The Arguement for Nuclear Power in the 21st Century

One of the most powerful and accessible technologies we have in the United States to relieve our current energy and environmental crisis is one that was invented three quarters of a century ago. While the initial catalyst for the development of nuclear fission was darker and more violent, in the aftermath of WWII, a miraculous and revolutionary application of this new technology developed: energy. In a flurry of activity, the U.S built dozens of nuclear power plants, uranium refineries, and research facilities to understand and and improve the fascinating new process. The science behind most nuclear power plants today is relatively simple. They use enriched uranium in which the concentration of the U-235 isotope is increased from 0.7 percent U-235 to about 4 to 5 percent U-235.

When an atom of U-238 absorbs a neutron in a nuclear reactor, it becomes U-239, which decays in a short time to Pu-239. If a Pu-239 atom stays in the reactor long enough, it absorbs another neutron and becomes an atom of Pu-240 if it doesn't fission. When the reactor is turned on, the multiplication of fissions is allowed to continue until the reactor is generating power at the desired rate. Then control rods that absorb neutrons are inserted until exactly one neutron from each fission causes another fission.

The power to produce electricity comes from the fact that the two atoms produced by the fission of a U-235 atom fly off at high speed, but they don't get even an inch before they hit something and are stopped. Stopping converts their energy of motion into heat, and the reactor heats up. If the heat weren't taken away, the reactor would melt. The heat from fission is taken up by water or steam pumped through the reactor. The hot steam goes through turbines connected to electric generators. About 2/3 of the heat energy is lost, and is emitted to the atmosphere or to a body of water, a river or the ocean. This loss is a consequence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and applies to all power plants, nuclear or coal-burning.

After 18 months or two years, most of the U-235 in the fuel is used up, and the fuel rods consist mainly of the products of fission, which remain radioactive and continue to generate heat. The fuel rods are placed in large pools of water which takes the remaining heat. The fuel rods become less and less radioactive with time.
After the rods have cooled off for a while, they should be chemically reprocessed to extract left over uranium and some plutonium that has been produced. The left-over uranium and the plutonium can then be converted to more reactor fuel. The fission products can then be buried in stable rock formations. The U-238 that is left over is used in "breeder reactors", which are not currently used in the U.S for political reasons, but are successful in most other nuclear-capable nations. [Excerpt from John McCarthy, Dept. of Computer Science, Stanford University, Nov. 13th 1995.]

Ok, now that we have a little background into how the science works, we can discuss the political and environmental ramifications of nuclear power and how they have shaped the present situation. As I mentioned earlier, most other nations with significant nuclear energy generating capability [The U.K, Japan, France, ect..] rely on a type of reactor design known as Breeder reactors, which have the ability to process both thorium and uranium isotopes, as well as re-processed fuel from spent fuel rods, vastly increasing both their cost efficiency and versatility in a dynamic and changing fuel market.

Obviously, safe and effective fuel storage is still a huge concern, but what seems lost on the American public in the wake of 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl is that it IS in fact possible to safely manage nuclear waste. 3 Mile island was a essentially a non-event thanks to rigid safety protocols and design failsafes in the reactor system, and Chernobyl was massively deliberate human error coupled with an outdated, unsafe reactor design. The stupidity and short-sightedness of Soviet-era politics is evident perhaps nowhere else as clearly as the Chernobyl engineers deliberate refusal to allow emergency shutoffs to occur at the time of the meltdown, yielding the nuclear holocaust that followed.

The obvious major advantage to nuclear power is that there are essentially no airborne pollutants emitted, and while the impact of heated water on the nearby lake or marine ecosystem is important, with proper management and design this can be minimized to where is is WAY less significant than that associated with our other so-called "green" energy technology, hydroelectric. The unrealistic environmentalists love to point out the inherent risk and difficulty of safely storing nuclear waste; ie spent fuel rod assemblies, but given 21st century technology and especially if Yucca Mountain permitting continues, this is largely a moot point. The major advantages of nuclear energy, the efficiency, the lack of greenhouse gasses, the fact that the world's premier uranium producer is our northern Neighbor, this all seems lost on irrational liberal superstition. I consider myself a fairly progressive liberal, yet am pragmatic and realistic enough to realize that a large part of the solution to our current energy crisis is in technology we already have.

