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10 Reasons to Oppose Nuclear Energy

Green America is active in  addressing the climate crisis  by transitioning the US electricity mix away from its heavy emphasis on coal-fired and natural gas power. But all of that work will be wasted if we transition from fossil fuels to an equally dangerous source – nuclear energy. Nuclear fission power is not a climate solution. It may produce lower-carbon energy, but this energy comes with a great deal of risk.

Solar power, wind power, geothermal power, hybrid and electric cars, and aggressive energy efficiency are  climate solutions  that are safer, cheaper, faster, more secure, and less wasteful than nuclear power. Our country needs a massive influx of investment in these solutions if we are to avoid the worst consequences of climate change, enjoy energy security, jump-start our economy, create jobs, and work to lead the world in development of clean energy.

Currently there are 444 nuclear fission power plants in 30 countries worldwide, with another 63 plants potentially under construction. Those plants should not be built for the following reasons:

Ten Strikes Against Nuclear Energy

1. nuclear waste:.

The waste generated by nuclear reactors remains radioactive for tens to hundreds of thousands of years (1). Currently, there are no long-term storage solutions for radioactive waste, and most is stored in temporary, above-ground facilities. These facilities are running out of storage space, so the nuclear industry is turning to other types of storage that are more costly and potentially less safe (2).

2. Nuclear proliferation:

There is great concern that the development of nuclear energy programs increases the likelihood of proliferation of nuclear weapons. As nuclear fuel and technologies become globally available, the risk of these falling into the wrong hands is increasingly present. To avoid weapons proliferation, it is important that countries with high levels of corruption and instability be discouraged from creating nuclear programs, and the US should be a leader in nonproliferation by not pushing for more nuclear power at home (3).

3. National security

Nuclear power plants are a potential target for terrorist operations. An attack could cause major explosions, putting population centers at risk, as well as ejecting dangerous radioactive material into the atmosphere and surrounding region. Nuclear research facilities, uranium enrichment plants, and uranium mines are also potentially at risk for attacks that could cause widespread contamination with radioactive material (9).

4. Accidents

In addition to the risks posed by terrorist attacks, human error and natural disasters can lead to dangerous and costly accidents. The 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine led to the deaths of 30 employees in the initial explosion and has has had a variety of negative health effects on thousands across Russia and Eastern Europe. A massive tsunami bypassed the safety mechanisms of several power plants in 2011, causing three nuclear meltdowns at a power plant in Fukushima, Japan, resulting in the release of radioactive materials into the surrounding area. In both disasters, hundreds of thousands were relocated, millions of dollars spent, and the radiation-related deaths are being evaluated to this day. Cancer rates among populations living in proximity to Chernobyl and Fukushima, especially among children, rose significantly in the years after the accidents (4)(5).

5. Cancer risk

In addition to the significant risk of cancer associated with fallout from nuclear disasters, studies also show increased risk for those who reside near a nuclear power plant, especially for childhood cancers such as leukemia (6)(7)(8). Workers in the nuclear industry are also exposed to higher than normal levels of radiation, and as a result are at a higher risk of death from cancer (10).

6. Energy production

The 444 nuclear power plants currently in existence provide about 11% of the world’s energy (11). Studies show that in order to meet current and future energy needs, the nuclear sector would have to scale up to around 14,500 plants. Uranium, the fuel for nuclear reactors, is energy-intensive to mine, and deposits discovered in the future are likely to be harder to get to to. As a result, much of the net energy created would be offset by the energy input required to build and decommission plants and to mine and process uranium ore. The same is true for any reduction in greenhouse gas emissions brought about by switching from coal to nuclear (12).

7. Not enough sites

Scaling up to 14,500 nuclear plants isn’t possible simply due to the limitation of feasible sites. Nuclear plants need to be located near a source of water for cooling, and there aren’t enough locations in the world that are safe from droughts, flooding, hurricanes, earthquakes, or other potential disasters that could trigger a nuclear accident. The increase in extreme weather events predicted by climate models only compounds this risk.

Unlike renewables, which are now the cheapest energy sources, nuclear costs are on the rise, and many plants are being shut down or in danger of being shut down for economic reasons. Initial capital costs, fuel, and maintenance costs are much higher for nuclear plants than wind and solar, and nuclear projects tend to suffer  cost overruns  and construction delays. The price of renewable energy has fallen significantly over the past decade, and it projected to continue to fall (14).

9. Competition with renewables

Investment in nuclear plants, security, mining infrastructure, etc. draws funding away from investment in cleaner sources such as wind, solar, and geothermal. Financing for renewable energy is already scarce, and increasing nuclear capacity will only add to the competition for funding.

10. Energy dependence of poor countries

Going down the nuclear route would mean that poor countries, that don't have the financial resources to invest in and develop nuclear power, would become reliant on rich, technologically advanced nations. Alternatively, poor nations without experience in the building and maintaining of nuclear plants may decide to build them anyway. Countries with a history of nuclear power use have learned the importance of regulation, oversight, and investment in safety when it comes to nuclear. Dr. Peter Bradford of Vermont Law, a former member of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, writes, "A world more reliant on nuclear power would involve many plants in countries that have little experience with nuclear energy, no regulatory background in the field and some questionable records on quality control, safety and corruption." (15). The U.S. should lead by example and encourage poor countries to invest in safe energy technology.

Please also see the piece  Nuclear Energy is not a Climate Solution

(1) Bruno, J., and R. C. Ewing. "Spent Nuclear Fuel."  Elements  2.6 (2006): 343-49

(2) United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “Dry Cask Storage”.  USNRC  (2016)

(3) Miller, Steven E., and Scott D. Sagan. "Nuclear Power without Nuclear Proliferation?"  Daedalus  138.4 (2009): 7-18

(4) Tsuda, Toshihide, Akiko Tokinobu, Eiji Yamamoto, and Etsuji Suzuki. "Thyroid Cancer Detection by Ultrasound Among Residents Ages 18 Years and Younger in Fukushima, Japan."  Epidemiology  (2016): 316-22.

(5) Astakhova, Larisa N., Lynn R. Anspaugh, Gilbert W. Beebe, André Bouville, Vladimir V. Drozdovitch, Vera Garber, Yuri I. Gavrilin, Valeri T. Khrouch, Arthur V. Kuvshinnikov, Yuri N. Kuzmenkov, Victor P. Minenko, Konstantin V. Moschik, Alexander S. Nalivko, Jacob Robbins, Elena V. Shemiakina, Sergei Shinkarev, Svetlana I. Tochitskaya, Myron A. Waclawiw, and Andre Bouville. "Chernobyl-Related Thyroid Cancer in Children of Belarus: A Case-Control Study."  Radiation Research  150.3 (1998): 349

(6) Schmitz-Feuerhake I, Dannheim B, Heimers A, et al. Leukemia in the proximity of a boiling-water nuclear reactor: Evidence of population exposure by chromosome studies and environmental radioactivity.  Environmental Health Perspectives  105 (1997): 1499-1504

(7) Spix C, Schmiedel S, Kaatsch P, Schulze-Rath R, Blettner M. "Case–control study on childhood cancer in the vicinity of nuclear power plants in Germany 1980–2003."  European Journal of Cancer  44.2 (2008): 275–284

(8) Baker PJ, Hoel DG. "Meta-analysis of standardized incidence and mortality rates of childhood leukemia in proximity to nuclear facilities."  European Journal of Cancer Care  16.4 (2007):355–363

(9) Ferguson, Charles D., and Frank A. Settle. "The Future of Nuclear Power in the United States."  Federation of American Scientists  (2012)

(10) Richardson, DB, Elisabeth Cardis, Robert Daniels, Michael Gillies, Jacqueline A O’Hagan, Ghassan B Hamra, Richard Haylock, Dominique Laurier, Klervi Leuraud, Monika Moissonnier, Mary K Schubauer-Berigan, Isabelle Thierry-Chef, Ausrele Kesminiene. "Risk of Cancer from Occupational Exposure to Ionising Radiation: Retrospective Cohort Study of Workers in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States"  BMJ  (2015)

(11) "World Statistics."  nei.org.  Nuclear Energy Institute.,Web. 04 Oct. 2016.

(12) Pearce, Joshua M. "Thermodynamic Limitations to Nuclear Energy Deployment as a Greenhouse Gas Mitigation Technology."  International Journal of Nuclear Governance ,  Economy and Ecology  2.1 (2008): 113.

(13) "World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2014."  World Nuclear Industry Status Report . World Nuclear Industry, July 2014. Web. 4 Oct. 2016.

(14) "Lazard's Levelized Cost of Energy Analysis  - Version 9.0. "  Lazard.com . Lazard. 2015.

(15) Lynas, Mark, and Peter Bradford. "Should the World Increase Its Reliance on Nuclear Energy?"  The Wall Street Journal . Dow Jones & Company, 08 Oct. 2012. Web. 10 Jan. 2017.

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Back to the Future Josh Freed

Leslie and mark's old/new idea.

The Nuclear Science and Engineering Library at MIT is not a place where most people would go to unwind. It’s filled with journals that have articles with titles like “Longitudinal double-spin asymmetry of electrons from heavy flavor decays in polarized p + p collisions at √s = 200 GeV.” But nuclear engineering Ph.D. candidates relax in ways all their own. In the winter of 2009, two of those candidates, Leslie Dewan and Mark Massie, were studying for their qualifying exams—a brutal rite of passage—and had a serious need to decompress.

To clear their heads after long days and nights of reviewing neutron transport, the mathematics behind thermohydraulics, and other such subjects, they browsed through the crinkled pages of journals from the first days of their industry—the glory days. Reading articles by scientists working in the 1950s and ‘60s, they found themselves marveling at the sense of infinite possibility those pioneers had brought to their work, in awe of the huge outpouring of creative energy. They were also curious about the dozens of different reactor technologies that had once been explored, only to be abandoned when the funding dried up.

The early nuclear researchers were all housed in government laboratories—at Oak Ridge in Tennessee, at the Idaho National Lab in the high desert of eastern Idaho, at Argonne in Chicago, and Los Alamos in New Mexico. Across the country, the nation’s top physicists, metallurgists, mathematicians, and engineers worked together in an atmosphere of feverish excitement, as government support gave them the freedom to explore the furthest boundaries of their burgeoning new field. Locked in what they thought of as a life-or-death race with the Soviet Union, they aimed to be first in every aspect of scientific inquiry, especially those that involved atom splitting.

1955: Argonne's BORAX III reactor provided all the electricity for Arco, Idaho, the first time any community's electricity was provided entirely by nuclear energy. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Though nuclear engineers were mostly men in those days, Leslie imagined herself working alongside them, wearing a white lab coat, thinking big thoughts. “It was all so fresh, so exciting, so limitless back then,” she told me. “They were designing all sorts of things: nuclear-powered cars and airplanes, reactors cooled by lead. Today, it’s much less interesting. Most of us are just working on ways to tweak basically the same light water reactor we’ve been building for 50 years.”

1958: The Ford Nucleon scale-model concept car developed by Ford Motor Company as a design of how a nuclear-powered car might look. Source: Wikimedia Commons

But because of something that she and Mark stumbled across in the library during one of their forays into the old journals, Leslie herself is not doing that kind of tweaking—she’s trying to do something much more radical. One night, Mark showed Leslie a 50-year-old paper from Oak Ridge about a reactor powered not by rods of metal-clad uranium pellets in water, like the light water reactors of today, but by a liquid fuel of uranium mixed into molten salt to keep it at a constant temperature. The two were intrigued, because it was clear from the paper that the molten salt design could potentially be constructed at a lower cost and shut down more easily in an emergency than today’s light water reactors. And the molten salt design wasn’t just theoretical—Oak Ridge had built a real reactor, which ran from 1965-1969, racking up 20,000 operating hours.

The 1960s-era salt reactor was interesting, but at first blush it didn’t seem practical enough to revive. It was bulky, expensive, and not very efficient. Worse, it ran on uranium enriched to levels far above the modern legal limit for commercial nuclear power. Most modern light water reactors run on 5 percent enriched uranium, and it is illegal under international and domestic law for commercial power generators to use anything above 20 percent, because at levels that high uranium can be used for making weapons. The Oak Ridge molten salt reactor needed uranium enriched to at least 33 percent, possibly even higher.

Aircraft Reactor Experiment building at ORNL (Extensive research into molten salt reactors started with the U.S. aircraft reactor experiment (ARE) in support of the U.S. Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion program.) Wikimedia Commons

1964: Molten salt reactor at Oak Ridge. Source: Wikimedia Commons

But they were aware that smart young engineers were considering applying modern technology to several other decades-old reactor designs from the dawn of the nuclear age, and this one seemed to Leslie and Mark to warrant a second look. After finishing their exams, they started searching for new materials that could be used in a molten salt reactor to make it both legal and more efficient. If they could show that a modified version of the old design could compete with—or exceed—the performance of today’s light water reactors, they knew they might have a very interesting project on their hands.

First, they took a look at the fuel. By using different, more modern materials, they had a theory that they could get the reactor to work at very low enrichment levels. Maybe, they hoped, even significantly below 5 percent.

There was a good reason to hope. Today’s reactors produce a significant amount of nuclear “waste,” many tons of which are currently sitting in cooling pools and storage canisters at plant sites all over the country. The reason that the waste has to be managed so carefully is that when they are discarded, the uranium fuel rods contain about 95 percent of the original amount of energy and remain both highly radioactive and hot enough to boil water. It dawned on Leslie and Mark that if they could chop up the rods and remove their metal cladding, they might have a “killer app”—a sector-redefining technology like Uber or Airbnb—for their molten salt reactor design, enabling it to run on the waste itself.

By late 2010, the computer modeling they were doing suggested this might indeed work. When Leslie left for a trip to Egypt with her family in January 2011, Mark kept running simulations back at MIT. On January 11, he sent his partner an email that she read as she toured the sites of Alexandria. The note was highly technical, but said in essence that Mark’s latest work confirmed their hunch—they could indeed make their reactor run on nuclear waste. Leslie looked up from her phone and said to her brother: “I need to go back to Boston.”

Watch Leslie Dewan and Mark Massie on the future of nuclear energy

Climate Change Spurs New Call for Nuclear Energy

In the days when Leslie and Mark were studying for their exams, it may have seemed that the Golden Age of nuclear energy in the United States had long since passed. Not a single new commercial reactor project had been built here in over 30 years. Not only were there no new reactors, but with the fracking boom having produced abundant supplies of cheap natural gas, some electric utilities were shutting down their aging reactors rather than doing the costly upgrades needed to keep them online.

As the domestic reactor market went into decline, the American supply chain for nuclear reactor parts withered. Although almost all commercial nuclear technology had been discovered in the United States, our competitors eventually purchased much of our nuclear industrial base, with Toshiba buying Westinghouse, for example.* Not surprisingly, as the nuclear pioneers aged and young scientists stayed away from what seemed to be a dying industry, the number of nuclear engineers also dwindled over the decades. In addition, the American regulatory system, long considered the gold standard for western nuclear systems, began to lose influence as other countries pressed ahead with new reactor construction while the U.S. market remained dormant.

Yet something has changed in recent years. Leslie and Mark are not really outliers. All of a sudden, a flood of young engineers has entered the field. More than 1,164 nuclear engineering degrees were awarded in 2013—a 160 percent increase over the number granted a decade ago.

So what, after a 30-year drought, is drawing smart young people back to the nuclear industry? The answer is climate change. Nuclear energy currently provides about 20 percent of the electric power in the United States, and it does so without emitting any greenhouse gases. Compare that to the amount of electricity produced by the other main non-emitting sources of power, the so-called “renewables”—hydroelectric (6.8 percent), wind (4.2 percent) and solar (about one quarter of a percent). Not only are nuclear plants the most important of the non-emitting sources, but they provide baseload—“always there”—power, while most renewables can produce electricity only intermittently, when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining.

In 2014, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations-based organization that is the leading international body for the assessment of climate risk, issued a desperate call for more non-emitting power sources. According to the IPCC, in order to mitigate climate change and meet growing energy demands, the world must aggressively expand its sources of renewable energy, and it must also build more than 400 new nuclear reactors in the next 20 years—a near-doubling of today’s global fleet of 435 reactors. However, in the wake of the tsunami that struck Japan’s Fukushima Daichi plant in 2011, some countries are newly fearful about the safety of light water reactors. Germany, for example, vowed to shutter its entire nuclear fleet.

November 6, 2013: The spent fuel pool inside the No.4 reactor building at the tsunami-crippled Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s (TEPCO) Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Source: REUTERS/Kyodo (Japan)

The young scientists entering the nuclear energy field know all of this. They understand that a major build-out of nuclear reactors could play a vital role in saving the world from climate disaster. But they also recognize that for that to happen, there must be significant changes in the technology of the reactors, because fear of light water reactors means that the world is not going to be willing to fund and build enough of them to supply the necessary energy. That’s what had sent Leslie and Mark into the library stacks at MIT—a search for new ideas that might be buried in the old designs.

