The Murky Future of Nuclear Power in the United States

Coal may be cheaper than nuclear, but the damages to environment and health are too high.

As for my experience, figuring out what to buy and what not, in Munich in the months after Chernobyl. Apples from Tirol were found to contain significantly higher levels of fallout -- one thing that happens to stick in my mind, because I was eating them until I learned this.

And wild mushrooms, particularly from Eastern Europe? Forgetaboutit -- fungii were concentrating fallout up to 400 times (not percent, but 400-fold).

A good friend cooked a meal containing wild mushrooms from her family back in Poland. I felt I had to pass on it.

Granted, coal-based energy spreads heavy metals around, and forests were taking it on the chin from acid rain before scrubbers and switching to coal supplies containing lower levels of sulfur -- primarily, as I recall, in the U.S. being "hard coal" from deposits/mines in western states. Global warming was a concern back then, but it hadn't entered the knowledge of the larger general public.

Everything has trade-offs. That includes nuclear, and we shouldn't be calling it "clean".

Like the heavy metals from coal burning, a significant concern is the very long-term nature of the pollution that does result, and that, with current and immediately foreseeable technology, said pollution is "irreducible".

CO2 warms things, but it doesn't directly poison them nor leave the ground infertile or unusable. Organic toxins can, largely, with enough will and investment literally be burned away -- at least, until you spread them out over the soil. If you have a vat of e.g. dioxin, you can -- carefully -- burn it away. Just make sure you burn ALL of it; one erstwhile proposal for such disposal was to inject the waste into a molten metal mass in a disposal "reactor" with careful monitoring and filtering of the exit gases.

We haven't yet achieved significant alchemaic control. Heavy metals stay heavy metals, and radio-nucleotides keep their own schedules of decay. Once spread around the environment, we are left quarantining that environment -- either wholesale, or where possible by scraping off the contaminated bits/layer and quarantining that.

A more immediate-term solution may be better concentrating and/or filtering mechanisms, for separation of such contamination from the environment it's dispersed through. (As one example, natural or engineered biological concentration and harvesting.)

Maybe nuclear is better than the wholesale smog that kills millions each year, and that used to kill many more in the U.S. but still takes probably hundreds of thousands a year.

But I'm not willing to call it "clean".

And given some of the potential, catastrophic risks, I'm not prepared to call it "better".

P.S. Another, primary concern I have with nuclear, is that no human society has demonstrated continuity and consistent reliability on the kind of timeframes required to manage current nuclear technology and its waste.

Even if a properly handled device is perfectly safe, do we have any guarantees -- or even real, high-likelihood hopes -- that humans will properly handle it (and its waste) until it is effectively retired or neutralized?

A fleet of many coal plants operating normally kills more people than one nuclear plant accident. A nuclear reactor that is bombed during war (or otherwise suffers catastrophic loss of containment) is not environmentally cleaner than one coal plant of comparable capacity operating normally. Nuclear power is safe by the numbers, but you have to use the right numbers.

If reactor containment failed more often then reactors wouldn't be any better for human health than fossil power plants. It's because they are designed and run with such care that they have such a good environmental and safety record, on average. I was reacting partially to something that you haven't said that I've heard all too often in discussions like these: reactors are so safe, we should get rid of these burdensome regulations so they can be affordable too. It's the "burdensome" attention to detail that makes nuclear so safe. If the nuclear industry had the same cavalier cowboy attitude to safety as the coal mining industry, it would be an environmental disaster.

But you didn't actually call for deregulation, and just making a poorly worded numerical comparison isn't enough for a downvote. I apologize for that.

The alternative is generally natural gas, not coal. With some exceptions, coal is generally a legacy technology.

I know that public opinion and environmental activism are often cited as reasons for nuclear power's failure to thrive in the developed world, and there's some truth to that. But I also think that if new reactor designs ever live up to the hype of producing the cheapest electricity around, they will become widespread despite opposition from activists. For a parallel, again look at the shale revolution. Fracking is vocally opposed by environmentalists and celebrities (many ordinary members of the public too), but it still grew rapidly because it actually delivered lower cost energy to buyers. The fact that nuclear keeps failing to deliver low costs/predictable construction schedules is a bigger factor in its weak market prospects than opposition by Greenpeace. Greenpeace opposes many things and usually fails to stop them.

  Boring old water reactors are about all that can be made to work for decades.

After being shut down by the Clinton administration in 1994 (as was its follow-on IFR program), disassembly showed no meaningful wear or damage to its hardware.

"In controlled testing in 1986, with the EBR-II reactor running at full power and the emergency shutdown systems disabled, the reactor's supply of electricity was intentionally turned off, causing the coolant pumps to stop. This is a worse scenario than what happened in the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster. (At Fukushima, which began operation in 1971, the emergency shutdown system turned off the reactor as soon as it detected the earthquake. However the tsunami destroyed the electric generators powering the coolant pumps, which needed to continue running after the reactor shutdown. Subsequently, the core overheated and meltdown occurred.) EBR-II, in contrast, handled the event without creating a dangerous situation. EBR-II had a negative thermal coefficient of reactivity that shut down the reactor when the temperature increased due to loss of the coolant pumps; the time required to heat the large pool of sodium surrounding the reactor provided a sufficient time buffer for the passive decay heat removal system to prevent the EBR-II reactor from melting down. The safe shutdown of the EBR-II relied only on the laws of physics and did not require operator or control system intervention."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Breeder_Reactor_I...

Sowing Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt about alternative, more sustainable energy sources (and storage) has gone on for decades and has had a very pervasive, toxic effect on general discourse of the matters.