Thomas Friedman recently wrote a great editorial in the New York Times concerning the people, including some relatively influential conservative politicians, who have used the recent blizzards on the east coast and anomalous winter weather as ammunition against global climate change. This is not only ignorant, it is dangerous and incredibly short-sighted as well. Notice I did not use the term 'Global warming"; this is a misnomer that only fuels the argument of the right against an indisputable global climactic phenomenon that we cannot afford OT deny any longer. The climate of every corner of our globe is being altered at an increasingly unnatural rate, and even with the confounding impact of being near the apex of the post-glacial warming period, scientific evidence for anthropogenic change cannot be denied.

Unfortunately, the ignorant "know nothing" attitude of much of the GOP and their huge corporate constituents has pervaded, and their current attitude seems to focus mostly on the paradoxical mix of somehow decreasing taxes and increasing thinly regulated drilling and petroleum exploration. to be fair, the American public needs to be informed on these matters in a responsible and non-partisan way, not through sensationalized rags like Fox News and the Huffington Post. Yes, I'm afraid both the far left and the far right seems to be willing to take significant steps to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, but at least I suppose the left acknowledges the problem to begin with.

The revitalization of the nuclear industry in the U.s begins with a major overhaul of current infrastructure, and I was pleased and surprised to see that President Obama has recently approved an $8 billion loan to construst 2 new nuclear power stations in Georgia, and has plans for fulfilling the ~$18 billion in green energy loan guarantees promised in Bush's 2005 Energy Policy Act, which unsurprisingly did not reach fruition under that administration. The oft-cited idea that nuclear energy is an uneconomical, welfate-state subsidized experiment in taxpayer money is quite simply false. While shortcomings of the energy utility system in heavily nuclear dependent countries like France and Japan do exist, last I checked they didn't have the massivly outdated and unreliable power grid we face in much of the U.S, where ancient coal and natural gas plants have been grandfathered in under the Bush and Clinton administration's backwards policies.

In Europe and Asia, most successful nuclear power plants have been built by semi-private utilities with a heavy degree of goverment subisidization and regulation. Economically and environmentally, this is necessary given the nature of nuclear power and the initial infrastucure cost. The lifespan of a well-maintained nuclear plant is more than double that of a large coal-fired generator, however, and while fossil fuel power in the U.S relies largely on coal and natural gas extracted from dirty, poorly-regulated operations in Appalachia and the Western U.S, not only do we have significant uranium reserves here in the U.s, the world's largest, cleanest, and most econmical producer of refined uranium for fuel rods is Canada. Why then, when we have not only the technology but also a stable, geaographically advantageous source of fuel, do we not embrace nuclear energy? The short long story is this: poltics and economics. The latter can be realistically surmounted, but it WILL take tax increases, and a collective realization that changing our dirty energy habits is not going to be cheap. I think President Obama realizes this, and his recent approval of the loans for the Georgia plants shows the initiative.

In another recent NYT od-ed piece, the possible "comeback" of the American nuclear industry was discussed is a forum like commentary by several prominant political and watchdog group figures. To be honest, I was rather dissapointed by the choice of comentators, as they all seemed unwilling to give up the superstition of another Chernobyl or some sort on economic black hole. The following comment from a NYT reader on this piece struck me as timely and well-put: "I have a farm in Pennsylvania, about equidistant from a nuclear and a coal burning generator. From the nuclear plant, all I see is steam; from the coal plant, a ribbon of yellow-brown sulfurous smoke. In a lifetime, the average American will produce 200 railroads cars of coal waste. If the same energy were produced by nuclear, the total waste would fill a Coke can." Think about it.