They have now launched a company, Transatomic, to build the molten salt reactor they see as a viable answer to the problem. And they’re not alone—at least eight other startups have emerged in recent years, each with its own advanced reactor design. This new generation of pioneers is working with the same sense of mission and urgency that animated the discipline’s founders. The existential threat that drove the men of Oak Ridge and Argonne was posed by the Soviets; the threat of today is from climate change.

Heeding that sense of urgency, investors from Silicon Valley and elsewhere are stepping up to provide funding. One startup, TerraPower, has the backing of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and former Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold. Another, General Fusion, has raised $32 million from investors, including nearly $20 million from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. And LPP Fusion has even benefited, to the tune of $180,000, from an Indiegogo crowd-funding campaign.

All of the new blood, new ideas, and new money are having a real effect. In the last several years, a field that had been moribund has become dynamic again, once more charged with a feeling of boundless possibility and optimism.

But one huge source of funding and support enjoyed by those first pioneers has all but disappeared: The U.S. government.

The "Atoms for Peace" program supplied equipment and information to schools, hospitals, and research institutions within the U.S. and throughout the world. Source: Wikipedia

From Atoms for Peace to Chernobyl

December 8, 1953: U.S. President Eisenhower delivers his "Atoms for Peace" speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Source: IAEA

In the early days of nuclear energy development, the government led the charge, funding the research, development, and design of 52 different reactors at the Idaho laboratory’s National Reactor Testing Station alone, not to mention those that were being developed at other labs, like the one that was the subject of the paper Leslie and Mark read. With the help of the government, engineers were able to branch out in many different directions.

Soon enough, the designs were moving from paper to test reactors to deployment at breathtaking speed. The tiny Experimental Breeder Reactor 1, which went online in December 1951 at the Idaho National Lab, ushered in the age of nuclear energy.

Just two years later, President Dwight D. Eisenhower made his Atoms for Peace speech to the U.N., in which he declared that “The United States knows that peaceful power from atomic energy is no dream of the future. The capability, already proved, is here today.” Less than a year after that, Eisenhower waved a ceremonial "neutron wand" to signal a bulldozer in Shippingport, Pennsylvania to begin construction of the nation’s first commercial nuclear power plant.

1956: Reactor pressure vessel during construction at the Shippingport Atomic Power Station. Source: Wikipedia

By 1957 the Atoms for Peace program had borne fruit, and Shippingport was open for business. During the years that followed, the government, fulfilling Eisenhower’s dream, not only funded the research, it ran the labs, chose the technologies, and, eventually, regulated the reactors.

The U.S. would soon rapidly surpass not only its Cold War enemy, the Soviet Union, which had brought the first significant electricity-producing reactor online in 1954, but every other country seeking to deploy nuclear energy, including France and Canada. Much of the extraordinary progress in America’s development of nuclear energy technology can be credited to one specific government institution—the U.S. Navy.

Rickover’s choice has had enormous implications. To this day, the light water reactor remains the standard—the only type of reactor built or used for energy production in the United States and in most other countries as well. Research on other reactor types (like molten salt and lead) essentially ended for almost six decades, not to be revived until very recently.

Once light water reactors got the nod, the Atomic Energy Commission endorsed a cookie-cutter-like approach to building additional reactors that was very enticing to energy companies seeking to enter the atomic arena. Having a standardized light water reactor design meant quicker regulatory approval, economies of scale, and operating uniformity, which helped control costs and minimize uncertainty. And there was another upside to the light water reactors, at least back then: they produced a byproduct—plutonium. These days, we call that a problem: the remaining fissile material that must be protected from accidental discharge or proliferation and stored indefinitely. In the Cold War 1960s, however, that was seen as a benefit, because the leftover plutonium could be used to make nuclear weapons.

2005: An ICBM loaded into a silo of the former ICBM missile site, now the Titan Missile Museum. Source: Wikipedia

With the triumph of the light water reactor came a massive expansion of the domestic and global nuclear energy industries. In the 1960s and ‘70s, America’s technology, design, supply chain, and regulatory system dominated the production of all civilian nuclear energy on this side of the Iron Curtain. U.S. engineers drew the plans, U.S. companies like Westinghouse and GE built the plants, U.S. factories and mills made the parts, and the U.S. government’s Atomic Energy Commission set the global safety standards.

In this country, we built more than 100 light water reactors for commercial power production. Though no two American plants were identical, all of the plants constructed in that era were essentially the same—light water reactors running on uranium enriched to about 4 percent. By the end of the 1970s, in addition to the 100-odd reactors that had been built, 100 more were in the planning or early construction stage.

And then everything came to a screeching halt, thanks to a bizarre confluence of Hollywood and real life.

On March 16, 1979, The China Syndrome —starring Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon, and Michael Douglas—hit theaters, frightening moviegoers with an implausible but well-told tale of a reactor meltdown and catastrophe, which had the potential, according to a character in the film, to render an area “the size of Pennsylvania permanently uninhabitable.” Twelve days later, the Number 2 reactor at the Three Mile Island plant in central Pennsylvania suffered an accident that caused the release of some nuclear coolant and a partial meltdown of the reactor core. After the governor ordered the evacuation of “pregnant women and preschool age children,” widespread panic followed, and tens of thousands of people fled in terror.

1979: Three Mile Island power station. Source: Wikipedia

But both the evacuation order and the fear were unwarranted. A massive investigation revealed that the release of radioactive materials was minimal and had posed no risk to human health. No one was injured or killed at Three Mile Island. What did die that day was America’s nuclear energy leadership. After Three Mile Island, plans for new plants then on the drawing board were scrapped or went under in a blizzard of public recrimination, legal action, and regulatory overreach by federal, state, and local officials. For example, the Shoreham plant on Long Island, which took nearly a decade to build and was completed in 1984, never opened, becoming one of the biggest and most expensive white elephants in human history.

The concrete "sarcophagus" built over the Chernobyl nuclear power plant's fourth reactor that exploded on April 26, 1986. Source: REUTERS

Chernobyl sarcophogi Magnum

The final, definitive blow to American nuclear energy was delivered in 1986, when the Soviets bungled their way into a genuine nuclear energy catastrophe: the disaster at the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine. It was man-made in its origin (risky decisions made at the plant led to the meltdown, and the plant itself was badly designed); widespread in its scope (Soviet reactors had no containment vessel, so the roof was literally blown off, the core was exposed, and a radioactive cloud covered almost the whole of Europe); and lethal in its impact (rescuers and area residents were lied to by the Soviet government, which denied the risk posed by the disaster, causing many needless deaths and illnesses and the hospitalization of thousands).

After Chernobyl, it didn’t matter that American plants were infinitely safer and better run. This country, which was awash in cheap and plentiful coal, simply wasn’t going to build more nuclear plants if it didn’t have to.

But now we have to.

The terrible consequences of climate change mean that we must find low- and zero-emitting ways of producing electricity.

November 2014: Leslie Dewan and Mark Massie at MIT. Source: Sareen Hairabedian, Brookings Institution

The Return of Nuclear Pioneers

Five new light water reactors are currently under construction in the U.S., but the safety concerns about them (largely unwarranted as they are) as well as their massive size, cost, complexity, and production of used fuel (“waste”) mean that there will probably be no large-scale return to the old style of reactor. What we need now is to go back to the future and build some of those plants that they dreamed up in the labs of yesterday.

Which is what Leslie and Mark are trying to do with Transatomic. Once they had their breakthrough moment and realized that they could fuel their reactor on nuclear waste material, they began to think seriously about founding a company. So they started doing what all entrepreneurial MIT grads do—they talked to venture capitalists. Once they got their initial funding, the two engineers knew that they needed someone with business experience, so they hired a CEO, Russ Wilcox, who had built and sold a very successful e-publishing company. At the time they approached him, Wilcox was in high demand, but after hearing Leslie and Mark give a TEDx talk about the environmental promise of advanced nuclear technology, he opted to go with Transatomic— because he thought it could help save the world.

November 1, 2014: Mark Massie and Leslie Dewan giving a TEDx talk . Source: Transatomic

In their talk, the two founders had explained that in today’s light water reactors, metal-clad uranium fuel rods are lowered into water in order to heat it and create steam to run the electric turbines. But the water eventually breaks down the metal cladding and then the rods must be replaced. The old rods become nuclear waste, which will remain radioactive for up to 100,000 years, and, under the current American system, must remain in storage for that period.

The genius of the Transatomic design is that, according to Mark’s simulations, their reactor could make use of almost all of the energy remaining in the rods that have been removed from the old light water reactors, while producing almost no waste of their own—just 2.5 percent as much as produced by a typical light water reactor. If they built enough molten salt reactors, Transatomic could theoretically consume not just the roughly 70,000 metric tons of nuclear waste currently stored at U.S. nuclear plants, but also the additional 2,000 metric tons that are produced each year.

Like all molten salt reactors, the Transatomic design is extraordinarily safe as well. That is more important than ever after the terror inspired by the disaster that occurred at the Fukushima light water reactor plant in 2011.When the tsunami knocked out the power for the pumps that provided the water required for coolant, the Fukushima plant suffered a partial core meltdown. In a molten salt reactor, by contrast, no externally supplied coolant would be needed, making it what Transatomic calls “walk away safe.” That means that, in the event of a power failure, no human intervention would be required; the reactor would essentially cool itself without water or pumps. With a loss of external electricity, the artificially chilled plug at the base of the reactor would melt, and the material in the core (salt and uranium fuel) would drain to a containment tank and cool within hours.

Leslie and Mark have also found materials that would boost the power output of a molten salt reactor by 30 times over the 1960s model. Their redesign means the reactor might be small and efficient enough to be built in a factory and moved by rail. (Current reactors are so large that they must be assembled on site.)

Click image to play or stop animation

Transatomic, as well as General Fusion and LPP Fusion, represent one branch of the new breed of nuclear pioneers—call them “the young guns.” Also included in this group are companies like Terrestrial Energy in Canada, which is developing an alternative version of the molten salt reactor; Flibe Energy, which is preparing for experiments on a liquid-thorium fluoride reactor; UPower, at work on a nuclear battery; and engineers who are incubating projects not just at MIT but at a number of other universities and labs. Thanks to their work, the next generator of reactors might just be developed by small teams of brilliant entrepreneurs.

Then there are the more established companies and individuals—call them the “old pros”—who have become players in the advanced nuclear game. These include the engineering giant Fluor, which recently bought a startup out of Oregon called NuScale Power. They are designing a new type of light water “Small Modular Reactor” that is integral (the steam generator is built in), small (it generates about 4 percent of the output of a large reactor and fits on the back of a truck), and sectional (it can be strung together with others to generate more power). In part because of its relatively familiar light water design, Fluor and a small modular reactor competitor, Babcock & Wilcox, are the only pioneers of the new generation of technology to have received government grants—for $226 million each—to fund their research.

Another of the “old pros,” the well-established General Atomics, in business since 1955, is combining the benefits of small modular reactors with a design that can convert nuclear waste into electricity and also produce large amounts of heat and energy for industrial applications. The reactor uses helium rather than water or molten salt as its coolant. Its advanced design, which they call the Energy Multiplier Module reactor, has the potential to revolutionize the industry.

Somewhere in between is TerraPower. While it’s run by young guns, it’s backed by the world’s second richest man (among others). But even Bill Gates’s money won’t be enough. Nuclear technology is too big, too expensive, and too complex to explore in a garage, real or metaphorical. TerraPower has said that a prototype reactor could cost up to $5 billion, and they are going to need some big machines to develop and test it.

So while Leslie, Mark, and others in their cohort may seem like the latest iteration of Silicon Valley hipster entrepreneurs, the work they’re trying to do cannot be accomplished by Silicon Valley VC-scale funding. There has to be substantial government involvement.

Unfortunately, the relatively puny grants to Fluor and Babcock & Wilcox are the federal government’s largest contribution to advanced nuclear development to date. At the moment, the rest are on their own.

The result is that some of the fledgling enterprises, like General Atomic and Gates’s TerraPower, have decamped for China. Others, like Leslie and Mark’s, are staying put in the United States (for now) and hoping for federal support.

UBritish Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne (2nd R) chats with workers beside Taishan Nuclear Power Joint Venture Co Ltd General Manager Guo Liming (3rd R) and EDF Energy CEO Vincent de Rivaz (R), in front of a nuclear reactor under construction at a nuclear power plant in Taishan, Guangdong province, October 17, 2013. Chinese companies will be allowed to take stakes in British nuclear projects, Osborne said on Thursday, as Britain pushes ahead with an ambitious target to expand nuclear energy. REUTERS/Bobby Yip (CHINA - Tags: POLITICS BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY ENERGY) Source: REUTERS

June 2008: A nearly 200 ton nuclear reactor safety vessel is erected at the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research at Kalpakkam, near the southern Indian city of Chennai. Source: REUTERS/Babu (INDIA)

Missing in Action: The United States Government

There are American political leaders in both parties who talk about having an “all of the above” energy policy, implying that they want to build everything, all at once. But they don’t mean it, at least not really. In this country, we don’t need all of the above—virtually every American has access to electric power. We don’t want it—we have largely stopped building coal as well as nuclear plants, even though we could. And we don’t underwrite it—the public is generally opposed to the government being in the business of energy research, development, and demonstration (aka, RD&D).

In China, when they talk of “all of the above,” they do mean it. With hundreds of millions of Chinese living without electricity and a billion more demanding ever-increasing amounts of power, China is funding, building, and running every power project that they possibly can. This includes the nuclear sector, where they have about 29 big new light water reactors under construction. China is particularly keen on finding non-emitting forms of electricity, both to address climate change and, more urgently for them, to help slow the emissions of the conventional pollutants that are choking their cities in smog and literally killing their citizens.

Since (for better or for worse) China isn’t hung up on safety regulation, and there is zero threat of legal challenge to nuclear projects, plans can be realized much more quickly than in the West. That means that there are not only dozens of light water reactor plants going up in China, but also a lot of work on experimental reactors with advanced nuclear designs—like those being developed by General Atomic and TerraPower.

Given both the competitive threat from China and the potentially disastrous global effects of emissions-induced climate change, the U.S. government should be leaping back into the nuclear race with the kind of integrated response that it brought to the Soviet threat during the Cold War.

But it isn’t, at least not yet. Through years of stagnation, America lost—or perhaps misplaced—its ability to do big, bold things in nuclear science. Our national labs, which once led the world to this technology, are underfunded, and our regulatory system, which once set the standard of global excellence, has become overly burdensome, slow, and sclerotic.

The villains in this story are familiar in Washington: ideology, ignorance, and bureaucracy. Let’s start with Congress, currently sporting a well-earned 14 percent approval rating. On Capitol Hill, an unholy and unwitting alliance of right-wing climate deniers, small-government radicals, and liberal anti-nuclear advocates have joined together to keep nuclear lab budgets small. And since even naming a post office constitutes a huge challenge for this broken Congress, moving forward with the funding and regulation of a complex new technology seems well beyond its capabilities at the moment.

Then there is the federal bureaucracy, which has failed even to acknowledge that a new generation of reactors is on the horizon. It took the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (the successor to the Atomic Energy Commission) years to approve a design for the new light water reactor now being built in Georgia, despite the fact that it’s nearly identical to the 100 or so that preceded it. The NRC makes no pretense of being prepared to evaluate reactors cooled by molten salt or run on depleted uranium. And it insists on pounding these new round pegs into its old square holes, demanding that the new reactors meet the same requirements as the old ones, even when that makes no sense.

At the Department of Energy, their heart is in the right place. DOE Secretary Ernest Moniz is a seasoned political hand as well as an MIT nuclear physicist, and he absolutely sees the potential in advanced reactor designs. But, constrained by a limited budget, the department is not currently in a position to drive the kind of changes needed to bring advanced nuclear designs to market.

President Obama clearly believes in nuclear energy. In an early State of the Union address he said, “We need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. And that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country." But the White House has been largely absent from the nuclear energy discussion in recent years. It is time for it to reengage.

May 22, 1957: A GE supervisor inspects the instrument panel for the company’s boiling water power reactor in Pleasanton, CA. Source: Bettmann/Corbis/AP Images

Getting the U.S. Back in the Race

So what, exactly, do the people running the advanced nuclear companies need from the U.S. government? What can government do to help move the technology off of their computers and into the electricity production marketplace?

First, they need a practical development path. Where is Bill Gates going to test TerraPower’s brilliant new reactor designs? Because there are no appropriate government-run facilities in the United States, he is forced to make do in China. He can’t find this ideal. Since more than two-thirds of Microsoft Windows operating systems used in China are pirated, he is surely aware that testing in China greatly increases the risk of intellectual property theft.

