I &%!#ing LOVE Nuclear Power
My wife watched The West Wing last night. Their boogeyman of the week was a staple of the 70's...nuclear power. As a nuclear engineer (of sorts), I was appalled at the horrific misrepresentations thrown around in the show. I shouldn't be...Hollywood gets 99% of everything, from lawyers to the military to science to the weather wrong, all in the name of entertainment. But this issue is a particular thorn, because what most people know about nuclear power comes from Sci-Fi Channel movies, and a few early 80's films. Not content to look at the possible legit consequences of nuclear power, they chose to ignore how US Nuclear plants are designed, run, and monitored in this country.
Here are a few actual truths:
1) Our plants will never explode.
2) Our plants provide an immense amount of energy, with minimal waste, and a safety record everything else in the world would literally kill for.
3) Nuclear power is also critical to our military, powering our forward power projection...carriers and submarines.
4) The people employed by the NRC, the Navy, and civilian plants are smarter than you. A lot smarter. Unless you work for NASA.
Nuclear power has the potential for horrific misuse and danger. Just like an airplane, a fire, or a knife. They can do immense harm...but never have. They can also do immense good. But most citizens are misinformed to the extent that we ignore nuclear power as a viable form of energy. They are misinformed because they think Hollywood is right on this topic.
They are wrong. Hollywood is wrong, willfully so. Nuclear power requires the best minds, the best designs, the best operators, and the best safety programs. And they have them.
The record speaks for itself.
Nuclear power has the potential for great value or great danger. It depends on the discipline used to harness it. It is not inherently evil, bad for the environment, or malicious. Or even unsafe. It is simple science.
Which isn't simple in our ignorant country anymore.
Here are a few actual truths:
1) Our plants will never explode.
2) Our plants provide an immense amount of energy, with minimal waste, and a safety record everything else in the world would literally kill for.
3) Nuclear power is also critical to our military, powering our forward power projection...carriers and submarines.
4) The people employed by the NRC, the Navy, and civilian plants are smarter than you. A lot smarter. Unless you work for NASA.
Nuclear power has the potential for horrific misuse and danger. Just like an airplane, a fire, or a knife. They can do immense harm...but never have. They can also do immense good. But most citizens are misinformed to the extent that we ignore nuclear power as a viable form of energy. They are misinformed because they think Hollywood is right on this topic.
They are wrong. Hollywood is wrong, willfully so. Nuclear power requires the best minds, the best designs, the best operators, and the best safety programs. And they have them.
The record speaks for itself.
Nuclear power has the potential for great value or great danger. It depends on the discipline used to harness it. It is not inherently evil, bad for the environment, or malicious. Or even unsafe. It is simple science.
Which isn't simple in our ignorant country anymore.
posted by Chuck | 2:35 PM
5 Comments:
Hmm. I hesitate to comment on this, since I am not a nuclear physicist or anything close to it. However, I feel inclined to throw my towel in the ring...
I am confused by your comparison of nuclear power to a plane or a knife. If a knife kills someone, or a plane crashes, there may be a terrible loss of life on the front end, but on the back end, there is a minimal cleanup. If something were to happen with a nuclear power plant, there would be significant cleanup on the back end, making the surrounding area uninhabitable and likely killing people for years to come. Which I guess leads me to your contention that nothing bad could ever possibly happen in OUR nuclear power plants.
That is clearly the position of current nuclear power proponents. I don't think anyone can argue that nuclear power is somehow inherently "safe", unless there was some breakthrough in the nature of the splitting of the atom that I am unaware of. So what you're really arguing is not that nuclear power in and of itself is safe, but that nuclear power is so well managed and harnessed now that a nuclear disaster is literally impossible.
You'll have to forgive the majority of Americans who are terrified at the thought of giving their country (and possibly the world) over to people who claim to have figured it all out because they are really that much smarter than everybody else. You're not going to win an argument with "Trust me".
You can win it with data. So - why are (rational) people afraid of nuclear power?
