A great overview article about California, and nuclear power; the one clean power source with enough depth to resolve our climate change issues.
Relative Risk: Global Warming and Imported Fossil Fuels vs. Nuclear Power
California State Assemblyman Chuck DeVore*
Understanding relative risk is at the heart of America’s current debate over a revival of nuclear power. “Nuclear power is dangerous,” say the critics. “Dangerous compared to what?” should be the reply.
Commenting in early 2007, the president of Stanford University, John Hennessy, said, “Nuclear power has to be part of the solution [to global warming]. Can we really understand the notion of risk? Nuclear plants versus carbon emissions – which will kill and has killed more people?”[1] To this we should append a question about the relative risk of nuclear power versus America’s reliance on fossil fuels.
Imported oil and natural gas can fluctuate wildly in cost or may be embargoed by hostile nations while domestic coal remains far from clean and burning any type of fossil fuel contributes to greenhouse gas emissions.
All energy comes with risks. Coal mining is a deadly occupation – burning coal emits thousands of tons of radioactive particles, damages the lungs of tens of thousands of people a year, and releases billions of tons of carbon dioxide. Natural gas presents somewhat less of a carbon problem than coal, but it is highly explosive. Hydroelectric dams can burst, causing flooding that can be detrimental to communities and the environment. Dams also damage fisheries, while inundating large swaths of carbon-impounding forests. Burning biomass for power spews particulates and other pollutants into the air and can compete with food and cash crops for limited farmland. Wind power consumes ten times the amount of cement and steel to produce the same amount of power as does nuclear, which it does only when the wind is blowing, and kills raptors and bats in the process. Photovoltaics are made with toxic materials, such as arsenic and mercury, and are still far more expensive than competing sources of energy. As a source of peaking power, solar thermal has become competitive with natural gas, mainly due to the latter’s increasing costs and price volatility. Still, because of their capricious nature, solar and wind require the construction and maintenance of backup power plants, typically powered by natural gas, to ensure grid reliability. Thus, solar and wind cannot provide reliable on-demand baseload power.
Then there’s nuclear.
In spite of the limitations of other energy sources, for the last 30 years Americans have been reluctant to invest their support in nuclear power, but this attitude is beginning to shift.
America’s 104 nuclear reactors produce about 20 percent of our nation’s electricity. By comparison, France’s 59 reactors produce 78 percent of its electricity while Sweden has 10 reactors that provide 48 percent of its power.[2] The first applications in 30 years for the building of new nuclear reactors were recently received by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). Over the next two years, the NRC expects applications for 19 new reactors[3] with a total of 30 anticipated.[4]
In spite of a U.S. nuclear energy safety record that would be the envy of the coal, gas, or oil industry, the future of nuclear power is clouded by split public opinion, the majority of which unrealistically sees wind and solar as both reliable and affordable mainstays of the U.S. power grid. Good intentions from politicians and wishful thinking from the public will not power the grid, however.
Nowhere in America is this more apparent than in California, where 54 percent of residents told the Public Policy Institute that “global warming poses a very serious threat to the state's future economy and quality of life.”[5] In 2006, in response to the publics’ desire to do something, the California legislature passed, and Governor Schwarzenegger signed, a sweeping greenhouse gas law (Assembly Bill 32 or AB 32).[6] AB 32 mandates a 25 percent reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2020, returning emissions to their 1990 levels – all while the state’s population is projected to grow 20 percent to 44 million people.[7] By 2050, AB 32 requires an 80 percent reduction in GHG emissions below 1990 levels.[8] A separate California law passed last year effectively phases out the use of conventional coal power over 20 years.[9] Coal now provides about 16 percent of California’s power.[10]
Implementing these laws while growing the state economy may prove Californians right for the wrong reason when they agreed that global warming threatens the State’s economy.[11]
The transportation sector produces 41 percent of California’s GHG emissions.[12] Short of using government edicts to radically alter people’s lives, the only way to meaningfully reduce these emissions is to offload them on an expanded and cleaner electrical sector. If electricity is affordable, this can be done with electric and hydrogen-powered vehicles at costs competitive with gasoline and diesel.
Electrical generation accounts for 22 percent of California’s GHG emissions. More than half of these emissions come from burning natural gas, which provides 42 percent of California’s electricity.[13] Yet reducing California’s dependence on natural gas, which is increasingly imported from abroad, will be impossible without a major change in state energy policy.
California law favors wind, solar, biomass, geothermal, and small hydroelectric, but they are costly or unreliable and do not make much of a dent, if any, in GHG emissions.[14] That leaves nuclear power as the sole source of power that is scalable, reliable and affordable. At a cost of about $4 billion for a 1,600 mW reactor, each new reactor built would save about $1 billion in burned natural gas per year[15] and about 8 million metric tons of GHG emissions,[16] all while using about $30 million in uranium.
Yet, any discussion about nuclear power immediately turns to the question of what to do with the spent nuclear fuel created in power generation. And there it stops. Many environmental groups claim that they would not oppose nuclear power if the nuclear waste issue could be solved. But any discussion of what to do with spent nuclear fuel makes one quickly realize that many nuclear opponents are not being honest about their opposition, as nothing can satisfy their concerns.
The anti-nuclear argument is an airtight but circular argument focused on the isotope of nuclear fission: plutonium-239. Each commercial nuclear reactor creates about 500 pounds of plutonium every year of operation.[17] This plutonium is the main argument against nuclear power. With a half-life of 24,110 years, plutonium-239 must either be reprocessed and used to make electricity, or placed in geologic storage for 200,000 years – the time needed for it to decay to radioactively safe levels.
The opposition to reprocessing is rooted in the Cold War-era fears of anti-nuclear activists. They argue that extracting the fissionable plutonium from spent fuel rods renders that plutonium available for making nuclear bombs (the second nuclear bomb used in warfare was a plutonium bomb). It was this rationale that caused President Jimmy Carter to ban U.S. nuclear fuel reprocessing in 1977. The thought was that this action would inspire other nations to do the same. Opponents of reprocessing speak of “plutonium-in-commerce” to define their fear that the extracted plutonium will fuel a new nuclear arms race. This line of reasoning leads us back to long-term geologic storage and the circular argument.
But the Gordian knot of plutonium has already been cut by the French. The French reprocess their spent nuclear fuel. By recycling usable fuel, including plutonium and unburned uranium back into their reactors, the French reduce the volume of used nuclear material by about 96 percent.[18] This slightly increases the cost of electricity, but it eliminates the need to safely store large amounts of plutonium-239 and other materials, saving money on the back-end by making geologic storage needed for a few hundred years, rather than two-hundred thousand years.