Thus, at the center of a development path would be an advanced reactor test bed facility, run by the government, and similar to what we had at the Idaho National Lab in 1960s. Such a facility, which would be open to all of the U.S. companies with reactors in development, would allow any of them to simply plug in their fuel and materials and run their tests

But advanced test reactors of the type we need are expensive and complex. The old one at the Idaho lab can’t accommodate the radiation and heat levels required by the new technologies. Japan has a newer one, but it shut down after Fukushima. China and Russia each have them, and France is building one that should be completed in 2016. But no one has the cutting-edge, truly advanced incubator space that the new firms need to move toward development.

Second is funding. Mark and Leslie have secured some venture capital, but Transatomic will need much more money in order to perform the basic engineering on an advanced test reactor and, eventually, to construct demonstration reactors. Like all startups, Transatomic faces a “Valley of Death” between concept and deployment; with nuclear technology’s enormous costs and financial risk, it’s more like a “Grand Canyon of Death.” Government must play a big role in bridging that canyon, as it did in the early days of commercial nuclear energy development, beginning with the first light water reactor at Shippingport.

For Further Reading

President Obama, It's Time to Act on Energy Policy November 2014, Charles Ebinger

Transforming the Electricity Portfolio: Lessons from Germany and Japan in Deploying Renewable Energy September 2014, John Banks, Charles Ebinger, and Alisa Schackmann

The Road Ahead for Japanese Energy June 2014

Planet Policy A blog about the intersection of energy and climate policy

Third, they need a complete rethinking of the NRC approach to regulating advanced nuclear technology. How can the brand new Flibe Energy liquid-thorium fluoride reactor technology be forced to meet the same criteria as the typical light water reactor? The NRC must be flexible enough to accommodate technology that works differently from the light water reactors it is familiar with. For example, since Transatomic’s reactor would run at normal atmospheric pressure, unlike a light water reactor, which operates under vastly greater pressure, Mark and Leslie shouldn’t be required to build a huge and massively expensive containment structure around their reactors. Yet the NRC has no provision allowing them to bypass that requirement. If that doesn’t change, there is no way that Transatomic will be able to bring its small, modular, innovative reactors to market.

In addition, the NRC must let these technologies develop organically. They should permit Transatomic and the others to build and operate prototype reactors before they are fully licensed, allowing them to demonstrate their safety and reliability with real-world stress tests, as opposed to putting them through never-ending rounds of theoretical discussion and negotiation with NRC testers.

None of this is easy. The seriousness of the climate change threat is not universally acknowledged in Washington. Federal budgets are now based in the pinched, deficit-constrained present, not the full employment, high-growth economy of the 1950s. And the NRC, in part because of its mission to protect public safety, is among the most change-averse of any federal agency.

But all of this is vital. Advanced nuclear technology could hold a key to fighting climate change. It could also result in an enormous boon to the American economy. But only if we get there first.

Who Will Own the Nuclear Power Future?

Josh Freed, Third Way's clean energy vice president, works on developing ways the federal government can help accelerate the private sector's adoption of clean energy and address climate change. He has served as a senior staffer on Capitol Hill and worked in various public advocacy and political campaigns, including advising the senior leadership of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Nuclear energy is at a crossroads. One path sends brilliant engineers like Leslie and Mark forward, applying their boundless skills and infectious optimism to world-changing technologies that have the potential to solve our energy problems while also fueling economic development and creating new jobs. The other path keeps the nuclear industry locked in unadaptable technologies that will lead, inevitably, to a decline in our major source of carbon-free energy.

The chance to regain our leadership in nuclear energy, to walk on the path once trod by the engineers and scientists of the 1950s and ‘60s, will not last forever. It is up to those who make decisions on matters concerning funding and regulation to strike while the iron is hot.

This is not pie-in-the-sky thinking—we have done this before. At the dawn of the nuclear age, we designed and built reactors that tested the range of possibility. The blueprints then languished on the shelves of places like the MIT library for more than fifty years until Leslie Dewan, Mark Massie, and other brilliant engineers and scientists thought to revive them. With sufficient funding and the appropriate technical and political leadership, we can offer the innovators and entrepreneurs of today the chance to use those designs to power the future.

Join the conversation on Twitter using #BrookingsEssay or share this on Facebook .

This Essay is also available as an eBook from these online retailers: Amazon Kindle , Barnes & Noble , Apple iTunes , Google Play , Ebooks.com , and on Kobo .

This article was written by Josh Freed, vice president of the Clean Energy Program at Third Way. The author has not personally received any compensation from the nuclear energy industry. In the spirit of maximum transparency, however, the author has disclosed that several entities mentioned in this article are associated in varying degrees with Third Way. The Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) and Babcock & Wilcox have financially supported Third Way. NEI includes TerraPower, Babcock & Wilcox, and Idaho National Lab among its members, as well as Fluor on its Board of Directors. Transatomic is not a member of NEI, but Dr. Leslie Dewan has appeared in several of its advertisements. Third Way is also working with and has received funding from Ray Rothrock, although he was not consulted on the contents of this essay. Third Way previously held a joint event with the Idaho National Lab that was unrelated to the subject of this essay.

* The essay originally also referred to Hitachi buying GE's nuclear arm. GE owns 60 percent of Hitachi.

Like other products of the Institution, The Brookings Essay is intended to contribute to discussion and stimulate debate on important issues. The views are solely those of the author.

Graphic Design: Marcia Underwood and Jessica Pavone Research: Fred Dews, Thomas Young, Jessica Pavone, Kevin Hawkins Editorial: Beth Rashbaum and Fred Dews Web Development: Marcia Underwood and Kevin Hawkins Video: George Burroughs- Director, Ian McAllister- Technical Director, Sareen Hairabedian and Mark Hoelscher Directors of Photography, Sareen Hairabedian- Editor, Mark Hoelscher- Color Correction and Graphics, Zachary Kulzer- Sound, Thomas Young- Producer

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Sample argumentative essay against the production of nuclear power.

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This sample argumentative essay explores nuclear power production, how it is increasingly growing in number, and issues with safety and health. As one of the hottest debates of our time, there is no shortage of situations to which this type of document apply. Particularly in the academic world, this is a discussion worthy of everything from brief essays to full dissertations .

Advantages and disadvantages of nuclear power

Nuclear power generation does emit relatively low amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2). The emissions of greenhouse gasses and therefore the contribution of nuclear power plants to global warming is therefore relatively little. This technology is readily available; it does not have to be developed first. It is possible to generate a high amount of electrical energy in one single plant. (Rohrer)

Disadvantages

The problem of radioactive waste is still an unsolved one. The waste from nuclear energy, also know as fusion energy , is extremely dangerous and it has to be carefully looked after for several thousand years (10,000 years according to United States Environmental Protection Agency standards). Nuclear power plants, as well as nuclear waste, could be preferred targets for terrorist attacks. No atomic energy plant in the world could withstand an attack similar to 9/11 in New York. Such a terrorist act would have catastrophic effects for the whole world.

During the operation of nuclear power plants, radioactive waste is produced, which in turn can be used for the production of nuclear weapons. In addition, the same know-how used to design nuclear power plants can to a certain extent be used to build nuclear weapons (nuclear proliferation). (Rohrer) For all intents and purposes, the argument against the production of nuclear power seems to be the strongest.

Meeting the world’s energy needs

Nuclear energy does not contribute much to the world’s overall energy needs . This is one argument against the production of nuclear powers.

In fact, “Electricity generation uses 40% of the world's primary energy. Nuclear provides 14% of world electricity” (World Nuclear Association).

With about 160 nuclear power resources in the United States and approximately 440 commercial nuclear power reactors globally, there is a lot of information available regarding nuclear energy generation (World Nuclear Association). While most countries do not rely solely on nuclear energy, there are about 13 countries that get about 25% of their electricity by means of nuclear energy (NEI). The top contenders are:

• France – 76.3%
• Ukraine – 56.5%
• Slovakia – 55.9%
• Hungary – 52.7%

Nuclear power disasters

Another argument against the production of nuclear power is the risk of horrific nuclear explosions in power plants. In 1986, a nuclear power plant in Europe suffered from an accident that has become known as one of the most devastating in regards to nuclear power activity in world history. The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded on April 26 when a sudden surge of power occurred during a systems test (The Chernobyl Gallery). Thirty-one people died and countless more were affected by exposure to radioactive substances released in the disaster.

"Nearly 400 million people resided in territories that were contaminated with radioactivity at a level higher than 4 kBq/m2 (0.11 Ci/km2) from April to July 1986. Nearly 5 million people (including, more than 1 million children) still live with dangerous levels of radioactive contamination in Belarus, Ukraine, and European Russia." (The Chernobyl Gallery)

The Mayak Nuclear Facility and the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi disasters

The second most disastrous nuclear disaster in history occurred in 1957. The Mayak Nuclear Facility in Kyshtym, Russia suffered a fate similar to that in the Chernobyl disaster.

"As a result of disregarding basic safety standards, 17,245 workers received radiation overdoses between 1948 and 1958. Dumping of radioactive waste into the nearby river from 1949 to 1952 caused several breakouts of radiation sickness in villages downstream." (Rabl)

There are many more nuclear power production incidents such as the Chernobyl and Kyshtym disasters that have had devastating effects on the environment, the human population, and even entire cities. Most recently, the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi disaster comes to mind. Accidents are rated based on a numbered system called the International Nuclear Events Scale, or INES. Events range from a Level 1, which is considered an Anomaly, to a Level 7, which is a Major Accident (Rogers). Some of the more disastrous incidents that have occurred are as follows:

• 1952 - Chalk River, Canada - Level 5
• 1957 - Windscale Pile, UK - Level 5
• 1979 - Three Mile Island, US - Level 5
• 1980 - Saint Laurent des Eaux, France - Level 4
• 1993 - Tomsk, Russia - Level 4
• 2011 - Fukushima, Japan - Level 5

Nuclear waste's impact on health and safety

The disposal of nuclear waste is yet another argument against the production of nuclear power.

“Nuclear waste is the material that nuclear fuel becomes after it is used in a reactor” (Rogers).

This waste is essentially an isotope of the Uranium Oxide fuel, or UO2, that nuclear reactors are powered by. This substance is highly radioactive and, if not disposed of properly, can leak into the environment, which subsequently can cause irreparable damage to the environment and people coming into contact with it.

The process of nuclear waste disposal is a lengthy process that can take years to mediate. Once the waste is captured, it must never become exposed to the outside world. The most method of disposal is underwater storage until the radiation in the waste decays and it can be moved to concrete tanks.

Keeping on the topic of nuclear waste disposal, the dangers of exposure to nuclear waste are catastrophic. In regards to plants, animals, and humans, exposure to radioactive waste can cause cancer, genetic problems, and death. Which brings to mind the nature and prospects of nuclear fusion- often called the "perfect" source of power - emitting neither radioactive waste nor greenhouse gasses that add to the global warming problem .

But because there is always the possibility of error in nuclear waste production, storage and disposal, there is always the risk that waste is somehow being exposed to the environment. The symptoms of exposure range from the following:

• Nausea and vomiting - within 10 minutes to 6 hours;
• Headache - within 2 hours to 24 hours;
• Dizziness and disorientation - immediately to 1 week;
• Hair loss, infections, low blood pressure - immediately to within 1 to 4 weeks. (Mayo Clinic Staff)

With the vast array of symptoms, illnesses, and effects of exposure to nuclear waste, it is easy to see why this is such a strong argument against the production of nuclear power.

Nuclear weapons' impact on the environment

The development and usage of nuclear weapons have become a hot topic of debates and essay assignments in recent years. It has always been, but even more so in the 20th and 21st centuries. Seldom do most people make the connection between nuclear weapons and nuclear power production. It was once deemed that the production of nuclear power for the sole purpose of electricity production. In the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower first came to the realization that the two concepts could be connected.

"In 1954 utilities which were to operate commercial nuclear reactors were given further incentive when Congress amended the Atomic Energy Act so that utilities would receive uranium fuel for their reactors from the government in exchange for the plutonium produced in those reactors." (NEIS) 1

As the process of linking nuclear power production and nuclear weapon development has become more evident, so has the fact that the connection is more political than historical. The political and microeconomic aspects of energy production are vast. Because of how little the world relies on nuclear power for energy production, it only makes sense that many countries would instead use nuclear energy solely for the production of nuclear weapons. This leaves this type of energy production in the hands of terrorist-friendly countries and organizations. These entities often camouflage their intentions with “peaceful” nuclear production (NEIS).

Alternative renewable energy sources

As the world’s population continues to grow at exacerbated rates, so does its need for renewable and sustainable energy sources. In years past, nuclear power was a feasible solution to the problem. Yet another argument against the production of nuclear power lay in the fact that there are many more options available. The world has taken notice to the natural energy that lights upon us everyday care of Mother Nature. Sun, wind, and water offer many opportunities at alternative energy sources without the aid of the environmentally detrimental energy that nuclear power provides (World Nuclear Association).

There is a rather large list of potential alternative energy sources that could prove to be healthier and safer options to nuclear power. These options include:

• Rivers and hydroelectricity
• Wind energy
• Solar energy
• Ocean energy
• Decentralized energy.

(World Nuclear Association)

The problem with these types of energy sources is the act of harnessing them. It makes sense that if the world is willing to accommodate the cost of nuclear power exploration that it would also be willing to harness much safer means of energy production that can be found in natural resources.

The argument against the production of nuclear power is a strong one and one popularly presented in opinion pieces and research papers alike . The production of nuclear power is dangerous and comes with many negative ramifications. Nuclear disasters are tragedies that are unlike any other in history and are unnecessary. The consequences of nuclear waste exposure are immeasurable and create long lasting legacies of destruction, fear, and pain.

Despite efforts from the US Department of Defense to move toward energy efficiency , the correlation between nuclear power production and nuclear weapon promotion will inevitably be the world’s ultimate demise. There are too many other renewable and sustainable energy sources available that nuclear power production should no longer be an option.

The world does not rely on nuclear energy heavily enough for it to be a necessity. The majority of countries that once sought the “peaceful” exploration of nuclear energy production now use it with malicious intent. As politics take precedence in all things global, the protection of the planet and its inhabitants has taken the backseat. The world once survived with nuclear power. Hopefully, we will see those days again.

Works Cited

EIA. "U.S. Energy Information Administration - EIA - Independent Statistics and Analysis." How Much Electricity Does a Nuclear Power Plant Generate? 3 Dec. 2015. Web. 02 June 2016. http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=104.

Mayo Clinic Staff. "Radiation Sickness." Symptoms. 2016. Web. 03 June 2016. http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/radiation-sickness/basics/symptoms/con-20022901.

NEI. "World Statistics." Nuclear Energy Institute. Web. 02 June 2016. http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-Center/Nuclear-Statistics/World-Statistics.

Rabl, Thomas. "The Nuclear Disaster of Kyshtym 1957 and the Politics of the Cold War | Environment & Society Portal." The Nuclear Disaster of Kyshtym 1957 and the Politics of the Cold War | Environment & Society Portal. 2012. Web. 03 June 2016. http://www.environmentandsociety.org/arcadia/nuclear-disaster-kyshtym-1957-and-politics-cold-war.

Rogers, Simon. "Nuclear Power Plant Accidents: Listed and Ranked since 1952." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 2011. Web. 03 June 2016. http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/mar/14/nuclear-power-plant-accidents-list-rank.

Rohrer, Jurg. "Time for Change." Pros and Cons of Nuclear Power. 2011. Web. 03 June 2016. http://www.timeforchange.org/pros-and-cons-of-nuclear-power-and-sustainability.

The Chernobyl Gallery. "What Is Chernobyl? | The Chernobyl Gallery." The Chernobyl Gallery What Is Chernobyl Comments. 2013. Web. 03 June 2016. http://chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/what-is-chernobyl/.

World Nuclear Association. "Renewable Energy and Electricity." 2016. Web. 03 June 2016. http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/energy-and-the-environment/renewable-energy-and-electricity.aspx.

World Nuclear Association. "World Energy Needs and Nuclear Power." May 2016. Web. 02 June 2016. http://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/world-energy-needs-and-nuclear-power.aspx.

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The 3,122-megawatt Civaux Nuclear Power Plant in France, which opened in 1997. GUILLAUME SOUVANT / AFP / Getty Images

Why Nuclear Power Must Be Part of the Energy Solution

By Richard Rhodes • July 19, 2018

Many environmentalists have opposed nuclear power, citing its dangers and the difficulty of disposing of its radioactive waste. But a Pulitzer Prize-winning author argues that nuclear is safer than most energy sources and is needed if the world hopes to radically decrease its carbon emissions. 

In the late 16th century, when the increasing cost of firewood forced ordinary Londoners to switch reluctantly to coal, Elizabethan preachers railed against a fuel they believed to be, literally, the Devil’s excrement. Coal was black, after all, dirty, found in layers underground — down toward Hell at the center of the earth — and smelled strongly of sulfur when it burned. Switching to coal, in houses that usually lacked chimneys, was difficult enough; the clergy’s outspoken condemnation, while certainly justified environmentally, further complicated and delayed the timely resolution of an urgent problem in energy supply.

