nukes. I don’t believe you, and you haven’t cited a source (to be fair, I can’t find a useful one that says anything one way or another).
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p>And, see the link to my report above, even if we as a country “went nuclear” starting tomorrow, we could reduce carbon emissions faster and more effectively if we “went renewable” with the same effort.
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p>Nuclear power is not a solution to global warming, period. Even if it was the safest thing in the world.
you are correct. Much of it has to do with local groups preventing the construction of these plants. But certainly the anti-nuclear movement, whether from environmentalists or NIMBY groups, played an important role in the demise of nuclear power in the US.
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p>And maybe you’re right that “we could reduce carbon emissions faster and more effectively if we ‘went renewable’ with the same effort.” But even if this is correct, and I’m not sure it is, it’s a false choice. Instead, why can’t we encourage nuclear power to replace coal plants, while simultaneously pushing for more renewable sources?
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p>It’s not a serious response to to say that nuclear won’t do anything for a decade because of the time needed to build plants, etc. That’s still an improvement over CO2-spewing coal plants still dominating a decade from now. One could have made the same argument as you did in 1990, but if nuclear had been part of the solution at that time, we’d have the nuclear plants and lower CO2 emissions now.
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p>(Also, what do you mean when you say “I don’t believe you”? I’m not saying that nuclear doesn’t need massive subsidies to be effective. What I’m saying is that nuclear can and should be part of the solution, along with renewable sources. Both are far superior to coal plants, I’d hope you’d agree).
Almost every antinuclear group in the country, even those active just locally, is not (and was not) in any sense a NIMBY group that was okay with nukes someplace else.
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p>Rather they shared both a comprehensive vision of a renewable sustainable energy system and a critique of the safety, economic, and political hazards of nuclear electricity.
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p>Time has vindicated both.
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p>I feel a little strange asking this, but this is the third post you have made here asserting as historical fact things that are just not so. I know your heart is in the right place, but I have to wonder: Where are you getting this from?
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p>You are right, I think, to blame (or credit) a grass-roots movement with the demise of nuclear power, though not in quite the way you suppose.
I think the public supports subsidies for renewables more than they support subsidies for nuclear.
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p>You say, “
“
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p>neither of us has polling. So I guess better phrased would have been, “I don’t agree with you” or, “my speculation is different from yours” Unless, of course you have polling, which I’d love to see.
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p>RE: Not a serious response, you say;
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p>I think it is a serious response if you are dealing with a set pot of money. So when the President says, “I want to give $X million to nuclear” I would respond, “$X million towards renewables, efficiency, updated electricity grid and energy storage would be better to reduce CO2 emission more rapidly, which is what needs to happen”
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p>Now, if you are talking about a theoretical unlimited pot of money, and you are saying “$x should go towards nukes replacing coal and $y should go towards renewables, efficiency, grid updates and storage R&D” then I would say, “No, from an environmental standpoint, nuclear has no place in our energy future, we don’t need it, the risks are too great, we haven’t dealt with the storage issue and it’s not like there aren’t human costs associated with the nuclear supply chain.
Here’s why:
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p>The lowest estimate I have seen for building a nuclear plant is three years. That’s without any approval problems or public opposition – it’s just the construction time. I don’t have any figures for how much additional time is required for testing and certification before it can supply electricity to the grid.
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p>Building a PV solar array, on the other hand, takes almost no time, and can begin supplying power to the grid immediately. Wind takes somewhat longer, but still nowhere near as long as nuclear.
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p>Subsidizing new nuclear power (Obama has $54B worth of nuclear-construction loan guarantees in his 2012 budget) won’t even produce any new power for years. Subsidizing renewables should produce power much more quickly. It’s a choice between spending a ton of money on something to get power later, with long-lasting environmental problems and the possibility of catastrophic failure, and spending a ton of money on immediate and safe energy with comparatively negligible risk. Also remember that uranium is a finite resource that requires lots of processing to be useful. Wind and solar are not going to run out, and are usable as delivered.
Taking nuclear off the table has led to tremendous efficiency gains and the growth of renewable technologies.
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p>The subsidies for renewables are doing what they are supposed to do, jump-starting a new industry where R&D is causing the price per kWh to drop.
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p>By contrast the nuclear industry is more than 50 years old and its price per kWh is growing despite subsidies at all levels.
wind and solar are already price competitive with nuclear, at least in their own ways.
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p>And those people, unlike you, have actually backed up what they said with substantial evidence. Here’s my contribution to add to what they’ve already brought forth over the course of many diaries: “Nuclear Energy Loses Cost Advantages,” NYT.
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p>As far as I’m concerned, there is not a single, solitary reason to support additional nuclear energy. It’s more expensive, there’s better options available… and it’s a disaster in waiting.
Saying we need to promote nuclear to replace fossil fuels is simply trading one future catastrophe for another. Fossil fuels have their problems near term (pollution, disease) and long term (warming). Nuclear also has a very major long-term problem – what to do with the spent fuel. We don’t even know what to do with what we have now, and the plants have more spent rods than they were initially designed to hold. Having no plan ensures that something really bad will happen. Having some plan, and I’m not holding my breath, just means that the catastrophe will happen in a way we didn’t imagine.
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p>More nuclear isn’t just passing the buck to the next generation. We are talking evolutionary time-scales before the spent fuel is safe without containment. Do you feel comfortable making that decision for people living ten-thousand years from now?
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p>Two more points:
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This has been running through my head the last couple of weeks.
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p>The universe is a pretty nasty place. There is a lot of radiation out there which would kill us all pretty quickly if not for our protective atmosphere. Whether by design, the act of a higher power, or just dumb luck, we have life here on this planet, shielded from the worst of the emissions in our solar system.
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p>So how wise is it to create some of that radiation within our protective bubble?
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p>I’m not anti-science/technology by any means, but I do understand the difference between knowledge and wisdom. Our species seems to deal with knowledge pretty well but we tend to use it without thinking through all (or even most) of the implications.
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p>If you haven’t read this article (Japan Nuclear Crisis Revives Long U.S. Fight on Spent Fuel) in yesterday’s New York Times, please do. Besides just the volume of spent nuclear fuel that needs to be contained, there is also the time aspect to consider.
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p>Emphasis mine.