* * Considering nuclear energy

For today’s blog entry, I thought I’d tackle a question poised to me on Facebook in response to a thread I’d launched about the wisdom of offshore oil drilling in light of the ongoing spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  I woman I’d known when we were school-kids asked, “What do you think about nuclear energy, Michael?”

As I begin to think through how to formulate a reasonable and logical answer, I have a flashback.  I am sitting in my apartment in Lynchburg, Virginia, in the springtime of 1979.  It is 5:30 in the afternoon and I have just gotten home from work.  I am three years into my employment with Babcock and Wilcox, a nuclear steam system supplier which built many of the working reactors across the United States.  I am listening to National Public Radio.  On the air is the voice of a man that I knew who also lived in Lynchburg.  He is testifying at a congressional hearing about why he thinks the reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania has suffered a partial meltdown.  I am thinking to myself at the time, if there is a serious safety issue with regard to the particular technology I am studying, I don't want to be there when it happens.

I left the nuclear industry not long after that and with it my career in engineering.  Earning my degree in engineering at Virginia Tech was the most difficult intellectual challenge of my life.  However, I never felt that I was very good at it, and I always worried that with the bigger, more complicated engineered systems of the era, I had best leave the calculations and assessments to more capable minds than my own.

That said, while I do not feel that I am an expert in nuclear energy, I certainly have for decades been an informed citizen.

Occasionally, I have been called upon to give lectures about Peak Oil, the point at which the world's oil resource will inevitably reach its maximum in production and began its terminal and inexorable decline.  Often during the question and answer session, someone will say, “You make it sound as if everything is about energy.”  In fact, everything is about energy.  Nothing in our world from the simplest movement to the most complex industrial operation happens without energy.  All life is dictated by the use of it.

Worldwide population surpassed one billion people around 1820 and currently is rocketing towards 7 billion.  This rapid explosion in human population has been propelled by the rapacious consumption of fossil fuel energy.  Coal, oil, and natural gas are endowments of energy that have always been buried beneath the feet of human beings.  However, only within the last 200 years have we consumed them in any meaningful way.

The very survival of the human species is soon to be imperiled by the peaking of fossil fuels.  The hazards of mining, refining, distributing, and consuming these fuels are evident now with the recent accidents in West Virginia (where 29 miners died in a coal mine explosion) and the Gulf of Mexico (where 11 drillers died and a huge oil spill still spews).  I heard an interview this morning with the chairman of BP who, at least for now, claims full responsibility (something Exxon-Mobil has never done when the wreck of the supertanker Valdez fouled the Prince William Sound in Alaska).  If fishing and tourism in the Gulf States is ruined, the claims may bankrupt BP.  (Remember, this was the type of spill that only a couple of months ago would have been considered extremely improbable.)  But the loss cannot be measured in dollars alone.

We pay a significant price for our access to cheap energy.

The question that we as a society seem to be asking ourselves is, “How will we continue to live the lifestyles to which we have become accustomed when our fossil fuels began to decline?”  We have become wedded to rapacious consumption and have made inestimable sacrifices to our energy workers, our communities, and our environment, to keep this system going.

Nuclear power, at first blush, seems to sidestep some of the major issues with fossil fuels.  In particular, uranium seems relatively plentiful and the fission of uranium does not release greenhouse gases.  However, nuclear power carries with it significant environmental issues of its own.  These include but are not limited to:

   Extensive spreading of toxic heavy metals during the mining of uranium

   The production of other toxic substances during the enrichment process 

   The production of quantities of high- and low-level radioactive waste in the disposal or reconstitution of spent nuclear fuels (Some of the byproducts of vision and reprocessing produced some of the most toxic substances known to man and are dangerous for literally thousands of years.)

   The threat of stolen fissile materials and other acts of terrorism

As the Three Mile Island accident showed us 30 years ago and as the recent coal mine and BP disasters have shown us recently, complex systems are always susceptible to failure, occasionally catastrophically. 

Nuclear power plants today are amazingly expensive.  The manager of a nearby coal-fired power plant once told me that his parent company had explored constructing a new two-unit nuclear power plant in Florida.  The cost was to be upwards of $17 billion.  It may be impossible for any public utility to obtain liability insurance for any nuclear power plant due to the enormous risk.  Therefore, that expense may fall to the federal government and ultimately to the taxpayers: us.

Nuclear power is large, complex, centralized, expensive, poisonous and risky.  I believe that we should be pursuing a national strategy of energy which is small, simple, decentralized, inexpensive, benign, and safe.  Above all, I feel that we should be working to dramatically reduce consumption at all levels.

Cheap energy, in particular the low cost of motor fuels, have led to has led to a radical reengineering of virtually every community in America, even since Three Mile Island.  Our downtowns have atrophied, our shopping areas are completely devoted to motoring customers, and our suburban housing developments have overwhelmed more compact living arrangements.  We have lost untold millions of acres of farmland and woodland.  It is time to re-magnetized our communities and reduce our energy footprint dramatically.

Nuclear energy to me represents all of the things we should not be doing in our country.