For too many environmentalists concerned with global warming, nuclear energy is today’s Devil’s excrement. They condemn it for its production and use of radioactive fuels and for the supposed problem of disposing of its waste. In my judgment, their condemnation of this efficient, low-carbon source of baseload energy is misplaced. Far from being the Devil’s excrement, nuclear power can be, and should be, one major component of our rescue from a hotter, more meteorologically destructive world.

Like all energy sources, nuclear power has advantages and disadvantages. What are nuclear power’s benefits? First and foremost, since it produces energy via nuclear fission rather than chemical burning, it generates baseload electricity with no output of carbon, the villainous element of global warming. Switching from coal to natural gas is a step toward decarbonizing, since burning natural gas produces about half the carbon dioxide of burning coal. But switching from coal to nuclear power is radically decarbonizing, since nuclear power plants release greenhouse gases only from the ancillary use of fossil fuels during their construction, mining, fuel processing, maintenance, and decommissioning — about as much as solar power does, which is about 4 to 5 percent as much as a natural gas-fired power plant.

Nuclear power releases less radiation into the environment than any other major energy source.

Second, nuclear power plants operate at much higher capacity factors than renewable energy sources or fossil fuels. Capacity factor is a measure of what percentage of the time a power plant actually produces energy. It’s a problem for all intermittent energy sources. The sun doesn’t always shine, nor the wind always blow, nor water always fall through the turbines of a dam.

In the United States in 2016, nuclear power plants, which generated almost 20 percent of U.S. electricity, had an average capacity factor of 92.3 percent , meaning they operated at full power on 336 out of 365 days per year. (The other 29 days they were taken off the grid for maintenance.) In contrast , U.S. hydroelectric systems delivered power 38.2 percent of the time (138 days per year), wind turbines 34.5 percent of the time (127 days per year) and solar electricity arrays only 25.1 percent of the time (92 days per year). Even plants powered with coal or natural gas only generate electricity about half the time for reasons such as fuel costs and seasonal and nocturnal variations in demand. Nuclear is a clear winner on reliability.

Third, nuclear power releases less radiation into the environment than any other major energy source. This statement will seem paradoxical to many readers, since it’s not commonly known that non-nuclear energy sources release any radiation into the environment. They do. The worst offender is coal, a mineral of the earth’s crust that contains a substantial volume of the radioactive elements uranium and thorium. Burning coal gasifies its organic materials, concentrating its mineral components into the remaining waste, called fly ash. So much coal is burned in the world and so much fly ash produced that coal is actually the major source of radioactive releases into the environment. 

Anti-nuclear activists protest the construction of a nuclear power station in Seabrook, New Hampshire in 1977.  AP Photo

In the early 1950s, when the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission believed high-grade uranium ores to be in short supply domestically, it considered extracting uranium for nuclear weapons from the abundant U.S. supply of fly ash from coal burning. In 2007, China began exploring such extraction, drawing on a pile of some 5.3 million metric tons of brown-coal fly ash at Xiaolongtang in Yunnan. The Chinese ash averages about 0.4 pounds of triuranium octoxide (U3O8), a uranium compound, per metric ton. Hungary and South Africa are also exploring uranium extraction from coal fly ash. 

What are nuclear’s downsides? In the public’s perception, there are two, both related to radiation: the risk of accidents, and the question of disposal of nuclear waste.

There have been three large-scale accidents involving nuclear power reactors since the onset of commercial nuclear power in the mid-1950s: Three-Mile Island in Pennsylvania, Chernobyl in Ukraine, and Fukushima in Japan.

Studies indicate even the worst possible accident at a nuclear plant is less destructive than other major industrial accidents.

The partial meltdown of the Three-Mile Island reactor in March 1979, while a disaster for the owners of the Pennsylvania plant, released only a minimal quantity of radiation to the surrounding population. According to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission :

“The approximately 2 million people around TMI-2 during the accident are estimated to have received an average radiation dose of only about 1 millirem above the usual background dose. To put this into context, exposure from a chest X-ray is about 6 millirem and the area’s natural radioactive background dose is about 100-125 millirem per year… In spite of serious damage to the reactor, the actual release had negligible effects on the physical health of individuals or the environment.”

The explosion and subsequent burnout of a large graphite-moderated, water-cooled reactor at Chernobyl in 1986 was easily the worst nuclear accident in history. Twenty-nine disaster relief workers died of acute radiation exposure in the immediate aftermath of the accident. In the subsequent three decades, UNSCEAR — the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, composed of senior scientists from 27 member states — has observed and reported at regular intervals on the health effects of the Chernobyl accident. It has identified no long-term health consequences to populations exposed to Chernobyl fallout except for thyroid cancers in residents of Belarus, Ukraine and western Russia who were children or adolescents at the time of the accident, who drank milk contaminated with 131iodine, and who were not evacuated. By 2008, UNSCEAR had attributed some 6,500 excess cases of thyroid cancer in the Chernobyl region to the accident, with 15 deaths.  The occurrence of these cancers increased dramatically from 1991 to 1995, which researchers attributed mostly to radiation exposure. No increase occurred in adults.

The Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, located near Avila Beach, California, will be decommissioned starting in 2024. Pacific Gas and Electric

“The average effective doses” of radiation from Chernobyl, UNSCEAR also concluded , “due to both external and internal exposures, received by members of the general public during 1986-2005 [were] about 30 mSv for the evacuees, 1 mSv for the residents of the former Soviet Union, and 0.3 mSv for the populations of the rest of Europe.”  A sievert is a measure of radiation exposure, a millisievert is one-one-thousandth of a sievert. A full-body CT scan delivers about 10-30 mSv. A U.S. resident receives an average background radiation dose, exclusive of radon, of about 1 mSv per year.

The statistics of Chernobyl irradiations cited here are so low that they must seem intentionally minimized to those who followed the extensive media coverage of the accident and its aftermath. Yet they are the peer-reviewed products of extensive investigation by an international scientific agency of the United Nations. They indicate that even the worst possible accident at a nuclear power plant — the complete meltdown and burnup of its radioactive fuel — was yet far less destructive than other major industrial accidents across the past century. To name only two: Bhopal, in India, where at least 3,800 people died immediately and many thousands more were sickened when 40 tons of methyl isocyanate gas leaked from a pesticide plant; and Henan Province, in China, where at least 26,000 people drowned following the failure of a major hydroelectric dam in a typhoon. “Measured as early deaths per electricity units produced by the Chernobyl facility (9 years of operation, total electricity production of 36 GWe-years, 31 early deaths) yields 0.86 death/GWe-year),” concludes Zbigniew Jaworowski, a physician and former UNSCEAR chairman active during the Chernobyl accident. “This rate is lower than the average fatalities from [accidents involving] a majority of other energy sources. For example, the Chernobyl rate is nine times lower than the death rate from liquefied gas… and 47 times lower than from hydroelectric stations.” 

Nuclear waste disposal, although a continuing political problem, is not any longer a technological problem.

The accident in Japan at Fukushima Daiichi in March 2011 followed a major earthquake and tsunami. The tsunami flooded out the power supply and cooling systems of three power reactors, causing them to melt down and explode, breaching their confinement. Although 154,000 Japanese citizens were evacuated from a 12-mile exclusion zone around the power station, radiation exposure beyond the station grounds was limited. According to the report submitted to the International Atomic Energy Agency in June 2011:

“No harmful health effects were found in 195,345 residents living in the vicinity of the plant who were screened by the end of May 2011. All the 1,080 children tested for thyroid gland exposure showed results within safe limits. By December, government health checks of some 1,700 residents who were evacuated from three municipalities showed that two-thirds received an external radiation dose within the normal international limit of 1 mSv/year, 98 percent were below 5 mSv/year, and 10 people were exposed to more than 10 mSv… [There] was no major public exposure, let alone deaths from radiation.” 

Nuclear waste disposal, although a continuing political problem in the U.S., is not any longer a technological problem. Most U.S. spent fuel, more than 90 percent of which could be recycled to extend nuclear power production by hundreds of years, is stored at present safely in impenetrable concrete-and-steel dry casks on the grounds of operating reactors, its radiation slowly declining. 

An activist in March 2017 demanding closure of the Fessenheim Nuclear Power Plant in France. Authorities announced in April that they will close the facility by 2020. SEBASTIEN BOZON / AFP / Getty Images

The U.S. Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, New Mexico currently stores low-level and transuranic military waste and could store commercial nuclear waste in a 2-kilometer thick bed of crystalline salt, the remains of an ancient sea. The salt formation extends from southern New Mexico all the way northeast to southwestern Kansas. It could easily accommodate the entire world’s nuclear waste for the next thousand years.

Finland is even further advanced in carving out a permanent repository in granite bedrock 400 meters under Olkiluoto, an island in the Baltic Sea off the nation’s west coast. It expects to begin permanent waste storage in 2023.

A final complaint against nuclear power is that it costs too much. Whether or not nuclear power costs too much will ultimately be a matter for markets to decide, but there is no question that a full accounting of the external costs of different energy systems would find nuclear cheaper than coal or natural gas. 

Nuclear power is not the only answer to the world-scale threat of global warming. Renewables have their place; so, at least for leveling the flow of electricity when renewables vary, does natural gas. But nuclear deserves better than the anti-nuclear prejudices and fears that have plagued it. It isn’t the 21st century’s version of the Devil’s excrement. It’s a valuable, even an irreplaceable, part of the solution to the greatest energy threat in the history of humankind.

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Should America Go Nuclear?

It’s carbon-free, but has a history of disasters. investing more in nuclear power can help get us to carbon-neutral by 2050. but is it worth it.

Today on The Argument, can nuclear power save us from the climate crisis?

Most reasonable people agree that unless we get our carbon emissions under control, we’re headed towards a climate disaster. But they don’t agree on how to do it. Wind farms and solar panels are part of the solution. So are better batteries and a more efficient electrical grid. But shouldn’t we be throwing everything at one of the biggest problems our planet has ever faced, like, ever, ever faced?

I’m Jane Coaston, and I’m curious about nuclear power. France gets more than 70 percent of its electricity from nuclear power, Sweden more than 40 percent. Here in the United States, we’re more skittish because though nuclear is clean, when it goes wrong, it goes really, really, really wrong. My guests today disagree on the risks and rewards of nuclear power. MC Hammond is a senior fellow at The Good Energy Collective, a progressive nonprofit that does nuclear research. She’s also a lawyer at Pillsbury Law. MC’s opinions today don’t represent the opinions or positions of her firm. Todd Larsen is the executive co-director for consumer and corporate engagement at Green America, a nonprofit group focused on environmental sustainability.

First and foremost, there are more than 50 nuclear power plants operating in the United States right now. MC, can you give us a very basic description of a nuclear power plant?

Yeah, absolutely. So I think that when people think about nuclear power plants, they think about the really big evaporation towers you see when you’re driving down the highway or The Simpsons. And not a lot of people understand just how nuclear power works. So not to take everybody back to 10th grade science class, but nuclear energy is created from breaking apart the nucleus of atoms, of really heavy elements like uranium. And when you break apart atoms, you create energy. And in a reactor, what happens is that energy creates heat. And that heat is used to create steam from water, and that steam goes into a steam turbine. And it turns and creates energy, and that’s how you turn your lights on in your house. Actually, in 2020, nuclear power replaced coal as the nation’s second largest source of generation. So it’s about 19 percent of the total energy generation on the grid. And it’s over half of the nation’s carbon-free electricity.

So Todd, you’re skeptical of expanding the United States’s use of nuclear power for a couple of reasons. Can you lay those out for us?

Sure, I’d be happy to. So there are very significant risks with nuclear power, all the way from uranium mining to the actual operation of the nuclear power plant, through to what do we do with the nuclear waste that’s produced by nuclear power plants in the United States and around the world. There’s also a major cost issue with nuclear power. Nuclear power is very expensive. Compared to other alternatives that we have, like wind and solar, new nuclear plants are at least twice as expensive. The nuclear plants that were under construction in the last 10 years all went over budget in the United States. The one in Georgia, the Vogtle plant that is being built, is about double its budget. It was projected to be $14 billion. And instead, it’s running about $28 billion. And the plants that were being constructed in South Carolina, the V.C. Sumner plants, utilities there spent $9 billion. And they never completed the plants. And those costs were passed on to ratepayers. And for $9 billion, you could have built a lot of wind and solar in the state of South Carolina. And that clean energy could be on the grid right now.

MC, clearly, the cost issue is huge. $9 billion for a plant that will not work is bad. But South Korea, in comparison, has been able to get its costs down. So this isn’t necessarily a across the board issue. Why is nuclear power so expensive? And is there a way, in your view, that that could change?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think Todd brings up such a great point with these really big plants and how expensive they are to operate. And that’s why what I work a lot on is smaller plants and advanced nuclear where they’re not so big, like bet-the-farm operations. So a lot of the power plants in the United States are really big, right? They’re one gigawatt of electricity, a lot of them, or two gigawatts. And we are looking at these smaller reactors. You have reactors that are 300 to 500 megawatts, kind of a size of a coal plant generally. But I want to go to your point, Jane, on South Korea and the reason that they’re able to build these plants generally on time and on budget. And they’ve really seen cost reductions. And they’ve seen cost reductions for the same reason we’ve seen cost reductions for wind and solar in the United States. They build the same thing over and over. And when you build the same thing over and over, you generally have a lot of learning from that. And you’re able to do it better the next time. And in some of these iterations, 30% to 40% cost reductions. In Georgia, those are a first of a kind plants for the United States, first of its kind, first in country. And when you build a first of a kind thing, it is going to be expensive. But that is why I think we need to learn from what we did with renewables to help reduce those costs, so we can have the tools to get to 100 percent carbon-free electricity.

I’ve joked that nuclear power has massive PR issue for understandable reasons. First, when you think about nuclear power, you think about Chernobyl or Three Mile Island. So I want to address the safety concerns first from you, MC. Why expand with these potential concerns?

Yeah, first, I just want to address Chernobyl because it was such a massive disaster. And just to be very clear, I know a lot of folks have watched the mini series where he explains at the end just how bad of a nuclear reactor design that was.

Yes, we’ve been talking about that series. And I have watched, like, 15 minutes of Chernobyl, and then I got too scared.

I really loved that mini-series because he explained what I think all of nuclear folks try to explain about Chernobyl, was just, like, how risky of a design that was. It was a massive reactor. And most reactors have something called the containment, which is just in case, you have a containment to contain the fission radiation. Chernobyl didn’t even have one. So that was one major design flaw that was one of the reasons it was such a large disaster. And the other thing is the way that it was designed, is, as a reactor that gets hotter, it increased its fission. And when I’m talking about these new advanced reactor designs, they’re designed the actual opposite way. So as they get too hot, they shut themselves down, which is the opposite of what happened to Chernobyl.

The concern here is Chernobyl takes place in 1986, but Fukushima takes place just a decade ago and is a massive disaster and one that ultimately reshaped the Japanese nuclear industry. After Fukushima, all nuclear reactors in Japan were shuttered, which eliminated 30 percent of total electricity production. And Japan is now the second largest net importer of fossil fuel in the world. Like, when nuclear goes wrong, it goes really wrong.

What happened at Fukushima is they had a substantial earthquake. And their power went out, so then their diesel generators kicked on, right? And then a giant tsunami came and flooded their generators. And that cut their backup power. When you cut the backup power, you lose your ability to put water coolant into the reactor. So, Fukushima relied on an external source of power to keep the plants cool. And these new designs, we call them in the industry walkaway safe, meaning I don’t need an external power source to shut the reactor down. When it gets too hot, it shuts itself down on its own.

Todd, I’m going to guess that if things get too hot, everything shuts down. That sounds better to me. Does that alleviate any of your concerns about the safety of nuclear energy?

Well, no, I think there are very serious risks to nuclear power. And first, let’s just talk about the fact that we do have nuclear power plants still in operation in the United States that have been around for several decades. So at Fukushima, what happened is the earthquake that occurred was of a magnitude much higher than had ever occurred in that area of Japan. And of course, that then led to the evacuation of thousands of people. That led to radiation being released into the water, not just in the community, but also into the ocean. So we’re still not done with Fukushima 10 years later. But I think what Fukushima shows for us here in the United States is that our plants are at risk, too. And then there’s the history of nuclear power in the United States so far, which doesn’t give anyone great confidence. There have been over 50 nuclear accidents that are significant in the United States. It just didn’t lead to the level of concern that we had with Three Mile Island with a partial meltdown. But if you look at, for example, Browns Ferry, which is a nuclear power plant in Alabama, workers there were trying to make a repair and put some insulation in place. And they wanted to test that the insulation was working to stop drafts, so they lit a candle. The candle lit the insulation on fire. It knocked out the cooling systems in Browns Ferry. It almost led to a nuclear meltdown. And the only thing that saved us is that the workers created a number of workarounds to the safety features at that plant and stopped the plant from melting down. And we have to also look at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission itself. It’s the regulator of nuclear power in the United States. And we trust it with our safety. But investigations have found that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is too friendly to the industry, that they watered down their recommendations to the industry based on industry pressure. And that’s very concerning.

