Nuclear power is not the answer to our energy needs or the climate change crisis. Nuclear power plants produce more greenhouse gas emission than wind, and certainly fewer than coal, but that is not the issue. Building new nuclear plants to try to reduce carbon emissions would irrevocably commit the world to a plutonium economy, increasing the risk of nuclear proliferation and terrorism, cancer, and contamination from nuclear waste.
New nuclear capacity cannot be added fast enough to significantly cut global carbon emissions. We need to take decisive action during the next decade to avoid the planetary tipping point described by NASA climate scientist James Hansen. Trying to build new nuclear plants fast enough to replace aging plants already past their design life while adding enough new plants to increase capacity and make even a modest contribution to combating climate change would compromise safety and create shortages in building materials and trained personnel.
Nuclear power’s growth potential is inherently limited by the industry ‘s need for vast amounts of cooling water for both normal operations and emergencies. As the planet warms, the population grows, and droughts spread, nuclear plants will not be able to obtain the water they need. Water levels in several lakes and rivers used for cooling nuclear plants have already dropped to minimum safety levels set by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Nuclear plants in the United States and Europe had to ramp down or shut down in recent summers after lakes and rivers became too shallow or too warm. Additionally, nuclear plants’ right to use and discharge water will face increasing legal challenges based on impacts to species and ecosystems.
Nuclear plants will compete for increasingly scarce water needed for drinking and agriculture. The current drought in the southeastern United States, the site of many existing and proposed nuclear plants, has lead to water competition among farmers, Atlanta households, Florida’s fisheries, and Alabama’s Farley nuclear plant. At least thirty-six states will face water shortages within five years.
Nuclear power raises serious security concerns in terms of safety and proliferation. The 9/11 Commission Report disclosed that Mohamed Atta, the lead pilot in the World Trade Center attack, considered targeting the Indian Point nuclear facility near New York City. Nuclear plant manufacturer General Electric and a recent German government study concluded that nuclear plants cannot withstand a direct hit by a 737 aircraft. A Consolidated Edison study of the Indian Point plant concluded that an aircraft hit could cause a core meltdown. Nuclear plants’ high-level nuclear waste is typically stored in fuel rod cooling pools in separate buildings adjacent to the reactor that are fifteen times more vulnerable to explosives or diving airplanes than the containment structure. Because of the lack of federal waste disposal facilities, large quantities of highly radioactive spent fuel are stored at sixty-five reactor sites in thirty-one states.
No country has found a millennia-long way to permanently and safely store plants’ high-level radioactive waste, including plutonium, the key ingredient in nuclear weapons. Decades and billions of dollars later, the proposed Yucca Mountain waste storage site is no closer to opening and probably never will. New evidence shows that an earthquake fault line runs right under it. The Bush administration’s proposed Global Nuclear Energy Partnership would end the thirty-year ban on civilian reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel, gravely increasing the risk of proliferation without solving the waste storage problem. Reprocessing eliminates some, but not all, of the waste and converts the remainder into weapons-grade material.
A growing body of published medical and scientific evidence links federally permitted radiation releases from the normal operation of nuclear power plants to increased cancer rates, especially of childhood cancer and breast cancer. During normal operation, every nuclear reactor in the world produces strontium-90 emissions at toxic levels.
From a business standpoint, nuclear power is a failure. Between 1974 and 1982, utilities cancelled orders for over 100 nuclear power plants, many well under construction. Wall Street rated nuclear power an unacceptably high risk and turned off the money. Nuclear power’s life cycle production costs per kilowatt hour of electricity generated are several times that of coal, natural gas, and wind–not including the unknown ultimate waste disposal and decommissioning costs.
For now, despite safety and security lapses at nuclear plants, massive taxpayer subsidies keep the idea of a nuclear renaissance alive. In the long term, even a carbon price through a carbon tax or cap and trade system cannot help nuclear power compete with safer, cleaner, smaller, and more flexible distributed sources of power. Nuclear power is a trap for the unwary and unwise.