1) potential for leaks/system failure
2) by-products of production
So maybe instead of adding to the rhetoric, you can explain in layperson's terms why both of these concerns are silly, because I am honestly interested. The last time I looked at this topic in any depth (and believe it or not, enviro-crunchies do actually STUDY these things, they don't just watch the China Syndrome and clutch their woven-hemp teddies) in about 1994 (yes, ten years ago, I admit, but I'm also not doing any anti-nuclear activism), there was no safe way to dispose of the by-products of the nuclear reaction. The waste was radioactive and needed to be disposed of in a very special way... the process was not a "closed loop", as we crunchy people say. There would always be this dangerous waste, which would inevitably need to be buried somewhere, and the location of the burial usually had something to do with politics. So what happens now? Is there no radioactive by-product anymore?
As for leaks and system failure, my personal philosophy is that the safest method for performing a task is usually the smartest. I respect that many smart people have devoted their career to the development of nuclear power. I've devoted my career to the American healthcare system, and I'm fairly smart. I don't necessarily think our system is the smartest safest way to run things. It would be fantastic to see what would've happened if we had invested just as much money into solar and wind power as we have invested in nuclear power... but of course, that didn't happen, because solar and wind have no defense value. So you say that there is literally NO potential for leaks and system failure? You have that many system checks built in now?
When I lived in Rockland County, I was within the "evacuation zone" of our local nuclear power plant, Indian Point. As federally mandated my telephone book had a sheet in the back telling people in the county what to do if the plant leaked. (I guess Hollywood created the mandate, since nuclear power is safe now...) NY state admitted that the evacuation plan was not practical - that it wasn't physically possible to evacuate all the people in Rockland County along the evacuation routes mapped in our phone books. But then they assured us nothing would happen anyway. Indian Point, meanwhile, has been a subject of many inspection failures and emergency shutdowns. Unsurprisingly, the many people who get the phone book and read the local paper with reports of the poor evacuation plans and explanations on the latest reason why the plant had to shutdown, are also not getting hysterical because they've listened to Hollywood, but are concerned because of the real problems they are seeing in the plant a few towns away.
So I looked up some resources, trying to find either unbiased or PRO nuclear power information so I wasn't getting anything "tainted" by Hollywood...
this was interesting:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/
and I went to the pro-nuclear power site of the Nuclear Energy Institute, which does indeed confirm that there is still no way to dispose of nuclear waste besides burying it. They also criticize the federal government for not using taxpayer's money to develop places for for-profit nuclear power plants to dump their waste:
http://www.nei.org/index.asp?catnum=4&catid=127
Not sure why it's such a mystery that people don't like it...
There is a price to be paid for the benefits of nuclear power. Nuclear waste, which has an effective half-life of forever (well, hundreds of years).
But how much is produced? Where does it go? That is where politics enters into it. This problem won't be solved outright. Energy can neither be created, nor
destroyed. Only converted. We can rant and rail and pretend we will use less energy, but that will never, ever, ever, ever happen. I didn't scour the net
or anti-nuclear websites for a counter-argument. I listened to a
bastardization of science on a popular TV show and responded. I used anecdotal data, being a nuclear engineer and son of a nuclear engineer. I used the
record of the NRC...in the US (and France, among other countries) nuclear energy has killed less people than lightning. Probably less than werewolf attacks. I've
been through numerous reactor inspections, and they always find laundry lists of "concerns" and "failures". None of which amounted to an unsafe situation.
That is simply how critical and complete the inspections are...anything less than 100% is heavily commented upon. I don't know the specifics of your local
plant. I don't proclaim that "Trust us" is the answer. It's not. It's "inspect often" and have levels and levels of protection.
The energy a reactor produces is CLEAN. No environmental impact. The reactor itself is merely a hot rock, and through the use of multiple loops of water (one touching the reactor exchanging the energy/heat with another "clean" loop, it's almost free steam...which turns turbines to create energy). Pretty simple. The size and amount of waste depend on the actual design (which would probably be much more advanced now had we not taken a long moratorium and focused on natural gas and oil...which is working out REALLY well for us) of
the plant. I know fissile material corresponding to a size smaller than a car can power a city for a decade.