I just want to pick up on a couple of the points that Todd made, which is what the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has done in response to the fire incident at Browns Ferry, in response to Fukushima. Every time there’s an incident, there are inspections and hearings and remediations. And finally, I’ll say, as somebody who’s been on the opposite side of the table of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission many times, they are certainly not friendly to me as a person in the industry. And I don’t know if that’s anecdotal experience. But I have to take a personal issue with that.

But Todd, you have, I think, some additional safety concerns that I want to get into. One is that spent fuel rods need to be maintained in pools of water or steel or concrete containers.

I think for many people, perhaps their best example of what a nuclear facility looks like is The Simpsons, which depicts nuclear waste as green ooze, which it isn’t.

It’s solid. But where we put that is a big problem.

I think everybody who’s involved in nuclear power would agree that we could store nuclear waste better than we’re storing it now. There’s universal agreement on that. And there’s real risk in what we’re doing right now. The amount of nuclear waste produced and then put into wet storage and then dry storage is greater than those plants were designed for. Because everybody thought that eventually we’d have a permanent solution to nuclear waste in this country. And we don’t. But the biggest issue of this is what are we going to do in the long run with all this nuclear waste? It is radioactive for thousands of years, tens of thousands of years. We have to find a safe way to store it. If we continue to store it the way we are storing it even in dry casks, which are safer, they’re not designed to store nuclear waste for thousands of years. Metal is going to corrode. Concrete’s going to deteriorate. And that’s a tremendous risk. So one long-term solution we had, Yucca Mountain, was opposed by the local communities and eventually stopped.

Clearly, nobody wants to be near a nuclear waste, but there has to be a place to put it. But no one wants to be the place. So how does the industry respond to these concerns?

Yeah, I mean, folks like to say or critics of nuclear power like to say that we don’t have a long-term waste solution, when, as Todd rightly points out, we do. We know what to do with the waste. I mean, technically, it’s solved, it relates to the political willpower, I think, in terms of solving it. And to say that we don’t have a solution, that might be true for civilian waste in the United States. But we’re already storing Department of Defense waste in an underground facility, like we’ve been doing that since 1999. You haven’t heard about it because it’s pretty safe. And these casks similarily, those have been in operation since 1986. There hasn’t been an issue with those casks. And if we look at what other countries that have nuclear are doing, you have a consent-based siting program in Finland that’s resulted in a really mature project for a deep geological repository that they’re moving forward with. Sweden and France are not far behind in their geological repositories. But I want to kind of take a step back and think about the lessons that we’ve learned from Nevada and Yucca Mountain and how important it is to ensure that if we are going to build something in a community, that the community wants it.

So one of the issues, MC, the uranium mining process is very similar to the coal mining process in terms of the risks that it can pose to the local communities and to the land. As we were researching for this episode, one of our producers spoke with Joe Heath, general counsel from the Onondaga Nation, who said that mining on Navajo Nation land impacted people who weren’t adequately protected and polluted the air and water from drainage from the mining. What regulations are there in place to protect the people who were involved in the mining process? Doesn’t that pose a huge risk? Because it seems to me that nuclear power may be, quote unquote, “clean.” The mining process definitely isn’t.

We mine now very little uranium in the United States. A lot of our uranium is imported. But I think what’s important to understand is that the mining processes have changed significantly from those that really affect these indigenous peoples. And first and foremost is to remediate these issues that occurred in mining processes. Underground mining processes are harmful to people. My family comes from Appalachia coal Country. And we were really affected by that. My grandfather is an orphan.

I think we don’t want to underestimate the harms that are caused by uranium mining, first in the United States and now around the world. And I don’t think most people realize that the largest release of radioactive material in US history occurred due to uranium mining. It was the Church Rock mines in New Mexico. They released 1,100 tons of radioactive mill waste that contaminated miles of the Puerco River. And that’s in the Navajo Nation. And that’s what you were referring to, the Navajo Nation and their fears around — and their anger around uranium mining. That’s where this comes from. And if you’re looking at environmental justice, though, and you talk to advocates around the country, what they’re talking about is renewable energy. They don’t bring up, we want nuclear power in our community. They talk about we want community solar. We want more control of our energy market in our communities. And the way you’re going to get that is going to be through renewable energy. And that’s because renewable energy is the most cost effective form of energy in the United States at this point. It’s carbon neutral. It’s safe. It’s the way we should be going in this country. If we really care about the climate crisis and we care about environmental justice in this country, there really is no alternative to rapidly scaling up renewable energy with battery storage.

So, Todd, according to 2020 data, nuclear power plants operate at full power, on average, 337 out of 365 days a year. Compare that to hydroelectric, which delivers 151 days per year, and wind, 129 days per year. We’ve gotten into a lot of the concerns about the processes by which you get nuclear power and the risks that that comes with. But wouldn’t that make nuclear our most reliable alternative energy source?

I don’t think nuclear power is the best solution for us. And we can address reliability with the technologies we have with renewable energy these days. Now what we need to do in the United States is to pair renewable energy with storage technologies. And that way, when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing, you can produce energy. When those events are occurring, you can store the power for later and then put it back on the grid when you need it. There have been peer-reviewed studies that have looked at this. And it’s entirely possible to meet the energy needs of the United States with renewable energy alone. It’s all really about politics at this point.

But there’s also the matter that wind farms require 360 times more land area to produce the same amount of electricity as nuclear plants. Solar requires 75 times more space. According to the, now, granted, the nuclear energy trade group, the Nuclear Energy Institute, they said in 2015 that no wind or solar facility currently operating in the United States is large enough to match the output of 1,000 megawatt nuclear reactor. How do we make wind and solar work as well and generate as much electricity as nuclear already can?

Well, I think wind and solar can be integrated into the built environment that we already have in a lot of ways. And in particular, this works with solar energy. You can put solar panels all over the place. You can put them into communities that already exist. You can put them into fields and farms. And between all these different solutions, you can actually bring enough wind and solar into the United States in order to meet our energy needs.

Last month, the Biden administration announced that their $2 trillion infrastructure plan included significant funding for advanced nuclear research and development. So what is advanced nuclear?

So I think there is probably about 60 different advanced reactor companies in the United States working on different designs. But I’ll tell you about my favorite one, which is the pebble bed reactor. And the reason that I think it’s so cool is because it looks kind of like a gumball machine. But instead of using long fuel rods, like you see in normal reactors, pebble bed reactors use a pebble. It’s about the size of a tennis ball. It’s, like, eight pounds. And they put it into the reactor, and you take the old pebbles out of the bottom and you put the new fuel in at the top. You never have to shut it down to refuel because you can always cycle it through. And another really cool thing about these advanced designs is when they get too hot, they shut themselves down. It’s a matter of physics. So when you think about thermal expansion, so when you take a jar of pickles and you run it under hot water to get the top off, that’s because the metal on the lid expands. That’s what we call thermal expansion. And when you have thermal expansion in a nuclear reactor, it makes the neutrons a little bit further away from everybody so they can’t run into the other ones and continue that fission reaction. The other thing I really want to talk about actually with these designs that’s so cool that I think a lot of people don’t realize is they’re designed with giant batteries with them together. These work really, really well with the intermittency of wind and solar to help create an overall firm energy grid. And that’s one of the reasons I think these new reactor designs are so exciting for the clean energy community.

Todd, I am guessing that these advances in nuclear energy aren’t exactly alleviating your concerns with nuclear energy.

Well, there are two concerns that I have, one of which is that the technology is not ready to go. And these nuclear solutions, they will be commercialized sometime next decade, someplace between 2030 and 2040. And the nuclear industry has a history of projecting deadlines that it never meets. The other problem is that we keep hearing about the safety of them. But I know the Union of Concerned Scientists recently just released a massive study of so-called advanced reactors. And what they found is that a number of the so-called advanced reactors actually continue to pose safety risks. And they also pose risks of proliferation because a number of these reactors that are being proposed, including the ones proposed by TerraPower, Bill Gates’s company, these are breeder reactors. And they reprocess the fuel to be reused again. And when you have that kind of process, you’re opening the door to proliferation. So if these reactors are used throughout the world in an attempt to address climate change, what we could be seeing is an expansion of the proliferation of plutonium weapons grade material. And those can actually be used in nuclear bombs, so how are we going to control the risks from that? How are we going to control the risks of weapons of mass destruction coming out of these programs?

We, in the advanced nuclear community, we’re really incorporating proliferation concerns into the designs of the reactors themselves. It’s called safeguards by design and working very closely with the IEA in Vienna to ensure that these proliferation concerns are addressed. And I also want to say the designs that I’m talking about in the United States that are being developed are not breeder reactors. They’re different. They’re molten salt. They’re sodium fast reactors. So I’m talking about a different thing. I think people like to take breeder reactors out and make an example of them. That’s not what I’m talking about. And now we have a lot of really smart people in private companies and in 17 national labs around the country figuring out how to make them the absolute safest they can be. It’s a little bit of hubris, right? We don’t know the solutions we’re going to need to solve in the future. So why take a potential solution off the table? My perspective is not that I think everything should be nuclear all the time. I think it’s really important that it’s a strong mix. And I think we need to deploy wind and solar and batteries right now at scale as much as possible. But we shouldn’t have these solutions taken away from us or from future Americans, frankly. [MUSIC PLAYING]

MC Hammond is a lawyer specializing in energy at Pillsbury Law, and she’s a senior policy fellow at The Good Energy Collective, a progressive nonprofit focused on nuclear energy. Todd Larsen is the executive co-director for consumer and corporate engagement at Green America, a nonprofit group focused on environmental sustainability. Thank you both so much for joining me.

Thanks so much. This was really great.

Yeah, thanks for having me. Thank you.

If you want to learn more about nuclear power, I recommend the article “Why Nuclear Power Must Be Part of the Energy Solution” at Yale Environment 360, and for an opposing view, the Washington Post op-ed titled, “I Oversaw the US Nuclear Power Industry, Now I Think it Should be Banned,” by Gregory Jaczko. You can find links to all of these in our episode notes. And after the break, I’m calling opinion columnist Bret Stephens to ask him about a recent column.

Hi, my name is Gus Demora. I’m a senior in high school from Shreveport, Louisiana. And there’s been a lot of people angry about Biden’s strike on Iranian-backed militias in the Middle East. I’m wondering if there’s a better way for us to have foreign policy in the Middle East, other than liberal internationalism, where we use drone strikes and hard power.

What are you arguing about with your family, your friends, your frenemies? Tell me about the big debate you’re having in a voicemail by calling 347-915-4324. And we might play an excerpt of it on a future episode. [MUSIC PLAYING]

[DIAL TONE]

Hello. Bret Stephens is a columnist at Times Opinion. He wrote a piece last month called “America Could Use a Liberal Party.” I read the article, and it annoyed me because the premise of his grand new party seemed to be that there should be a party comprised of people who agree with him, who call themselves Republicans or Democrats, but really are more Bret Stephens’s. In my previous life, I probably would have just tweeted about it. But now Bret is my colleague. And I realized I could just talk to him directly. And maybe he would explain himself. So we spoke last month.

Jane, how are you doing?

I’m doing well. Thank you.

And you got your shot, I saw.

I did. I did. I’ve had my shot. It was an excellent process.

Are you feeling OK?

Yeah, there is really something to the impact of having the shot because for the entire day I had it, everything I felt, I was like, is that it? Is that the shot? What just happened? But no, I felt fine, and I feel fine.

Well, I’m very happy for you, and I feel I must tell you, a little bit envious. I can’t wait to get a needle in my arm and go on with trying to live a normal life.

I wanted to talk about one of your recent columns, “America Could Use a Liberal Party.” So, why?

Well, because I think it’s the unoccupied space in the American public square. When I use the term “liberal,” I’m not referring to I guess what — I don’t know — Nancy Pelosi or the editors of the nation would typically mean by liberal. I mean, the values of liberal democracy writ large, a commitment to the rule of law, to free speech, to respecting the outcome of elections, to believing in the presumption of innocence. But I think that increasingly, as particularly the Republican Party moves much further to the right and as parts of the Democratic Party move to the left, that is a zone of ideology, if you will, that the current party system doesn’t really represent. And I think a Liberal Party built on those lines, attracting former centrist Republicans and maybe some disenchanted Democrats, could work.

But if you asked someone from the Democratic National Committee or the Republican National Committee, they would both say that they already do this. Neither party, no matter what they actually do, is like, screw the rule of law. We hate freedom of speech. There should be no deference to personal autonomy. Why do you say that neither party, particularly Republicans, but you do talk about Democrats, why do you think that these parties aren’t doing those things?

Well, obviously, if you talk to the head of the DNC or the head of the RNC, they would tell you that, right? I just don’t think that they’re telling you or maybe they’re not telling themselves the truth. And I think it registers in the profound disenchantment that a growing number of Americans feel with the current political duopolies. So the real question is, who is going to harness it and how? And right now, the people who are harnessing that disenchantment, I think, fall kind of on what used to be the fringes, whether it’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or the Trumpians in the Republican Party. But I also think that there’s additional vacant space at the center of a lot of people who are just like, I don’t like these jerks. I don’t like where they’re taking the parties that used to represent me. And I want a different form of politics.

I want to read you a comment that someone left on your piece.

Because it goes back to the fact that — I know, I know. It’s going to be OK. It goes back to the point that you did make, saying that this is a concern you see predominantly for Republicans. And Robert in Illinois says, “As someone who self-identifies as a radical centrist, I think there’s a qualitative difference between the extremes of the left of the Democratic Party and the right of the Republican Party. In previous times at best, there were more like two teams playing the same game, more or less accepting the same rules. Now the Trump-influenced Republican Party is trying to destroy the rules of the game altogether because they think it is the only way they can win. I fail to see the equivalent undermining of democracy on the left.” And you acknowledge that liberalism on the right is the most dangerous form because it’s attempted to subvert an election. So is your piece, in some ways, calling for reforms of the Republican Party or asking the Democratic Party to not become like the Republican Party as it is now?

Well, look, I think Democrats who think that they’re immune from what happens to the Republican Party are fooling themselves. And I basically agree with that comment from Robert. But it is also true that there is a kind of liberalism on the left that is more apparent in cultural institutions. And I think if you scroll through some of those comments, as I did, you’ll find plenty of people attesting to the fact that there’s a kind of a culture of, keep your mouth shut and don’t disagree when it comes to university settings, even high school settings, magazine culture, and so on. And culture has a way of jumping over into politics. So yeah, I guess, my answer to your question is Democrats, don’t tilt the way that the Republican Party did.

You mentioned magazine politics or university politics and the influence that that kind of culture can have in the Democratic Party. But the party at large, they didn’t go for the kind of what we used to call political correctness and what is apparently called wokeness that you and others think that was coming from a lot of other Democratic candidates. They went for Joe Biden.

Again, I think that what the last election cycle showed is that the heart of the Democratic Party remains much more kind of middle of the road, working class values than I had feared or suspected. But on the other hand, I really do think that it was a kind of an 11th hour — I don’t want to say a miracle, but a surprise that [Bernie] Sanders, who had done so extraordinarily well in the early rounds of voting, whether in New Hampshire or in Iowa, came up short. So I’m just saying, look, I remember the Republican Party in 2015 and the sense that the idea that Donald Trump could take it over just seemed absurd. It just seemed ridiculous, and yet here we are five years later. So look, maybe, Jane, it’s my inner Jewish fatalism that that says, worry now, more to follow. But I think the Democrats are foolish just to assume that all is well and that the kind of very illiberal kind of left-wing progressivism that some of us see in elite circles can’t have a greater foothold on the mainstream of the Democratic Party.

I think I want to ask you one question because you’ve talked a little bit in other conversations how sometimes you feel as if you’re the Komodo dragon of New York Times Opinion. You’re here to look scary. How much does that influence how you write and how you argue?

Well, I write with the idea that I’m trying to reach the persuadables person on the other side, not necessarily to convince them, but to at least say, yeah, I can see that. And that’s different from the way I used to write at the Wall Street Journal, where I could say with a reasonable amount of conviction that 95 percent of the audience already shared 95 percent of my premises, so that there was a lot that you can elide as a columnist. As a columnist, a lot of what goes into a column is what you’re not saying because you’re just assuming a basis for common agreement. And I can do a lot less of that at The Times. I think it has forced me to become a more careful writer. I can’t say I always succeed at it. And I’m sometimes surprised by what some readers take exception to. I mean, I still feel like a bit of a newbie at The Times. I’ve been here for four years. But it definitely forces me to write in a different way. And it forces me to think about how you reach people who are not going to see it your way either at the beginning of your column or at the end, but who might at least give something a second thought.

Well, Bret, thank you so much for your time for getting on the phone with me. And I hope you enjoy the rest of your day.

Thank you, Jane. [MUSIC PLAYING]

The Argument is a production of New York Times Opinion. It’s produced by Phoebe Lett, Elisa Gutierrez, and Vishakha Darbha; edited by Alison Bruzek and Paula Szuchman; with original music and sound design by Isaac Jones; and fact-checking by Kate Sinclair. Special thanks this week to Shannon Busta.

