The BP/TransOcean/Halliburton pill continues unabated, and the debate in all the media is how the disaster will affect energy policy. New York magazine's got a story- not up on the Intertubes yet- arguing the spill should cause a shift to nuclear power.
It's not a new argument. For some years now the idea's been percolating. Even environmental groups are considering it. Well, some.
The main argument for it is France, which gets something like 80% of its power from nuclear plants. No big disasters, either.
On the other hand's there's the times things didn't work out so well. Chernobyl. Three Mile Island. Windscale.
Then there's plants like Trojan in Oregon, which just turned out to have been crappily built, had to be decommissioned at taxpayer expense, and then blown up.
That seems to suggest point of confluence between the oil spill and nuclear power plants: incredibly complicated systems can be engineered to work wonderfully- until they don't. And when they don't, history suggests we're gonna have one big, immediate, ginormous problem to try and fix yesterday. It's been three weeks since the BP explosion and it's just now emerging that the shutoff valve had bad wiring, faulty seals, and a dead battery.
It was supposed to be failsafe. Hollywood made a movie with that name back in the 1960s. It ended badly.
There's another problem with both more offshore drilling and nuke plants: if we launched a crash program today, it'd be a decade or more before we got anything built and operating. Newt Gingrich's "Drill Here. Drill Now" slogan is just that: a bid to raise the animal spirits, but not really a solution that can be employed today.
Advocates for nuclear power plants have a lot of good arguments going back to the 1950s when it was going to power our cars and space ships. But it seems like the biggest problem advocates have is this: where do we store the waste product?
National Geographic underscored the problem in a 2002 article that featured a number of nuclear sites where it seems like the custodians of the stuff just dumped it out with the trash every week:
Rocky Flats may be DOE's poster child for cleanup success, but a sister facility, the 586-square-mile Hanford Site, in Washington State, is quite another matter. Here reposes the country's greatest volume of high-level nuclear waste.
The Hanford inventory includes 53 million gallons of waste from plutonium processing stored in underground tanks, nearly 2,300 tons of spent fuel, four and a half tons of plutonium, 25 million cubic feet of solid waste, and 38 billion cubic feet of contaminated soil and groundwater. In a storage pool I look at the nation's most lethal single source of radiation excepting reactor cores—1,936 steel cylinders containing cesium and strontium covered by 13 feet of water. When a technician switches off the lights, radiation from the cylinders puts on a light show of royal blue.
Hanford reactors made plutonium for the first nuclear explosion, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, in 1945 and for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki (the Hiroshima bomb used uranium). Hanford had produced about 59 tons of bomb-grade plutonium by the time it closed in 1989.
From the earliest days, Hanford scientists observed that radionuclides—a catchall term for radioactive atoms—were entering the environment. Iodine 131, a gas by-product of plutonium processing, escaped from unfiltered stacks. Water taken from the nearby Columbia River to cool reactors was returned to the river with a burden of radioactive sodium, zinc, arsenic, even some -ium elements.
Later, waste stored in underground tanks leaked into the soil, and 45 billion gallons of contaminated liquids were dumped onsite, some near leaking tanks. Thus contaminated plumes were created underground, some threatening the Columbia [River]. The press began reporting claims of increasing rates of cancer in people and birth defects in people and animals in farm areas near Hanford.
So what do we do with the stuff? For decades the choice of Yucca Mountain was fought in Congress and the courts. You can see the schizoid views of politicians right here in South Carolina: they want the cheap power, they just want the waste to go somewhere else:
And, after a decade's worth of delays, President Barack Obama's 2011 budget suggests that won't change anytime soon. The new budget zeroes out the site's funding, even though taxpayers have spent $10 billion to develop the site as a national nuclear waste depository.
This is bad news for South Carolina. The state currently stores 3,610 metric tons of spent uranium, more than all but two other states, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute, the policy arm of the nuclear industry. Moreover, the Palmetto State has contributed $1.2 billion toward the Nuclear Waste Fund that will pay for the Yucca Mountain dump. With that investment potentially lost if the Yucca project dies, Gov. Mark Sanford announced last week that the state would pursue legal action against the federal government to recover that money if the president doesn't reverse his decision by the end of February.
Sanford's Feb. 16 proclamation came on the same day as an announcement by Obama that the federal government would guarantee loans for two new nuclear power plants along the Savannah River in Georgia, a move the Sanford administration supports.
"The governor has been supportive of nuclear power throughout his career," says governor's office spokesman Benjamin Fox of the announcements. "Our state ranks near the top for our percentage of power provided by nuclear, and we obviously encourage more of that."
The piece of the puzzle that seems to be missing from serious public discussion is what Americans can do right now, with immediate effect: use less energy. The former vice president, Mr. Cheney, dismissed this as an exercise in moral virtue, but the simple fact is most people can reduce energy consumption right now. Not the expensive stuff, like installing solar panels. Just turning off lights. Notching the thermostat up a degree or two. Not leaving computers and other household energy suckers on all the time.
Easy. Effective. Immediate.
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