Why we have to stop worrying and learn to love nuclear energy.
The safest, cheapest alternative to fossil fuel is hiding in plain sight. We have nothing to fear but fear itself.
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About 4 a.m. on Wednesday, March 28, 1979, the Three Mile Island Unit 2 nuclear reactor, near Middletown, Pa., suffered a partial meltdown. It was the most serious accident in U.S. commercial nuclear power plant operating history and although its small radioactive releases had no detectable health effects on plant workers or the public, it totally freaked out millions of Americans and planted a fear of nuclear energy in public perception that has slowed the development of the most efficient carbon-free electricity source available to this day.
It probably didn’t help that Hollywood piled on immediately with a film called “The China Syndrome”, which was based on the fanciful premise of a nuclear meltdown whose radioactive core would burn a hole through the earth “all the way to China.” Add in a generation of kids who were trained to hide under their desks to defend themselves from Russian bombers armed with nuclear weapons and you can understand how nukes got a bad name
In hindsight, Three Mile Island was not all that much as industrial accidents go. Don’t believe me? Here’s what the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said:
“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.”
But, you say, what about Chernobyl? What about Fukushima Daiichi? Those were more serious accidents for sure and there were many lessons learned that have been applied to future deployments. But the statistics about Chernobyl irradiations have been much lower than anticipated and Fukushima was triggered by an earthquake and a tsunami, not a flaw in the plant itself.
Compare the numbers to the Bhopal disaster, in India in 1984, 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. The simple fact is that every follow-up study has found that even the worst possible accident at a nuclear plant is less destructive than other major industrial accidents.
The main advantage of nuclear is that enriched uranium produces energy by fission rather than chemical burning so it generates baseload electricity with no output of carbon. Natural gas produces about half the carbon dioxide of burning coal but switching from coal or natural gas to nuclear power basically eliminates carbon altogether (except for the carbon cost of building the plant).
A second advantage is that nuclear power plants operate at an average capacity of 93 percent, meaning they operate at full power on 336 out of 365 days per year. That’s about 1.5 to 2 times more reliable than natural gas and coal units, and 2.5 to 3.5 times more reliable than wind and solar plants.
Third, and this is counterintuitive, nuclear power releases less radiation into the environment than any other major energy source. No less an august publication than Scientific American writes: "In fact, the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy."
You might be surprised to learn that the U.S. is already the world’s largest producer of nuclear power. It generated 809 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2019—the highest total ever. There are currently 94 commercial reactors helping to power homes and businesses in 28 U.S. states. Illinois, alone, has 11 reactors—the most of any state—and like South Carolina and New Hampshire gets more than 50% of its power from nuclear.
The real question is not about the safety of nuclear energy but why has nuclear energy been stuck at around 20% of America’s total energy output since 1990 when its environmental and safety advantages are so persuasive once removed from preconceived reactions?
The reasons are many and varied but the biggest is cost and business risk. The capital costs of building a nuclear power plant are much higher than for energy sources such as coal and natural gas—somewhere between $6 billion and $9 billion for each 1,100 MW plant. The yearly annual cost of repaying the initial investment is substantially higher than the annual operating costs, which tend to be relatively cheap. Nuclear power plants are technically complex and because of intense public skepticism—much of it fueled by fossil fuel industry misinformation—must satisfy strict licensing and design requirements. It takes an army of expensive engineers and specialists many years, to actually get a new plant up and operating. Changes in design or lawsuits can cause delays that further increase the financing charges that frequently exceed the actual construction costs.
Two years ago, two of South Carolina’s largest electric utilities—SCE&G and Santee Cooper—simply walked away from a $9 billion effort launched in 2008 to build two new nuclear reactors. SC lawmakers greenlighted the multibillion-dollar boondoggle which was plagued from the beginning by delays, cost overruns, and mismanagement. Ultimately, SC utility customers (of which, I happen to be one) were stuck with the tab. One of the executives involved in the coverup was actually sentenced to jail this week.
Fortunately, for those of us like Bill Gates and me who believe we can’t get to zero emissions without nuclear energy, there is a better way to build nuclear power plants. They are called Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) and they change everything. It’s getting late so let’s tackle the SMR solution in another post this week;
Dig Deeper
Background on Three Mile Island
Nuclear Has the Highest Capacity
Coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste
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