Twenty years ago environmental activists were fighting nuclear energy tooth-and-nail. Now, according to surveys by Treehugger.com, and Grist, an online environmental journal, more than half of their readers favor giving fission another chance. What was recently the bane of a clean, safe and livable environment now represents salvation from global climate change.
The argument in favor of building new nuclear power reactors is simple, arguably effective and definitely well-publicized. If we had a nearly limitless, well-developed, greenhouse-gas-emissions-free power source, why would we not use it? The pre-packaged answer is that of course we have to. Logic demands it, because if you’d rather burn coal then the evildoers have already won.
What is left out of the sales pitch is any acknowledgment that the long industrialized road from uranium ore to controlled fission is one long story: material that is deadly to human life, that neighbors to reactors, like Chernobyl, risk catastrophe from fairly minor accidents, that the life span of a reactor facility is a matter of short decades and that the “spent fuel” will be extremely dangerous for 10,000 years after it’s powered our flat screen TV and, if things go right, charged our mystical electric vehicles.
Yet fickle and conflicted average people are jumping on the nuclear bandwagon, as are many self-proclaimed environmentalists. Deluded by a fast-talking “solution” to the greenhouse gas emissions problem, it is akin to signing an adjustable rate sub-prime mortgage on our sky-domed home in the hopes that we’ll find a solution to the stop-gap after this crisis passes.
The problem with problematic solutions is that over time they lose their solution-like characteristics and become simply problematic. We should not be willing to accept more nuclear-powered facilities as a solution to our energy and climate crises because they represent a short-term benefit with a long-term liability. We should not hold at the core of our electrified society a power source that is deadly and dangerous.
Such residual problematic qualities were evident in a decision earlier this month by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. They ruled in favor of the plaintiff in a case that claims radiation from Hanford facilities in south-central Washington caused cancer in employees and nearby residents. Hanford produced plutonium for weapons for more than 40 years, and Washington’s only commercial reactor, Columbia Generating Station, is in the same neighborhood.
Even though the nuclear industry claims that processes are better and safer, the fact remains radioactive material is extremely deadly, expensive to work with and the lifespan of the waste dwarfs the lifespan of any facility. Despite this, the federal government supports the nuclear solution and is processing applications for new reactors to add to the more than 100 nuclear reactor facilities already in the U.S. As a solution to the waste issue, there is the plan to neatly centralize “all” radioactive wastes at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain.
It sounds neat on paper, but in practice it is much messier.
Oregon’s ill-fated Trojan facility was killed in 1992, about twenty years before its projected life span due to the release of radioactive steam. With Trojan came a total construction-demolition cost of about $900 million. Its core was sent to Hanford, the tower imploded, yet its spent fuel rods are still on the banks of the Columbia waiting in a pool of water for what may come next, be that Yucca, erosion or nothing.
Such messiness has the likes of Warren Buffet scrapping plans to back a new facility that had been planned near the Oregon-Idaho border. However, show me someone who holds contracts to store radioactive waste and I’ll show you someone who knows how to leverage long-term investment against public health and public sentiment – and who supports more nuclear power facilities.
Because Oregon has a law that the public must approve new reactors, though two research reactors still operate in the state – at Oregon State University and at Reed College – and given the regional reliance on hydropower and a sentiment toward wind and solar power, there is little likelihood that we will have a new nuclear power plant in our state.
However, Eugene does draw some power from the Columbia Generating Station, and if an expansion occurred there, we would “benefit” from that. Also, plans for a new facility outside Boise would have regional implications if it were actually built.
Given the push to expand nuclear power’s role in our energy spectrum, and given its apparent “emissions-free” status and our willingness to flip on the switch no matter where the electricity comes from or what wastes are made, it is a real possibility that nuclear power will effectively take up the “environmentally friendly” banner that most rationally thinking environmental activists would reserve for solar, wind and perhaps hydro-electric power.
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An overhaul at DPS can’t come soon enough
Daily Emerald
April 29, 2008
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