Stumble It!
Pop Quiz: what source of energy has received the most government subsidies since World War II, has a by-product that has remained dangerous for thousands of years, and is a major component of McCain’s energy proposal?
If you said “oil,” you answered incorrectly.
What I’m talking about is nuclear energy — 1950’s energy of the future. Back then, it was thought that nuclear energy would be the radioactive wave that would carry the world into the atomic age, supplying nearly all of the world’s electricity and a significant portion of its commercial energy. Obviously, nuclear energy has failed to live up to this expectation.
In the United States, no nuclear power plants have been built since the late 1970s. For private investors, the costs of building, maintaining and decommissioning a nuclear power plant overrun each other. Simply put, nuclear energy is a value destroyer that has only been proliferated by billing the American taxpayer. The modern initiatives for nuclear power still fail to recognize many of the flaws of the energy source.
Although electricity produced through nuclear power has been competitive, this price is not representative of all the costs along the nuclear energy value chain. For as much as nuclear energy is touted as an American fuel source, the Energy Information Agency of the U.S. government reported in 2007 that 54 million pounds of uranium oxide (what fuel rods are made of) were purchases imported into the U.S., compared to domestic production of 5 million pounds.
With oil, we have come to understand the political and economic consequences of becoming dependent on foreign sources, so we shouldn’t delude ourselves about nuclear.
Maintaining nuclear reactors can be expensive, yet necessary for the reactor to be stable and safe.
Unfortunately, when the companies that manage such nuclear reactors already work with thin profit margins, safety problems can be ignored until the plant has to shut down to address them.
The Union of Concerned Scientists has recorded on its Web site that an outage at a nuclear power plant which lasted more than a year has occurred 51 times at 41 different reactors. While in the 1960s and 1970s the plants were closed primarily for damage recovery, since 1996 all the year-long outages were for safety restoration.
In a September 2006 report, the Government Accountability Office criticized the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for acting slowly on needed oversight improvement, “particularly in improving the agency’s ability to identify and address early indications of declining safety performance.”
Although modern reactor and plant designs offer some solace about safety concerns, the issue still exists of what is done with spent fuel rods — high-level radioactive wastes. These spent fuels rods must be safely stored for at least 10,000 years, or 240,000 years if plutonium-239 is not removed by reprocessing.
There is no agreed-upon method for storing the wastes for 10,000 years, much less 240,000. Currently, many nuclear power plants in the U.S. store these wastes in deep water pools or dry concrete casks. Sabotage, terrorist attacks or earthquakes at one of these sites could release significant amounts of radioactive materials into the troposphere, contaminating large areas for decades.
Despite safety concerns, many aging nuclear power plants, dating from the late 1960s and early 1970s, are seeking operating license renewals from the Nuclear Regulation Commission, according to a Wall Street Journal article published in April.
Since 2000 the Nuclear Regulation Commission has extended the licenses of 48 nuclear power reactors. This extension delays the costly decommissioning process and speaks to the cost inefficiency of managing a nuclear power plant: they need to continue to extend a plant’s usable life to cover the overrunning costs. Moreover, using reactors beyond their intended life can only compound safety concerns.
Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute estimates that nuclear energy has received nearly half a trillion dollars in taxpayer subsidies, and thus has not been able to pay for itself throughout its entire existence. Current proposals to expand nuclear energy not only include more subsidies and tax incentives but also federal loan guarantees for the construction of plants. This means that nuclear power companies do not have to depend on their own collateral when trying to finance the construction of new plants.
America seems to be entering an era of socialistic corporatism. The measures for supporting nuclear energy are much akin to the $700 billion bailout of the financial sector. The government has visibly become an instrument for insuring private profit at public cost.
In reality, nuclear energy in this country is just a zombie kept alive by massive government subsidies. There’s only one thing I’d recommend to do with a zombie, and it involves a shotgun.
Filed under: Indigenous, Nuclear Waste, Yucca Mountain, enivornment, nuclear weapons | Tagged: It’s about time to kill off, nuclear energy
The light water reactor was the first attempt at producing power from nuclear resources, it is probably one of the most inefficient ways to do so. The reason we used this design are more historical than logical. If we only use the amount of subsidies, as Lovins does, we have to look at dollars per KWhr. In this case, nuclear kills both wind and solar. You need to really educate yourself on these issues. If government subsidies went away for wind power, it would disappear in an instant. A new nuclear plant has a majority of its cost in capital outlay for construction. The fuel is a trivial part of the cost of nuclear electricity. The cost of coal based electricity is largely from the cost of coal, burned at a rate of 70 tons a day. A couple years ago, coal cost around $30 a ton, now it is roughly $120 a ton. This trend is going to increase over the next ten years, without any cap and trade etc. It would take a log unit increase in the price of yellow cake to even see a difference in marginal cost of electrical generation.
The only real alternative to nuclear is coal. We burn 3.8 Billions of tons a year. The energy content of coal is efficiently converted into electricity, far more than any of the alternatives, except for nuclear. If you think of the Terra Watts that exist in that coal, and then think about how much can be harvested from solar and wind, your argument becomes comical without the willful suspension of disbelief. Germany has been phasing out its nuclear power because of people like you. They are now building 24 new large coal burning plants to replace the nuclear, and they have been the best at wind and solar implementation. Coal is dirtier than people like Lovins will admit. It sits in the ground for hundreds of millions of years. It absorbs heavy metals that are dissolved in the water that peculates through it, like a Brita filter cartridge. When the coal is burned, it releases these metals into the atmosphere and then into the water sheds and ocean. Coal plants burn 30,000 pounds of mercury a year, and there are 600 in this country. This is far more dangerous than all the combined radioactive waste combined. Coal also releases tons of Uranium and Thorium. There is so much Uranium in some coal that the US military used to burn coal in order to extract the concentrated Uranium from the ash. People living in the shadows of coal fired plants have up to 10 times the amount of ionizing radiation in their bones than the general public. This is the cost of opposing nuclear.
Avery has it backwards:
EVERY PENNY SPENT ON WIND AND SOLAR IS A PENNY THAT COULD HAVE BEEN SPENT ON RESEARCH ON NEW NUCLEAR TECHNOLOGIES AND INCREASES GLOBAL WARMING AND ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTION THAT IS KILLING THE PLANET.
Look up technologies such as the LFTR and Deep Burn pebble bed reactors. These produce enough heat to directly replace coal fired plants and burn down their fuel to near completion, the run 24/7 at vastly higher efficiency as coal, which is vastly more efficient as wind, solar and even hydro.
One more thing:
“Although electricity produced through nuclear power has been competitive, this price is not representative of all the costs along the nuclear energy value chain. For as much as nuclear energy is touted as an American fuel source, the Energy Information Agency of the U.S. government reported in 2007 that 54 million pounds of uranium oxide (what fuel rods are made of) were purchases imported into the U.S., compared to domestic production of 5 million pounds.”
This is because it is cheaper to do so, not because we don’t have the resources. The import/domestic ratio has nothing what so ever to do with “costs along the nuclear energy value chain.” We have been getting most of our Uranium off old soviet war head pits that have been blended down and dumped on the market here. It has been cheap. The cost of Uranium is such a small part of the cost of nuclear based electricity that this suggest you haven’t done your homework, except for listening to every word that comes off of Avery Lovin’s pen.