Green Meme Killers: Nukes Are Good For You

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about the viability of nuclear power; the loudest and most obnoxious voice in the chorus has been Wired magazine, who took it upon themselves to launch a bright orange cover telling us wacky enviro types that we should start gunning down spotted owls, guzzling pesticides, and give nuclear power a big hug.

Totally safe. For real. We promise this time. From Stuckincustoms.

The reason behind all this lunacy? Carbon Dioxide. Wired thinks that it’s the Holy Grail of the environmental movement, and the only concern that any of us should have for the next 75 years or so. Environmentalism, the magazine trumpets, is too important to be left to the environmentalists. Because we care too much about spotted owls to actually save the world.

Look at the environmental protection agency’s CO₂-per-kilowatt-hour map of the US and two bright patches of low-carbon happiness jump out. One is the hydro-powered Pacific Northwest. The other is Vermont, where a 30-year-old nuclear reactor, Vermont Yankee, keeps the Ben & Jerry’s cold.

Vermont! (Pub: I wonder what Simon Slade would say) How interesting that you bring that up, since it you assail it elsewhere in your arrogant little shot across the bow of the green community. But that’s merely a pet peeve. Let’s look further into that low-carbon happiness; the Pacific Northwest does draw power largely from hydro-plants, but once upon a time, it was on the nuclear bandwagon, as well. Actually, the Hanford Site, in Washington State, led the way for nuclear power in America: it was established in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project, and has nine plutonium production reactors. What’s going on there? “Cocooning,” a process where the reactor is entombed in a case of steel, concrete, and lead, designed to be water, fire, tornado, and earthquake resistant for 75 years. Because maybe by then we’ll know what to do with the stuff inside. They don’t know what to do with it in Vermont, either: the Yankee’s storage pools are almost full, and still waiting for a federal repository to open somewhere. Because you know, Nuclear power is great in my state, but the leftovers need to go to somebody else’s. Of course, they may just be able to seal it off as well: a 2007 reactor SCRAM, the last safety option before a meltdown, has placed the operating license of the Vermont plant at risk.

There’s no question that nuclear power is the most climate-friendly industrial-scale energy source. You can worry about radioactive waste or proliferating weapons. You can complain about the high cost of construction and decommissioning. But the reality is that every serious effort at carbon accounting reaches the same conclusion: Nukes win. Only wind comes close — and that’s when it’s blowing. A UK government white paper last year factored in everything from uranium mining to plant decommissioning and determined that nuclear power emits 2 to 6 percent of the carbon per kilowatt-hour as natural gas, the cleanest of the fossil fuels.

A punchline to a joke that’s the favorite of grandfathers the world over says it best: “I don’t have to outrun the bear. I just have to outrun you.” As long as we’re bound to our present mindset with respect to power generation, the bear will be global warming, and nuclear power will seem the most appealing to anybody who won’t be around in 40 years. But consider this: 60% of all power generated is lost in transmission, mostly because Americans consider ourselves too good to look at or smell coal, natural gas, or oil burning plants, and insist that power for New York is dependent on a grid stretching to Ohio. The bear isn’t global warming; that’s just a symptom. The bear is non-sustainable development, and true energy efficiency will come once there’s a power source that’s able to fight coal on a cost-per-kilowatt-hour basis, AND that communities will welcome. Oh wait: have we missed the strides made by solar in the past five years? You seem to think that the race is for ‘climate-friendly industrial-scale’ power. We’ll grant you half of that.

Embracing the atom is key to winning the war on warming: Electric power generates 26 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and 39 percent of the United States’ — it’s the biggest contributor to global warming.¹ One of the Kyoto Protocol’s worst features is a sop to greens that denies carbon credits to power-starved developing countries that build nukes — thereby ensuring they’ll continue to depend on filthy coal.

Of course it doesn’t take much effort to determine that our electric infrastructure and choice of fuels is pretty darn evil–but if it’s worth fixing, it’s worth fixing right. Scaling up uranium mining operations to build the beasts? Not an environmentally friendly enterprise, and if you doubt it, ask coal miners how much their employers cared about the environment before laws began making them. And uranium is largely found in former Soviet States–hardly the places known for green cred. Instead of complaining that Kyoto is handcuffing the third world, why not give green energy the same boost that nuclear has in order to make it reasonable? Massive government subsidies. Look, Wired: we know you meant well. But part of saving the planet is having one to save, and part of solving a problem is treating the issues, not the symptoms. Nukes are far too shortsighted.

[Wired]

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