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President Biden has set an ambitious goal for the United States to be carbon-neutral by 2050. Achieving it means weaning the country off fossil fuels and using more alternative energy sources like solar and wind. But environmentalists disagree about whether nuclear power should be part of the mix.

[You can listen to this episode of “The Argument” on Apple , Spotify , Google or wherever you get your podcasts .]

Todd Larsen, executive co-director for consumer and corporate engagement at Green America and Meghan Claire Hammond, senior fellow at the Good Energy Collective, a policy research organization focusing on new nuclear technology, join Jane Coaston to debate whether nuclear power is worth the risks.

And then the Times columnist Bret Stephens joins Jane to talk about why he thinks America needs a liberal party.

Mentioned in this episode

“ Why Nuclear Power Must Be Part of the Energy Solution ,” by Richard Rhodes in Yale Environment 360.

“ I oversaw the U.S. nuclear power industry. Now I think it should be banned ,” by Gregory Jaczko in The Washington Post

The TV mini-series “Chernobyl,” a depiction of the 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant

“ America Could Use a Liberal Party ,” by Bret Stephens

(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)

Thoughts? Email us at [email protected] or leave us a voice mail message at (347) 915-4324. We want to hear what you’re arguing about with your family, your friends and your frenemies. (We may use excerpts from your message in a future episode.)

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Nuclear Power Advantages and Disadvantages Essay

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Introduction

Nuclear power and fuel cost, global warming and nuclear power, article annotation, works cited.

Nuclear power is the energy generated by use of Uranium. The energy is produced via complex chemical processes in the nuclear power stations. Major chemical reactions that involve the splitting of atom’s nucleus take place in the reactors. This process is known as fission (Klug and Davies 31-32). The first nuclear power station was established in 1956 in Cumbira, England. Nuclear energy provides about sixteen percent of the total earth’s energy requirements (Cohen ch. 2).

Nuclear plants take years to be built.The cost of buying, and building the reactors is way too high (Klug and Davies 31-32). The kinds of security installations done around the power plant are of high technology which is extremely costly. Managers of nuclear power plants would prefer claiming their returns at the commencement of the plants activities which describes the high cost of fuel. The claim is thought to include cost of installations and time taken to construct the nuclear plants.

Other reasons that could lead to high cost of fuel namely, Security measures, installation factors and safety measures (Klug and Davies 36). The safety measure gadgets are very expensive and are made by great technological experts. Another form of safety measure is availability of machine spare parts. This ensures frequent renewal and upgrading of the plant’s mechanical equipment and this is again very costly.

The main reason for such security is due to the danger that could be caused by exposure to the products of radioactivity. The main equipment that needs close check up is the reactor. Its installation is quite costly hence appropriate renewal of worn out parts is an option that should not to be overlooked.

In addition to these costs, the costs of containing the waste matter is also quite high (Cohen ch.11). Although many people think that investing in nuclear power is a costly event, I do not feel so because it is a worthy venture and one of the cleanest sources of energy.

Though it is not renewable, its establishment and good management could provide a perfect source of energy to the world at large . Nuclear energy production requires low fuel and once the plant is built the cost variables are minor. The Cost of doubling fuel or uranium cost in nuclear plants will only increase fuel cost by 9%. For other sources like coal and gas, doubling fuel prices will increase the fuel prices by 31% and 66% respectively (Cohen ch.9).

Global warming is caused by the effect of green house gases. These gases are carbon dioxide, methane, vapor and ozone. They are produced by burning fossil fuel. When the gases accumulate in the atmosphere they serve as a mirror in reflecting heat energy back to earth. The accumulation of these gases leads to increased temperature on earth’s atmosphere resulting into global warming (Klug and Davies 31-37).

Nuclear power should not at any instance be regarded as one of the causative effects of global warming. This is because it consumes carbon dioxide which is of the green house gases during energy production. Carbon dioxide is a major gas among the green house gases. Hence nuclear energy has provided a solution point for its disposal.

Nuclear energy should therefore be referred to as a cleaner rather than destroyer. It has also boosted the economy by creating a market for sale of carbon dioxide gas. Industries producing this gas can as well trade with nuclear power plants. When serious action is taken in trading this gas from various outlets to various nuclear plants, then a solution would be made on how to regulate global warming using nuclear power generation.

In addition to nuclear power generation, use of renewable energy would also help in countering global warming. Due to the increased need for electricity, more nuclear power plants should be built. These will provide enough market for carbon dioxide waste from other manufacturing industries.

Nuclear energy should be adopted in place of fossil fuel. This is because fossil fuels position’s the earth at a higher risk of global warming. The only task that would justify the use of nuclear energy is when the purpose of Uranium metal is not shifted to bomb production or nuclear weapon production. New adoptions and policies on how to prevent global warming should be implemented.

Barkan, Steven. Nuclear Power and Protest Movements. Social problems journal Vol. 27.1(1979):11-36.Print.

Steve Barkan, a retired article writer basically points out people’s views that have been influenced by environmental degradation. The people have turned more attention to nuclear energy technology as a means of addressing the problem. Barkan’s article examines people’s opinion on nuclear energy. Those against the notion of nuclear energy as a source of energy believe that carbon dioxide emissions mostly emanate from nuclear power and not renewable energy.

These people’s arguments are based on the argument that high grade ores will get depleted hence low grade ores which produce carbon dioxide will be used with no installation of advanced reactor equipment.

In addition the opponents say that nuclear waste makes the environment susceptible to harm in the future, but they fail to point out that long lived constituents or radioactive elements give off small portion of radioactivity. The opponents also fail to mention any person that could have been harmed as a result of using fuel from power plants.

Another argument is that high cost of nuclear plant management has resulted to increased cost of fuel. In this case, they fail to note that the cost of electricity from nuclear energy is cheaper than most sources. Barkan also brings out the contrasting issue of terrorist attack whom the anti nuclear group argues that could cause melt down of ore. He responds by saying that high level of technological security would not allow access of such suicidal sabotage.

Nuclear energy is more affordable to produce than coal energy. It does not produce smoke or carbon dioxide. Instead, the carbon dioxide is used in the process to remove heat from the system. In this case carbon dioxide does not act as a byproduct rather it serves a positive purpose by being utilized. In addition its usage, nuclear energy produces less waste. It does contribute to neither environmental hazards nor green house effect like coal.

Nuclear energy is reliable and produces large amount of energy from less fuel. The negative effect lies on the risks that are associated with nuclear plants especially accidents and suicidal terrorists. These could cause extremely deadly effects and scars that can never be erased. Only good management and high technological security can assist in nullifying such fateful occurrences.

Nuclear power reactors should not be built in politically unstable regions. Political instability results in war and negative effects on the economy. For instance war prone areas are susceptible to attacks by terrorists which could result in detrimental effects. There is need for effective safety policy to be implemented that will address the following factors namely, climate change, security of power plants, safety, energy security and proliferation of nuclear technologies. This is because such proliferations would result in nuclear bomb.

Cohen, Benard. The Nuclear Energy Option . Plenum Press.1990.

Klug, Aaron & Davies, David. Nuclear Energy; The Future Climate. Norway: The Royal Society (1999):11-65.Print.

• Ecosphere Care in the United States
• Climate Shift Could Leave Some Marine Species Homeless
• Can a Nuclear Reactor Explode Like an Atomic Bomb?
• Nuclear Power Station Advantages and Disadvantages
• The Environmental Impact of Nuclear Energy
• Mitigation Plan for Energy Resources
• Solution to Environmental Problems
• Energy Use and Conservation
• Policy Paper on Oil Conservation
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IvyPanda. (2018, October 17). Nuclear Power Advantages and Disadvantages. https://ivypanda.com/essays/nuclear-power/

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IvyPanda . 2018. "Nuclear Power Advantages and Disadvantages." October 17, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/nuclear-power/.

1. IvyPanda . "Nuclear Power Advantages and Disadvantages." October 17, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/nuclear-power/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Nuclear Power Advantages and Disadvantages." October 17, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/nuclear-power/.

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Nuclear energy protects air quality by producing massive amounts of carbon-free electricity. It powers communities in 28 U.S. states and contributes to many non-electric applications, ranging from the  medical field to space exploration .

The Office of Nuclear Energy within the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) focuses its research primarily on maintaining the existing fleet of reactors, developing new advanced reactor technologies, and improving the nuclear fuel cycle to increase the sustainability of our energy supply and strengthen the U.S. economy.

Below are some of the main advantages of nuclear energy and the challenges currently facing the industry today.

Advantages of Nuclear Energy

Clean energy source.

Nuclear is the largest source of clean power in the United States. It generates nearly 775 billion kilowatthours of electricity each year and produces nearly half of the nation’s emissions-free electricity. This avoids more than 471 million metric tons of carbon each year, which is the equivalent of removing 100 million cars off of the road.

Creates Jobs

The nuclear industry supports nearly half a million jobs in the United States. Domestic nuclear power plants can employ up to 800 workers with salaries that are 50% higher than those of other generation sources. They also contribute billions of dollars annually to local economies through federal and state tax revenues.

Supports National Security

A strong civilian nuclear sector is essential to U.S. national security and energy diplomacy. The United States must maintain its global leadership in this arena to influence the peaceful use of nuclear technologies. The U.S. government works with countries in this capacity to build relationships and develop new opportunities for the nation’s nuclear technologies.

Challenges of Nuclear Energy

Public awareness.

Commercial nuclear power is sometimes viewed by the general public as a dangerous or unstable process. This perception is often based on three global nuclear accidents, its false association with nuclear weapons, and how it is portrayed on popular television shows and films.

DOE and its national labs are working with industry to develop new reactors and fuels that will increase the overall performance of these technologies and reduce the amount of nuclear waste that is produced.  

DOE also works to provide accurate, fact-based information about nuclear energy through its social media and STEM outreach efforts to educate the public on the benefits of nuclear energy.

Used Fuel Transportation, Storage and Disposal

Many people view used fuel as a growing problem and are apprehensive about its transportation, storage, and disposal. DOE is responsible for the eventual disposal and associated transport of all used fuel , most of which is currently securely stored at more than 70 sites in 35 states. For the foreseeable future, this fuel can safely remain at these facilities until a permanent disposal solution is determined by Congress.

DOE is currently evaluating nuclear power plant sites and nearby transportation infrastructure to support the eventual transport of used fuel away from these sites.

Subject to appropriations, the Department is moving forward on a government-owned consolidated interim storage facility project that includes rail transportation . 

The location of the storage facility would be selected through DOE's consent-based siting process that puts communities at the forefront and would ultimately reduce the number of locations where commercial spent nuclear fuel is stored in the United States.  

Constructing New Power Plants

Building a nuclear power plant can be discouraging for stakeholders. Conventional reactor designs are considered multi-billion dollar infrastructure projects. High capital costs, licensing and regulation approvals, coupled with long lead times and construction delays, have also deterred public interest.

Microreactor (left) - Small Modular Reactor (right)

DOE is rebuilding its nuclear workforce by  supporting the construction  of two new reactors at Plant Vogtle in Waynesboro, Georgia. The units are the first new reactors to begin construction in the United States in more than 30 years. The expansion project supported up to 9,000 workers at peak construction and created 800 permanent jobs at the facility when the units came online in 2023 and 2024.

DOE is also supporting the development of smaller reactor designs, such as  microreactors  and  small modular reactors , that will offer even more flexibility in size and power capacity to the customer. These factory-built systems are expected to dramatically reduce construction timelines and will make nuclear more affordable to build and operate.

High Operating Costs

Challenging market conditions have left the nuclear industry struggling to compete. DOE’s  Light Water Reactor Sustainability (LWRS) program  is working to overcome these economic challenges by modernizing plant systems to reduce operation and maintenance costs, while improving performance. In addition to its materials research that supports the long-term operation of the nation’s fleet of reactors, the program is also looking to diversify plant products through non-electric applications such as water desalination and  hydrogen production .

To further improve operating costs. DOE is also working with industry to develop new fuels and cladding known as  accident tolerant fuels . These new fuels could increase plant performance, allowing for longer response times and will produce less waste. Accident tolerant fuels could gain widespread use by 2025.

*Update June 2024

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The top pros and cons of nuclear energy

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As with any energy source, renewable or non-renewable, there are pros and cons to using nuclear energy. We'll review some of these top benefits and drawbacks to keep in mind when comparing nuclear to other energy sources.

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Top pros and cons of nuclear energy

Despite the limited development of nuclear power plants recently, nuclear energy still supplies about 20 percent of U.S. electricity. As with any energy source, it comes with various advantages and disadvantages. Here are just a few top ones to keep in mind:

Pros and cons of nuclear power

On the pros side, nuclear energy is a carbon-free electricity source (with other environmental benefits as well!). It needs a relatively small land area to operate and is a great energy source for reliable baseload power for the electric grid. On the cons side, nuclear is technically a non-renewable energy source, nuclear plants have a high up-front cost associated with them, and nuclear waste and the operation of nuclear plants pose some environmental and health challenges.

Below, we'll explore these pros and cons in further detail.

Advantages of nuclear energy

Here are four advantages of nuclear energy:

Carbon-free electricity

Small land footprint, high power output, reliable energy source.

While traditional fossil fuel generation sources pump massive amounts of carbon dioxide (the primary cause of global climate change) into the atmosphere, nuclear energy plants do not produce carbon dioxide, or any air pollution, during operation. That's not to say that they don't pollute at all, though - mining, refining, and preparing uranium use energy, and nuclear waste pose a completely separate environmental problem. We'll discuss nuclear waste's role in all this later on.

Nuclear energy plants take up far less physical space than other common clean energy facilities (particularly wind and solar power). According to the Department of Energy, a typical nuclear facility producing 1,000 megawatts (MW) of electricity takes up about one square mile of space. Comparatively, a wind farm producing the same amount of energy takes 360x more land area, and a large-scale solar farm uses 75x more space. That's 431 wind turbines or 3.125 million (!!!) solar panels. Check out this graphic from the Department of Energy for more fun comparisons of energy sources, like how many Corvettes are needed to produce the same amount of energy as one nuclear reactor.

Nuclear power plants produce high energy levels compared to most power sources (especially renewables), making them a great provider of baseload electricity. "Baseload electricity" simply means the minimum level of energy demand on the grid over some time, say a week. Nuclear has the potential to be this high-output baseload source, and we're headed that way - since 1990, nuclear power plants have generated 20% of the US's electricity. Additionally, nuclear is a prime candidate for replacing current baseload electricity sources that contribute significantly to air pollution, such as large coal plants.

Lastly, nuclear energy is a reliable renewable energy source based on its constant production and accessibility. Nuclear power plants produce their maximum power output more often (93% of the time) than any other energy source, and because of this round-the-clock stability, makes nuclear energy an ideal source of reliable baseload electricity for the grid.

Disadvantages of nuclear energy

Here are four disadvantages of nuclear energy:

Uranium is technically non-renewable

Very high upfront costs

Nuclear waste

Malfunctions can be catastrophic, uranium is non-renewable.

Although nuclear energy is a "clean" source of power, it is technically not renewable. Current nuclear technology relies on uranium ore for fuel, which exists in limited amounts in the earth's crust. The longer we rely on nuclear power (and uranium ore in particular), the more depleted the earth's uranium resources will become, which will drive up the cost of extracting it and the negative environmental impacts of mining and processing the uranium.

High upfront costs

Operating a nuclear energy plant is a relatively low-cost endeavor, but building it in the first place is very expensive. Nuclear reactors are complex devices that require many levels of safety built around them, which drives up the cost of new nuclear plants. 

And now, to the thorny issue of nuclear waste – we could write hundreds of articles about the science of nuclear waste, its political implications, cost/benefit analyses, and more regarding this particular subject. The key takeaway from that would be this: nuclear waste is a complicated issue, and we won't claim to be anything near experts . Nuclear waste is radioactive, making it an environmental and health catastrophe waiting to happen. These reasons are exactly why governments spend tons of money to safely package and dispose of used-up nuclear fuel. At the end of the day, yes, nuclear waste is a dangerous by-product of nuclear power plants, and it takes extreme care and advanced technology to handle it properly.

A nuclear meltdown occurs when the heat created by a nuclear reactor exceeds the amount of heat being transferred out by the cooling systems; this causes the system to exceed its melting point. If this happens, hot radioactive vapors can escape, which can cause nuclear plants to melt down fully and combust, releasing harmful radioactive materials into the environment. This is an extremely unlikely worst-case scenario, and nuclear plants are equipped with numerous safety measures to prevent meltdowns.

