The jump not taken
Tuesday, June 6, 2006 at 9:41PM You're standing at the open door of an airplane, three miles up. You have a sewing machine under your right arm, and a bundle of nylon cloth under your left. Your assignment: to jump out of the plane and invent the parachute on the way down.
This is, of course, completely insane. You have no chance of success. This is how we’ve handled nuclear waste disposal in America.
After a twenty year hiatus in building nuclear power plants, the Bush administration is promoting a renaissance for the nuclear industry. There are two problems with this: It's dangerous and it's unnecessary.
First, the danger. There is no geologically stable place to put the highly radioactive waste and store it for 25,000 years. The federal government has approved a plan for Yucca Mountain in Nevada, but there are still arguments about whether it will contaminate the aquifer beneath it. A disquieting number of scientists are saying that those promoting the site "cooked" their research. Many Nevadans don't want it, and I don't blame them. On the face of it, the concepts “geologically stable” and “25,000 years” are contradictory. A short 10,000 years ago, my hometown in Vermont was submerged beneath part of the Atlantic Ocean. The fact remains: there is no place for the radioactive waste we're producing right this second, and we don't know when there will be one. Experts on all sides admit that it is many years away. Even if Yucca Mountain gets built as planned, all the space in it is already booked. In the next decade, three quarters of our nuclear plants will run out of room in their waste storage pools.
Social and environmental stability could be a bigger problem than geological stability. Can we predict what the climate will be in even a hundred years? The groundwater levels? The politics? The economy? Will our grandchildren, and their grandchildren, have the resources to safely maintain the mountains of radioactive waste we're leaving them? We don't know, so we're gambling their lives for our own wasteful habits.
More power plants, including nuclear plants, are unnecessary. Europeans have a standard of living equal to ours while using just over half the energy per person. We have inefficient buildings, lights, appliances, industrial motors, you name it. Before we start making more radioactive waste we should eliminate our electrical waste. Efficiency programs typically cost half as much per kilowatt-hour as generating electricity. They can be implemented quickly, and have zero risk. Efficiency could displace our entire nuclear generating capacity. Why juggle with hand grenades when tennis balls are so readily available?
And then there’s wind power. Large-scale wind farms are able to sell electricity at the same price as natural gas fueled plants. Unlike natural gas and uranium, the price of wind never goes up, and the supply never runs out. The United States has enough potential wind resources to equal twice our present electrical use. Wind power could easily provide the same percentage of our power as nuclear does now.
Some people object to the aesthetics of wind turbines and their effects on the land where they are placed. It’s tough to argue a subjective issue such as aesthetics, but I’ll take a few steel towers over a pile of nuclear waste. The fundamental point is that wind turbines are reversible. If we decide that a wind installation is a bad idea, we can take down the towers, break up the concrete foundations, and let the forest grow back over it all. Once we dig up the uranium ore and purify it, we’re stuck with it for a thousand generations.
The bad news is, we've already jumped, and we're in for a hard landing. We have to deal with the radioactive waste we've created. The good news is, we have alternatives that we can use right now: efficiency and renewable energy. The sooner we start, the less weight we'll be carrying when we hit.
Reader Comments (2)
Asalam Alekum!
A teffi baradji hamden!
I just took my students down to tour VT Yankee and then Searsburg. Yankee was churning out 640MW of rock steady power, but up on the hill in lil' Searsburg the wind wasn't blowin and the blades weren't movin.
Why not keep diversification. Decommision the coal plants (bye bye CO2 etc.) and keep a percentage of the portfolio with good ole fission....nda... at least until we get a few big TOKAMAK reactors on line. I hope we can all agree that plasma fusion is our only hope!
Sey wakati sedda!
Talk about missing the point - wow. Sure, nuke plants can produce reliable energy - that's not the issue. The COST of that 'rock steady' power is extremely dangerous waste that we have NO WAY to get rid of, and no good place to store. AND, we wouldn't need ANY nuke plants if we just CONSERVE a bit more.