Now come the dangers of nuclear power. You dislike my knife and car analogy, but the end result of misusing a knife or a reactor is the loss of life. The amount of lives lost is exponentially higher for nuclear power, making it an
exponentially higher risk. The nuclear waste *can* be (but currently is NOT) a major environmental and health risk. Is the solution to simply remove nuclear power as an option? Where does the opposition think we'll find that 20% of the nation's energy supply? Because that is the current % of US power delivered by Nuclear Power. If the opposition is right, the number should be 0%. We can
drill the hell out of ANWR to make up, I don't know, a fraction of 1%. My point is...why just 20%? I never claimed nothing bad could happen. I said nothing would.
As for the health issues, I sat with 50 feet of a operating reactor for thousands of hours over a 4 year period. I got more radiation from second hand
smoke growing up than I did from that exposure. And cigarettes can't power a fraction of the country. I will gladly back
off nuclear as an option when something better is presented, something viable. Something that can support that amount of power with a safety record even approaching that of nuclear power.
In short, proper design and inspection prevents 1) the leak concern. It is a major concern, but the problem is preventable many times over.
Nuclear waste (2 on your list) is not preventable. It is manageable.
I'll post a second time for your second comment and an aside.
Wind and solar...with respect, no amount of research is going to yield a comparable amount of power to nuclear. Solar power is nuclear power...just 93 million miles of way. Lots of potential energy lost on the way here. That is not to say they shouldn't be pursued...solar and wind could be extremely promising as small scale energy sources. But unless you harness a Cat 4 hurricane, nothing will come from wind and solar that approaches our needs.
As for money going to nuclear for military research...you say that likes it a bad thing. If there was money in wind and solar, GE would have looked into it. Profit drives not just this country, but the world. You know the batteries that make cell phones viable? Thank DARPA (Defense Advanced Research) for that. Defense R&D is responsible for much more than most people know.
As for the "majority of people opposing nuclear power", I'd love to see stats on that. An informal (and therefore non-scientific) poll at MSNBC today (ironically) had 70+% people in favor of ramping up nuclear power right now, with 15% more saying more should be done before ramping up. Less than 15% said it would never be safe. I am sure the response would be different if you put it in their backyard.
Long story short, there is a significant energy demand in our country. We haven't built a reactor in decades...we've simply consumed more of our other resources in the intervening time.
"So you say that there is literally NO potential for leaks and system failure? You have that many system checks built in now?"
Yes. It would require multiple system failures AND multiple human failures for such a condition to develop. Design-wise, even if it did occur (which is always a statistical possibility), it would likely simply ruin the facility for use. There are levels and levels of safety built in at design, construction, and operation. There has to be. The consequences are catastrophic.
Ok, here's a problem with nuclear power that I don't think anyone is addressing adequately - how do we promote how wonderful and clean and good it is, and then deny it to nations we don't approve of?
This is what's happening now with Iran. Iran argues that it wants to develop nuclear capabilities for nuclear power plants. But we don't like Iran, so we don't want them to. We argue that they're trying to make weapons, but can't prove it.
How do we say on the one hand that nuclear is our best option and then say on the other hand that it's too dangerous for anyone else to have? And how do we guarantee that other nations have SAFE nuclear power if we also wish to protect our propietary technology?
As for your other responses to my comments:
I didn't say there was anything bad about giving R&D to defense. I said it was bad that all the R&D money went to only one type of energy development. I am shocked to hear a scientist argue that solar and wind won't work simply because we haven't figured out how to make them work yet. Imagine if someone had said the same thing about computers - "Computers will never be affordable to everyone!" Many people said that, but they were famously wrong.
Defense R&D, just like all forms of R&D, is responsible for more wonderful everyday innovations than most people know because most people don't give a crap about where their cool stuff came from. They just want to buy it and use it. So people will always complain that money is spent on NASA, and money is spent on drug research for "silly" diseases that don't impact enough people, etc, because they only see the tiny picture and not the big one. I am not one of those people. But I do object to scientific exploration being limited by corporate and defense interests. There should be money going to R&D to solve more than just the problem of Dick Cheney's profit margin. It's grossly late for Bush to start spouting about "alternative sources of energy", pushed there because of his 30% approval rating. It's pretty pathetic, in fact.
Finally, maybe the majority of people don't oppose nuclear power. But I will bet you any amount of money they will oppose nuclear waste being dumped in their yard. As long as we think about nuclear power chanting NIMBY, it will never be a fair and safe option.
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