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Essay:Arguments against nuclear power

• 1.1 There is no solution
• 1.2 It will remain toxic for millions of years
• 1.3 There are vast amounts of it
• 1.4 It is a burden on future generations
• 1.5 The public will pay for its disposal
• 2.1 Uranium will run out soon
• 3.1 Reactors emit deadly radiation!
• 3.2 Chernobyl could happen again
• 3.3 Reactors could be attacked by terrorists
• 3.4 Nuclear power will lead to nuclear proliferation
• 4.1 Nuclear power is expensive
• 4.2 Nuclear is unfairly subsidized
• 4.3 Liability limitation laws give the nuclear industry an unfair advantage
• 5.1 Nuclear can't be built fast enough to make a difference
• 5.2 There is a supply bottleneck for pressure vessels
• 6 Footnotes

Nuclear waste [ edit ]

The anti-nuclear movement is preoccupied with the problem of nuclear waste and its possible impact on the environment and health. Generation of nuclear waste, which is dangerous to all known forms of life, is a valid concern about nuclear power, and the problem must be addressed in an environmentally sound way. However, there is no reason to believe this problem is insoluble. Here are some claims made by the anti-nuclear movement in reference to the waste issue.

There is no solution [ edit ]

The validity of this claim is highly dependent on your definition of "solution". If the "solution" is for the waste to magically disappear with no trace at zero cost, then that is indeed impossible, but that's also an unreasonable definition of a solution.

If we define "solution" as something that lets humanity forget about the waste without adverse consequences at a cost that is a small portion of the price of generated electricity, then there are a few options. The most popular of them is deep geological disposal, which is currently the best researched method. The method puts the waste deep underground in a geologically stable rock formation, with several layers of defence against water intrusion. Several such repositories have been built, but the results have been a decidedly mixed bag: out of six such repositories that went into operation, two have since turned out as failures. These were the two repositories for intermediate and low-level nuclear waste (e.g. not spent fuel) that were built in Germany: Asse II and Morsleben. They reused the sites of former salt mines, and previous mining work led to structural stability problems in the salt domes. Both are in poor condition and leaking contaminated brine. Four projects seem to have succeeded, for example, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in USA is already operating and began accepting military transuranic waste in 1998. So far no issues have been identified. [1] Two other projects, the planned final storage facilities at Gorleben in Germany and Yucca Mountain in the USA, were cancelled or put on hold indefinitely.

It will remain toxic for millions of years [ edit ]

The extremely long lifes of waste are usually obtained due to a misapplication of a rule of thumb for short-lived isotopes, which says that a sample is no longer radioactive after 10 half-lifes. However, this is not applicable to long-lived nuclides, which cease to be dangerous once their radioactivity approaches ambient levels. The correct answer is 10 000 years. After this period, the waste is less radioactive than the uranium ore it was ultimately produced from. [2] Since the 65 trillion tons of uranium in the Earth's crust are not a big concern for public health, neither would be such decayed waste.

Reprocessing can dramatically reduce the lifetime of nuclear waste - from 10 000 years to about 300. [2] Additionally, it extracts unused uranium and plutonium for reuse. Currently it's uneconomical on its own as means of producing more nuclear fuel, but makes sense from a long-term waste management perspective. The anti-nuclear movement opposes reprocessing, [3] because it believes it could lead to more nuclear proliferation (see further below) and that it pollutes the environment with radioactivity (wrong).

Certain designs of reactors that are not cost effective yet, but known to be practical, can reuse high level waste as fuel, because it still contains around 95% of its energy. Two of them are already operating in Russia and Japan. This option is also unpopular with the anti-nuclear movement. This might be due to teething problems of the technology, such as sodium leaks and fires (altrough not all waste burning reactors use sodium coolant).

There are vast amounts of it [ edit ]

According to the Department of Energy, the total amount of spent fuel produced by nuclear power stations in the U.S. between 1968 and 2002 was 47 023.4 metric tons. [4] Most of that total is stored at reactor sites. It would cover a football field to a depth of 6.5 meters. [5] At first this might sound like a lot, but compare this to e.g. 71 100 000 tons of fly ash produced every year at U.S. coal plants. [6]

It is a burden on future generations [ edit ]

This claim is a popular soundbite, [7] but it actually requires quite a lot of assumptions. Detecting radioactive contamination is far easier and cheaper than, for example, detecting chemical contamination. [8] Nuclear waste would become a problem to our descendants only if:

• They lived in a sufficiently close future in which the waste has not decayed yet (10 000 years).
• They did not understand any of the warning signs we might put up.
• They did not have any means of detecting radioactivity.
• They had enough technical sophistication to intrude into a geological repository

The last point assumes that waste will be put into underground repositories before we fall off the radar. An interesting subversion of the argument is that since most high-grade deposits of uranium would not be available to our descendants, as we have already mined them, discovering a nuclear waste repository could lead them to rediscover radioactivity and nuclear technology.

The public will pay for its disposal [ edit ]

The situation differs between countries. In the U.S. there is a 0.1c/kWh levy on nuclear generated electricity that goes into the Nuclear Waste Fund. So far the fund has accumulated $31 billion. The federal government has not yet managed to create a permanent waste disposal facility using this money. [9]

In the United Kingdom, the situation is different. Decommissioning is paid for by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, a government-funded entity. Dividing its total budget by the nuclear electricity generation gives a large subsidy of 2.3p/kWh. [10] However, this agency also manages military waste from UK's nuclear weapons program, which is much more noxious and difficult to handle - the actual cost of managing civilian waste is much lower.

The public typically pays for protests related to nuclear waste transport, for example the costs of providing security. But it's also the public that stages and participates in those protests.

Uranium supply [ edit ]

Uranium will run out soon [ edit ].

When you divide world reserves of uranium by the current consumption, you get about 70 years as the time horizon for uranium depletion. However, this calculation is too simplistic, as it ignores two key facts.

• Reserves are defined in economical terms: "uranium that is worth mining", not "all uranium there is".
• Exploring for uranium costs money. It's pointless to find more if you already have 70 years of backlog.

Analyses that take the above into account have considerably longer depletion timelines, usually in the vicinity of 200 years. Breeder reactors can utilize uranium-238 as well as uranium-235, effectively expanding the supply of fuel 100-fold.

Uranium depletion can theoretically be avoided by extracting uranium from the sea, which is constantly replenished by erosion (rivers). This technology was experimentally demonstrated in Japan, but no large scale facility was built so far. [11]

In addition to uranium, thorium can also be used as a nuclear fuel in future nuclear reactors. There is three times more thorium than uranium on Earth.

Reactor safety [ edit ]

Outside of the Soviet Union, no member of the public ever died because of nuclear power. In the Soviet Union, Chernobyl was the only exception to this rule. Anti-nuclear activists are highly concerned about the safety of nuclear reactors, as well as the possible effects of their operation on the health of neighboring populations.

Reactors emit deadly radiation! [ edit ]

Normally operating nuclear power plants emit small amounts of radioactive gases arising from the fission of fuel into the atmosphere. Anti-nuclear organizations usually maintain that even the lowest dose of radiation is harmful. This is a somewhat distorted interpretation of the linear no-threshold hypothesis, which says that health effects of ionizing radiation are directly proportional to the dose, and are exactly none only at zero dose. The hypothesis is supported by extensive data for radiation doses above 100 mSv, but using it to quantitatively predict cancer risks for lower doses is discouraged. [12]

The problem with this argument is that nearly everything on Earth is slightly naturally radioactive. Even with no nuclear power, people would be exposed to small doses of radiation. This is called background radiation (not to be confused with cosmic microwave background). Radiation from natural and artificial sources has the same biological effects. The usual background dose is 3 mSv per year, but there are considerable variations. Many places have higher levels of about 10 mSv/year, and record spots can have up to 240 mSv/year. These variations do not cause any statistically significant differences in cancer rates or other radiation-related illnesses between low- and high-radiation areas. [13] [14] The dose from normally operating nuclear power plants is many orders of magnitude smaller than the variations in the background, so logically the minuscule additional dose is completely harmless.

In order to circumvent the above considerations, some fringe anti-nuclear groups attempt to use pseudoscientific theories to prove that low level radiation is more harmful than implied by the LNT hypothesis, or that man-made radioactivity is much worse than natural radioactivity. One of them is the second event theory proposed by Chris Busby.

Chernobyl could happen again [ edit ]

The Chernobyl disaster was no doubt a very severe accident, with wide reaching consequences. Anti-nuclear groups claim that any reactor can explode just like Chernobyl and render a large area uninhabitable for many centuries.

This ignores the following facts:

• The Chernobyl reactor design, called RBMK, was very different from reactors used in other countries. For example, it had no concrete containment shell. Nobody is proposing building more of them.
• The accident was the result of a combination of poor staff training, poor reactor design, an unnecessary experiment which would not be attempted in more safety-oriented regulatory regimes, and unfortunate timing of a failure at a coal power plant which forced a rescheduling of the experiment to a night shift. [15] If even one of those elements was missing, e.g. the staff were better trained or the control rod design wasn't defective, the accident would not happen.
• Every remaining reactor of this type has been modified to prevent this scenario from happening. All of them are in Russia.
• Health consequences from radiation releases that resulted from the Chernobyl accident were largely limited to emergency response workers. Health problems in the general population were due to intense fear of radiation and psychological trauma rather than radiation itself. [16] In other words, the hype did more damage than the explosion.
• Chernobyl area is not a dead zone. It is a de facto wildlife preserve. [17]

Reactors could be attacked by terrorists [ edit ]

Some anti-nuclear activists join others in claiming that nuclear power stations are vulnerable to terrorist attack. Armed assault on the plant or a plane crash is the usual scenario.

Terrorists assaulting a nuclear power plant would have a tough job, because the guards are armed with automatic weapons and are trained to withstand attack from multiple groups coordinating with each other. Slamming an aircraft into it would probably cause a lot of damage, but would not destroy the reactor, because its containment building is essentially a very sturdy bunker designed to withstand airplane hits, missiles and earthquakes. [18]

There is a related issue of terrorists stealing something very radioactive and spreading it in a city using explosives. This is not very dangerous, but would have a giant psychological impact. See: dirty bombs .

Nuclear power will lead to nuclear proliferation [ edit ]

Nuclear reactors produce a small amount of plutonium during their operation. This plutonium can be extracted and reused as fuel. However, plutonium is also the material used in most nuclear bombs. Therefore, say the activists, more nuclear power, and more nuclear reprocessing in particular, will naturally lead to more nuclear weapons. And we wouldn't want that. A more extravagant version is that "nuclear power industry is a fig leaf on the nuclear weapons industry".

The main flaw in this argument is that there are different kinds of plutonium, varying in their isotopic composition, and they have vastly different weapons potential. Nuclear weapons typically require plutonium that is at least 93% 239 Pu. To obtain it, rods made of 238 U (aka depleted uranium ) have to sit in the reactor for only 30 days. Longer irradiation causes a buildup of 240 Pu and 242 Pu, which are not fissile. Typically, nuclear fuel sits inside a power reactor for five years . The plutonium in spent fuel has only about 60% 239 Pu. It also contains up to 1% of 238 Pu, which emits large quantities of heat and gamma radiation. This is completely useless for weapons. [19]

It is possible that very elaborate weapon designs could make even reactor-grade plutonium explode. However, this has never been achieved in practice, and it would be a challenge even for existing nuclear powers. It would be absurd for a proliferate state to spend its resources on a very dubious route of obtaining nuclear weapons, when there are more affordable ways that are known to work. Those include constructing a plutonium production reactor or using high enriched uranium.

There are some civilian technologies that do have genuine proliferation potential. Uranium enrichment is one of them, which is why enrichment facilities are closely controlled by international bodies. Another possible route are research reactors, which are designed for easy insertion and removal of samples. India has manufactured some weapons-grade plutonium in a research reactor called CIRUS, supplied by Canada. Yet another possibility are obsolete dual-use reactors, such as Magnox or RBMK, which have on-line refueling systems. However, none exist outside of states that already have the bomb - the last RBMK outside of Russia (Ignalina in Lithuania) was closed at the end of 2009.

It should be noted that none of the countries that have obtained nuclear weapons so far did it using existing civilian infrastructure. In fact, none of them had any at the time their first weapons were built. As of 2010, 26 nations have nuclear power stations but no nuclear weapons; 2 have nuclear weapons but no nuclear power.

Economics [ edit ]

These arguments claim that nuclear power is unprofitable and exists only because of government intervention, and would be replaced by other sources if the interventions were stopped.

Nuclear power is expensive [ edit ]

In absolute terms a nuclear power plant is indeed expensive. Costs of a new reactor are measured in billions of dollars. It is also expensive when compared in terms of dollars per kilowatt of capacity - from 1600$/kW to over 7000$/kW depending on the technology and location. However, these figures tell us little about the thing that matters, the price of the electricity from the reactor. Because of the long operating life of reactors (currently 60 years), [20] high capacity factor and low cost of fuel, nuclear comes out less expensive than solar and comparable to wind and coal, but more expensive than natural gas when gas prices are low. [21]

Nuclear is unfairly subsidized [ edit ]

Anti-nuclear activists argue that nuclear power would make zero economic sense were it not for massive subsidies, tax breaks and ceilings on insurance liability given to it by the government. If the subsidies were removed, they contend, renewables would quickly displace nuclear power and fossil fuels.

There are two errors common in this kind of argument:

• Conflating government spending on nuclear weapons and environmental remediation programs associated with weapons sites with nuclear power subsidies.
• Comparing market subsidy in absolute terms, instead of relative to the amount of power produced.

In the case of U.S., the total amount of direct market subsidies for nuclear through the year 2003 were comparable to those given to hydro and twice as big as those for non-hydro renewables. However, nuclear power produced far more energy than either of them, so renewables received much more money in terms of dollars per unit of produced energy. [22] Federal R&D expenditure was also lower for nuclear power than other technologies: over the period 1994-2003, non-hydro renewables and coal each received roughly twice as much R&D funds as nuclear. [22]

For the liability ceiling claim, see below.

Liability limitation laws give the nuclear industry an unfair advantage [ edit ]

Many countries have laws that limit the liability of nuclear operators in case of an accident, including Britain, Canada, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden and the U.S. [23]

In the United States, the relevant law is the Price-Anderson Act. It specifies the conditions under which operators (e.g. utilities) are held liable for nuclear accidents. It sets up three tiers of insurance. The first one is $375 million of individual insurance on each facility. The second tier is a shared pool of $12.6 billion funded by the nuclear industry. The third is the government. In the event of an accident, liabilities are satisfied first from individual insurance on a given facility, then from the shared pool, and finally the government covers the rest. In exchange, the insurance is no-fault - that is, the company cannot defend itself by putting the blame on other entities or natural causes. [24]

The criticism of liability limitation laws focuses on two issues:

• If there is a very serious nuclear accident (damage exceed $13 billion), the citizens will have to pay for it.
• The laws are an indirect subsidy, because otherwise the operators would have to buy full insurance against the worst possible accident.

Both of these criticisms assume that other industrial facilities also have to buy mandatory liability insurance. They don't. For example, hydro dams in the U.S. are not required to be insured against catastrophic failure or terrorist attack, and if the owner did not buy insurance, the only compensation available to victims would be from the government. [25] [26] Same goes for chemical processing plants and paper mills, which may cause widespread environmental pollution as a result of their operation, but are not legally required to carry pollution insurance. [27]

Only $151 million (1.2% of the current liability cap) was ever paid out from the Price-Anderson fund, around half of it related to the Three Mile Island accident. It covered the living expenses and lost wages of people who voluntarily evacuated, even though there was no real danger. [24]

Climate change mitigation potential [ edit ]

These arguments question the feasibility of using nuclear power to combat climate change .

Nuclear can't be built fast enough to make a difference [ edit ]

Here the claim is that nuclear power plants are slow to build, so they will be late to the party and fail to avert catastrophic climate change .

This is true when one considers current construction rates in the West. However, the required build rates are comparable to the highest historic rates. To replace all fossil fuel electricity with nuclear power and not be late, we would need to construct 3000 new reactors over 60 years, which is equivalent to 50 GW per year or one new 1 GW reactor per week. The highest historical rate of construction was 34 GW per year. [28]

There is also a past empirical counter-example to this argument. France went from virtually 0% of nuclear energy in the power grid to 80% in just 25 years (from 1975 to 2000). This is faster than most proposed renewable energy transitions, which operate with 30-50 year timeframes for achieving comparable penetration.

There is a supply bottleneck for pressure vessels [ edit ]

One of the more advanced arguments is that pressure vessels for modern nuclear reactors are very large and can only be forged by only a few manufacturers. Sometimes the claim is that only Japan Steel Works can do it, and it has a capacity of only four vessels per year.

The current capacity for large forgings might be insufficient, which is mainly because there was a stagnation during the 80s and it made little sense to invest in heavy forging capacity that would be unused. It doesn't mean that new forging capacity can't be installed if needed. Despite the long lull in nuclear construction there are several suppliers for the heaviest components: Japan Steel Works, China First Heavy Industries, and OMX Izhora (Russia). New manufacturing capacity is being built in Korea, France and India. [29]

Some designs of nuclear reactors, such as CANDU, do not require heavy forgings of the size needed for light water reactors. The pressure vessel in CANDUs is composed of a multitude of small tubes, which can be manufactured using more common industrial methods.

