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.   

The Truth About 'Clean Coal' and 'Carbon Sequestration'

Yesterday's post touched on something, and I want to revisit that and go into a little more depth, so please allow me this small indulgence today to talk about some of the junk science being tossed around these days by your representative government.

One of the line items of the The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 was $2.4 billion for carbon-capture demonstration projects, also known as 'Carbon Sequestration'. To paraphrase the late great George Carlin, the more syllables, the less bad it sounds. So let me put it another way- Carbon Sequestration is nothing more than the 21st-century version of a dump, except instead of dumping trash under a mound of dirt, we're dumping tons of CO2, delaying the inevitable as a problem for future generations to deal with.

'Carbon Sequestration' sounds so neat and clean and technical; in reality, all it is is pumping all of the bad CO2 into a spent oil well and capping it. So it never really went anywhere, its just being stored... until the day something ruptures, that is. So how is this really solving the problem? The ugly truth your government doesn't want you to know- its not.

And why do they need to spend $2.4 billion on what is basically a proof-of-concept, when our neighbors to the north are already using this technology, at EnCana's Weyburn and Midale fields? Oh, yeah, I forgot- somebody somewhere made a generous campaign donation in exchange for the no doubt lucrative contract (as a side note, EnCana is actually lobbying the Canadian government for credits for carbon dioxide they import from the U.S. and store at their sites!)...

So what, you ask, does this have to do with 'clean coal', one of the cornerstones of Obama's new energy policy ( http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/newenergy )? Nothing, really, save for the fact that they are both vaporware- they don't exist except on paper somewhere.
Now you can argue semantics with me, but basically, 'clean coal' is no different from the coal we burn today. The difference is all in how the emissions are treated. Sure, the industry may talk about different ways to prep the coal before its burned to reduce sulfur and particulates, but the end result is that the same coal is being used, and at the end of the process, it is burned releasing carbon dioxide. The 'clean' part comes in when they sequester the carbon dioxide, preventing it from entering (or stalling its release into) the environment until peak CO2 emissions subside hundreds of years from now.

Sure. Let's create the mess, then leave it for our children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children to worry about how to clean up the mess we chose to literally sweep under the rug. Sounds like excellent future planning to me.

This is not sound policy, and this is not something that should be even considered as a stepping stone to energy independence. Nuclear isn't the answer either, but I'll save that for another day.

Obama, on his website, talks about Clean Coal, among other things, creating "Millions of New Green Collar Jobs"... how many jobs, really, does every new coal-fired power plant create? The answer- in 1997, the average 300 MW coal-fired power plant had 53 employees. Just how many new power plants are you planning to build there, chief?

Why is renewable energy getting 'only' $8 billion? What, did they not contribute enough in the 2008 election?

When I relocated to Arizona, I decided to drive. Crossing from New Mexico into Arizona, I was in the middle of nowhere- no exits, no gas stations, no hotels, nothing. Then I saw a sign selling land for $200.00 an acre. I didn't think much of it at the time, because it was literally in the middle of nowhere, but lately, I've been thinking more and more about that...

How many photovoltaic panels can you squeeze into an acre of land, in the middle of nowhere, far away from anyone who would scream and yell "Not in my back yard!"?

And even with the current efficiency of around 20%, since Arizona averages 330 days of sun per year, how much power would that one acre of land generate?

And how many jobs would that create, from the highly skilled labor actually building the panels to the construction workers installing them to the utilities running the lines to hook the site up to the grid?

Wind Turbines are a subject for another thread, but there again, true renewable energy, and the things are so massive, its cost prohibitive to build them overseas and ship them here, so there are more skilled jobs that would have to go to Americans- not only the fabrication, but also the installation and the maintenance.

These are the things we should be investing in. With unemployment at a 50-year high, there are literally millions of Americans that need a job. They don't need welfare, they don't need unemployment, they don't need a handout- they need a job.

Its already a foregone conclusion that Obama is going to get his $825 billion package; if you are going to spend money we don't have, could you at least spend it wisely? Use the funding for true 'green' projects, not nostra like so-called clean coal and carbon capture/sequestration, and use the job training initiatives already in the bill to train people for these new careers.

Either that, or break out the fiddle and do your best impression of Nero, watching while this great country our Founding Fathers built burn and crumble to the ground.

There is no try. There is only do.