New Nuclear Power Plants- Just Say No

The last nuclear power plant built in the United States was completed in 1977, over 30 years ago.  In light of some of our recent energy challenges, there have been renewed calls for the permitting and construction of new nuclear reactors.

I like inexpensive power as much as anybody else, but I think the sheer length of the long term planning required for nuclear energy should disqualify it from future consideration.  We should instead look into true renewable, clean, nonpolluting sources of energy.  Things that are not going to cause more issues for future generations than they solve for us today. 

We as a society use a lot of power, and our usage is increasing every day.  That demand will only skyrocket if and when the environmentalists get their wish of so-called 'plug-in hybrids' and pure electric vehicles.  The environmentalists love them because they supposedly are 'zero emission vehicles'; truth be told, there are no tailpipe emissions, but that does not mean that there are no emissions... of course, I guess for the more passive environmentalists out there, if you don't see it, then there are none, right?  Wrong.

And commissioning new nuclear reactors is not the way to power this new armchair activism, this lashing out at oil companies and auto manufacturers under the pretense of environmentalism.  The long-term negative effects far outweigh the short-term gains. 

Since we started splitting the atom for power in the 1950s, radioactive waste has been building up with nowhere to go.  Generally, nuclear fuel will last three to four years in an average nuclear reactor (although the nuclear fuel in military vessels is designed to last much longer, up to 30 years by some estimates).  

At this point, the amount of spent nuclear fuel in the United States alone would fill a football stadium ten feet deep.  That's 576,000 cubic feet of highly radioactive waste (56,000 metric tons).  At current levels, without commissioning any new nuclear power plants, that number is projected to grow to 1,224,000 cubic feet by 2035 (119,000 metric tons).  What about that storage facility in Yucca Mountain, you say?  Well, current regulations will only allow a maximum of 720,000 cubic feet of radioactive waste to be stored at the Yucca Mountain facility (70,000 metric tons).  You've got to love long-term government planning.

To put those numbers in perspective, the average home in the United States, at 2,300 square feet, would be around 18,800 cubic feet.  The amount of spent nuclear fuel in temporary storage today would fill about 30 houses full of spent nuclear fuel, waste that will remain deadly for eons.

And the worst problem with this is that this waste will be radioactive for up to BILLIONS of years.  Sure, there are some radioisotopes with half lives measured in days.  Others, like Cesium 137 and Strontium 90, although being considered some of the most dangerous radioisotope byproducts of nuclear fission, have a relatively manageable half life of 30 years.  Some radioisotopes, though, have significantly longer half-lives, measuring not in the hundreds or thousands of years, but in the millions and billions of years.  

Take Uranium, for example.  Not all Uranium is used up during its operating cycle.  Some isotopes of uranium have half-lives ranging from 700 million to 4.5 BILLION years...  To put that into perspective, 700 million years ago, the only life on earth was multicellular life- simple animals wouldn't be around for another 100 million years.  And modern geologists and geophysicists estimate the earth's age at 4.54 billion years old.

It is simply not worth mortgaging a future so far out that we can hardly imagine it.  As I've said before, if we're going to spend money, let's at least spend it wisely.  That means development of solar, wind, and hydro power.  Just say no to new nuclear power plants and junk science like 'clean coal'; technologies whose downsides far outweigh the immediate short-term gain.

If we instead commit the resources to true clean renewable technologies today, the investment would allow economies of scale to kick in, a renewed focus on R&D would increase their efficiency and reliability (if Moore's Law were to come into play, renewable energy could follow a similar reduction in cost to computers over the last two decades) , and best of all, we would no longer be in the unenviable position of choosing the lesser of two evils- fossil fuel versus nuclear- for our energy production.