Footnotes [ edit ]

• ↑ http://www.wipp.energy.gov/index.htm
• ↑ 2.0 2.1 WNA: Radioactive Waste Management
• ↑ Greenpeace International - Reprocessing
• ↑ U.S. DOE Energy Information Administration, Spent Nuclear Fuel Data, Detailed United States as of December 31, 2002, at [1]
• ↑ [ http://www.nei.org/resourcesandstats/nuclear_statistics/nuclearwasteamountsandonsitestorage/ NEI: Nuclear Waste: Amounts and On-Site Storage
• ↑ http://www.acaa-usa.org/PDF/2005_CCP_Production_and_Use_Figures_Released_by_ACAA.pdf
• ↑ Gregory Benford. 1999. Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia . New York: Bard. ISBN 978-0-380-97537-8.
• ↑ http://hackedgadgets.com/2010/04/12/diy-geiger-counter-project-based-on-the-arduino-microcontroller/
• ↑ Atlanta Business News: Billions in nuclear waste funds in limbo
• ↑ David MacKay, Sustainable energy - without the hot air, page 167
• ↑ www.physics.harvard.edu/~wilson/energypmp/2009_Tamada.pdf
• ↑ HPS - Radiation Risk in Perspective
• ↑ HPS - China High Background Radiation Study
• ↑ Monfared et al. Living in high natural background radiation areas in Ramsar, Iran. Is it dangerous for health? International Congress Series, Volume 1276, February 2005, pp. 438–439
• ↑ INSAG-7: The Chernobyl Accident pg. 23
• ↑ GreenFacts - Health effects of the Chernobyl accident. This is a summary of the WHO / Chernobyl Forum report.
• ↑ BBC News: Wildlife defies Chernobyl radiation
• ↑ Video of an F-4 fighter plane crashing into a nuclear containment building wall . Larger planes don't do much more damage, because their airframes absorb more energy on impact.
• ↑ Depleted Cranium: Why you can't build a bomb from spent fuel
• ↑ It's hard to say what the real operating life of reactors will be. Reactors built in the 70s are now expected to operate for 60 years. They might work for 80 or 100 years, but we don't know yet, because nuclear power is only 67 years old.
• ↑ WNA: Nuclear Power Costs
• ↑ 22.0 22.1 Issues in Science and Technology: The U.S. Energy Subsidy Scorecard
• ↑ Anthony Heyes and Catherine Liston-Heyes. "Capping Environmental Liability: The Case of North American Nuclear Power." Geneva Papers on Risk & Insurance . April 2000. Vol 25, No. 2, pl. 196-205.
• ↑ 24.0 24.1 NRC: Fact Sheet on Nuclear Insurance and Disaster Relief Funds
• ↑ Nuclear Energy Institute - Price-Anderson Act fact sheet
• ↑ www.waterpowermagazine.com - The insurance job
• ↑ http://www.bizjournals.com/philadelphia/stories/2001/11/05/focus4.html
• ↑ David MacKay, Sustainable energy - without the hot air, page 171
• ↑ Nuclear Engineering International: New nuclear build – sufficient supply capability?
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Nuclear Power in a Clean Energy System

About this report.

With nuclear power facing an uncertain future in many countries, the world risks a steep decline in its use in advanced economies that could result in billions of tonnes of additional carbon emissions. Some countries have opted out of nuclear power in light of concerns about safety and other issues. Many others, however, still see a role for nuclear in their energy transitions but are not doing enough to meet their goals.

The publication of the IEA's first report addressing nuclear power in nearly two decades brings this important topic back into the global energy debate.

Key findings

Nuclear power is the second-largest source of low-carbon electricity today.

Nuclear power is the second-largest source of low-carbon electricity today, with 452 operating reactors providing 2700 TWh of electricity in 2018, or 10% of global electricity supply.

In advanced economies, nuclear has long been the largest source of low-carbon electricity, providing 18% of supply in 2018. Yet nuclear is quickly losing ground. While 11.2 GW of new nuclear capacity was connected to power grids globally in 2018 – the highest total since 1990 – these additions were concentrated in China and Russia.

Global low-carbon power generation by source, 2018

Cumulative co2 emissions avoided by global nuclear power in selected countries, 1971-2018, an aging nuclear fleet.

In the absense of further lifetime extensions and new projects could result in an additional 4 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions, underlining the importance of the nuclear fleet to low-carbon energy transitions around the globe. In emerging and developing economies, particularly China, the nuclear fleet will provide low-carbon electricity for decades to come.

However the nuclear fleet in advanced economies is 35 years old on average and many plants are nearing the end of their designed lifetimes. Given their age, plants are beginning to close, with 25% of existing nuclear capacity in advanced economies expected to be shut down by 2025.

It is considerably cheaper to extend the life of a reactor than build a new plant, and costs of extensions are competitive with other clean energy options, including new solar PV and wind projects. Nevertheless they still represent a substantial capital investment. The estimated cost of extending the operational life of 1 GW of nuclear capacity for at least 10 years ranges from $500 million to just over $1 billion depending on the condition of the site.

However difficult market conditions are a barrier to lifetime extension investments. An extended period of low wholesale electricity prices in most advanced economies has sharply reduced or eliminated margins for many technologies, putting nuclear at risk of shutting down early if additional investments are needed. As such, the feasibility of extensions depends largely on domestic market conditions.

Age profile of nuclear power capacity in selected regions, 2019

United states, levelised cost of electricity in the united states, 2040, european union, levelised cost of electricity in the european union, 2040, levelised cost of electricity in japan, 2040, the nuclear fade case, nuclear capacity operating in selected advanced economies in the nuclear fade case, 2018-2040, wind and solar pv generation by scenario 2019-2040, policy recommendations.

In this context, countries that intend to retain the option of nuclear power should consider the following actions:

• Keep the option open:  Authorise lifetime extensions of existing nuclear plants for as long as safely possible. 
• Value dispatchability:  Design the electricity market in a way that properly values the system services needed to maintain electricity security, including capacity availability and frequency control services. Make sure that the providers of these services, including nuclear power plants, are compensated in a competitive and non-discriminatory manner.
• Value non-market benefits:  Establish a level playing field for nuclear power with other low-carbon energy sources in recognition of its environmental and energy security benefits and remunerate it accordingly.
• Update safety regulations:  Where necessary, update safety regulations in order to ensure the continued safe operation of nuclear plants. Where technically possible, this should include allowing flexible operation of nuclear power plants to supply ancillary services.
• Create a favourable financing framework:  Create risk management and financing frameworks that facilitate the mobilisation of capital for new and existing plants at an acceptable cost taking the risk profile and long time-horizons of nuclear projects into consideration.
• Support new construction:  Ensure that licensing processes do not lead to project delays and cost increases that are not justified by safety requirements.
• Support innovative new reactor designs:  Accelerate innovation in new reactor designs with lower capital costs and shorter lead times and technologies that improve the operating flexibility of nuclear power plants to facilitate the integration of growing wind and solar capacity into the electricity system.
• Maintain human capital:  Protect and develop the human capital and project management capabilities in nuclear engineering.

Executive summary

Nuclear power can play an important role in clean energy transitions.

Nuclear power today makes a significant contribution to electricity generation, providing 10% of global electricity supply in 2018.  In advanced economies 1 , nuclear power accounts for 18% of generation and is the largest low-carbon source of electricity. However, its share of global electricity supply has been declining in recent years. That has been driven by advanced economies, where nuclear fleets are ageing, additions of new capacity have dwindled to a trickle, and some plants built in the 1970s and 1980s have been retired. This has slowed the transition towards a clean electricity system. Despite the impressive growth of solar and wind power, the overall share of clean energy sources in total electricity supply in 2018, at 36%, was the same as it was 20 years earlier because of the decline in nuclear. Halting that slide will be vital to stepping up the pace of the decarbonisation of electricity supply.

A range of technologies, including nuclear power, will be needed for clean energy transitions around the world.  Global energy is increasingly based around electricity. That means the key to making energy systems clean is to turn the electricity sector from the largest producer of CO 2 emissions into a low-carbon source that reduces fossil fuel emissions in areas like transport, heating and industry. While renewables are expected to continue to lead, nuclear power can also play an important part along with fossil fuels using carbon capture, utilisation and storage. Countries envisaging a future role for nuclear account for the bulk of global energy demand and CO 2 emissions. But to achieve a trajectory consistent with sustainability targets – including international climate goals – the expansion of clean electricity would need to be three times faster than at present. It would require 85% of global electricity to come from clean sources by 2040, compared with just 36% today. Along with massive investments in efficiency and renewables, the trajectory would need an 80% increase in global nuclear power production by 2040.

Nuclear power plants contribute to electricity security in multiple ways.  Nuclear plants help to keep power grids stable. To a certain extent, they can adjust their operations to follow demand and supply shifts. As the share of variable renewables like wind and solar photovoltaics (PV) rises, the need for such services will increase. Nuclear plants can help to limit the impacts from seasonal fluctuations in output from renewables and bolster energy security by reducing dependence on imported fuels.

Lifetime extensions of nuclear power plants are crucial to getting the energy transition back on track

Policy and regulatory decisions remain critical to the fate of ageing reactors in advanced economies.  The average age of their nuclear fleets is 35 years. The European Union and the United States have the largest active nuclear fleets (over 100 gigawatts each), and they are also among the oldest: the average reactor is 35 years old in the European Union and 39 years old in the United States. The original design lifetime for operations was 40 years in most cases. Around one quarter of the current nuclear capacity in advanced economies is set to be shut down by 2025 – mainly because of policies to reduce nuclear’s role. The fate of the remaining capacity depends on decisions about lifetime extensions in the coming years. In the United States, for example, some 90 reactors have 60-year operating licenses, yet several have already been retired early and many more are at risk. In Europe, Japan and other advanced economies, extensions of plants’ lifetimes also face uncertain prospects.

Economic factors are also at play.  Lifetime extensions are considerably cheaper than new construction and are generally cost-competitive with other electricity generation technologies, including new wind and solar projects. However, they still need significant investment to replace and refurbish key components that enable plants to continue operating safely. Low wholesale electricity and carbon prices, together with new regulations on the use of water for cooling reactors, are making some plants in the United States financially unviable. In addition, markets and regulatory systems often penalise nuclear power by not pricing in its value as a clean energy source and its contribution to electricity security. As a result, most nuclear power plants in advanced economies are at risk of closing prematurely.

The hurdles to investment in new nuclear projects in advanced economies are daunting

What happens with plans to build new nuclear plants will significantly affect the chances of achieving clean energy transitions.  Preventing premature decommissioning and enabling longer extensions would reduce the need to ramp up renewables. But without new construction, nuclear power can only provide temporary support for the shift to cleaner energy systems. The biggest barrier to new nuclear construction is mobilising investment.  Plans to build new nuclear plants face concerns about competitiveness with other power generation technologies and the very large size of nuclear projects that require billions of dollars in upfront investment. Those doubts are especially strong in countries that have introduced competitive wholesale markets.

A number of challenges specific to the nature of nuclear power technology may prevent investment from going ahead.  The main obstacles relate to the sheer scale of investment and long lead times; the risk of construction problems, delays and cost overruns; and the possibility of future changes in policy or the electricity system itself. There have been long delays in completing advanced reactors that are still being built in Finland, France and the United States. They have turned out to cost far more than originally expected and dampened investor interest in new projects. For example, Korea has a much better record of completing construction of new projects on time and on budget, although the country plans to reduce its reliance on nuclear power.

Without nuclear investment, achieving a sustainable energy system will be much harder

A collapse in investment in existing and new nuclear plants in advanced economies would have implications for emissions, costs and energy security.  In the case where no further investments are made in advanced economies to extend the operating lifetime of existing nuclear power plants or to develop new projects, nuclear power capacity in those countries would decline by around two-thirds by 2040. Under the current policy ambitions of governments, while renewable investment would continue to grow, gas and, to a lesser extent, coal would play significant roles in replacing nuclear. This would further increase the importance of gas for countries’ electricity security. Cumulative CO 2 emissions would rise by 4 billion tonnes by 2040, adding to the already considerable difficulties of reaching emissions targets. Investment needs would increase by almost USD 340 billion as new power generation capacity and supporting grid infrastructure is built to offset retiring nuclear plants.

Achieving the clean energy transition with less nuclear power is possible but would require an extraordinary effort.  Policy makers and regulators would have to find ways to create the conditions to spur the necessary investment in other clean energy technologies. Advanced economies would face a sizeable shortfall of low-carbon electricity. Wind and solar PV would be the main sources called upon to replace nuclear, and their pace of growth would need to accelerate at an unprecedented rate. Over the past 20 years, wind and solar PV capacity has increased by about 580 GW in advanced economies. But in the next 20 years, nearly five times that much would need to be built to offset nuclear’s decline. For wind and solar PV to achieve that growth, various non-market barriers would need to be overcome such as public and social acceptance of the projects themselves and the associated expansion in network infrastructure. Nuclear power, meanwhile, can contribute to easing the technical difficulties of integrating renewables and lowering the cost of transforming the electricity system.

With nuclear power fading away, electricity systems become less flexible.  Options to offset this include new gas-fired power plants, increased storage (such as pumped storage, batteries or chemical technologies like hydrogen) and demand-side actions (in which consumers are encouraged to shift or lower their consumption in real time in response to price signals). Increasing interconnection with neighbouring systems would also provide additional flexibility, but its effectiveness diminishes when all systems in a region have very high shares of wind and solar PV.

Offsetting less nuclear power with more renewables would cost more

Taking nuclear out of the equation results in higher electricity prices for consumers.  A sharp decline in nuclear in advanced economies would mean a substantial increase in investment needs for other forms of power generation and the electricity network. Around USD 1.6 trillion in additional investment would be required in the electricity sector in advanced economies from 2018 to 2040. Despite recent declines in wind and solar costs, adding new renewable capacity requires considerably more capital investment than extending the lifetimes of existing nuclear reactors. The need to extend the transmission grid to connect new plants and upgrade existing lines to handle the extra power output also increases costs. The additional investment required in advanced economies would not be offset by savings in operational costs, as fuel costs for nuclear power are low, and operation and maintenance make up a minor portion of total electricity supply costs. Without widespread lifetime extensions or new projects, electricity supply costs would be close to USD 80 billion higher per year on average for advanced economies as a whole.

Strong policy support is needed to secure investment in existing and new nuclear plants

Countries that have kept the option of using nuclear power need to reform their policies to ensure competition on a level playing field.  They also need to address barriers to investment in lifetime extensions and new capacity. The focus should be on designing electricity markets in a way that values the clean energy and energy security attributes of low-carbon technologies, including nuclear power.

Securing investment in new nuclear plants would require more intrusive policy intervention given the very high cost of projects and unfavourable recent experiences in some countries.  Investment policies need to overcome financing barriers through a combination of long-term contracts, price guarantees and direct state investment.

Interest is rising in advanced nuclear technologies that suit private investment such as small modular reactors (SMRs).  This technology is still at the development stage. There is a case for governments to promote it through funding for research and development, public-private partnerships for venture capital and early deployment grants. Standardisation of reactor designs would be crucial to benefit from economies of scale in the manufacturing of SMRs.

Continued activity in the operation and development of nuclear technology is required to maintain skills and expertise.  The relatively slow pace of nuclear deployment in advanced economies in recent years means there is a risk of losing human capital and technical know-how. Maintaining human skills and industrial expertise should be a priority for countries that aim to continue relying on nuclear power.

The following recommendations are directed at countries that intend to retain the option of nuclear power. The IEA makes no recommendations to countries that have chosen not to use nuclear power in their clean energy transition and respects their choice to do so.

• Keep the option open:  Authorise lifetime extensions of existing nuclear plants for as long as safely possible.
• Value non-market benefits:  Establish a level playing field for nuclear power with other low carbon energy sources in recognition of its environmental and energy security benefits and remunerate it accordingly.
• Create an attractive financing framework:  Set up risk management and financing frameworks that can help mobilise capital for new and existing plants at an acceptable cost, taking the risk profile and long time horizons of nuclear projects into consideration.
• Support new construction:  Ensure that licensing processes do not lead to project delays and cost increases that are not justified by safety requirements. Support standardisation and enable learning-by-doing across the industry.
• Support innovative new reactor designs:  Accelerate innovation in new reactor designs, such as small modular reactors (SMRs), with lower capital costs and shorter lead times and technologies that improve the operating flexibility of nuclear power plants to facilitate the integration of growing wind and solar capacity into the electricity system.

Advanced economies consist of Australia, Canada, Chile, the 28 members of the European Union, Iceland, Israel, Japan, Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland, Turkey and the United States.

Reference 1

Cite report.

IEA (2019), Nuclear Power in a Clean Energy System , IEA, Paris https://www.iea.org/reports/nuclear-power-in-a-clean-energy-system, Licence: CC BY 4.0

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