Nuclear power

Energy in North America (and the world) is overwhelmingly derived from fossil fuels. But the combustion of oil, coal, and natural gas is exacting a terrible toll: heating the planet and melting the polar ice caps; acidifying the oceans; and releasing particulate air pollution that, by one estimate, kills 50,000 -100,000 people every year in America alone. Clearly, we need alternatives.

One alternative is nuclear fission. In fact, already this low-carbon method of energy generation accounts for about 14% of the world's electricity; 15% in Canada, 20% in the US, and in certain countries the percentage is much higher.

But large swaths of the voting public are dead-set against nuclear power generation, and believe that not only should no new reactors be built, but that existing ones should be brought offline as soon as possible. Many people, it seems, are willing to accept nothing less than a nuclear-free, low-carbon near future; and presumably they believe this to be a realistic goal.

Here's why I am not one of these people.

The Case Against Nuclear Power

A damning case against nuclear power is not difficult to make: it's association with nuclear weapons, waste products that remain toxic for millions of years, and accidents such as those that occurred at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. Constructing new nuclear power plants is astronomically expensive; and doing so, combined with the impacts of uranium mining, is not environmentally inconsequential.

All these issues harbor room for debate - nuclear power plays a role in disarmament or proliferation (about half of America's atomic energy is derived from decommissioned nuclear warheads), long-term waste management is or isn't feasible, the severity of past and the likelihood of future disasters is small or large, and and so on; and these debates often quickly become highly complex and technical, forcing most of us to rely on our gut feelings about nuclear power.

But I think some very ugly assertions about it can be made with confidence. For example, the capacity to generate nuclear power makes it much easier for countries to then construct nuclear weapons, and provides a facade behind which this can occur clandestinely. There have been a number of instances in which radioactive waste disposal has been grossly botched. And catastrophic accidents cannot currently be guaranteed against, whether due to earthquakes, deliberate sabotage, meteorites, or other unforeseen events.

These are very real and serious problems. But of all of them, I think it's safe to say the specter of future accidents has probably the single greatest negative effect on public opinion of nuclear power.

A Word on Nuclear Disasters

In the wake of Fukushima, a poll conducted for the BBC indicated that the world's opinion of nuclear power has plummeted. Prudent politicians around the world announced they were reassessing, scaling down, or phasing out their nuclear industries - most notably in Germany, which now plans to be nuclear-free by 2022. And the International Energy Agency cut it's estimate of how much nuclear power the world will be generating by 2035 in half. Here on the West Coast of North America, which is already racked with fear of the relatively innocuous radiation emitted by cellphones and "smart meters", 8,000 kilometers of intervening ocean did not prevent sales of potassium iodide pills and Geiger counters from going through the roof.

But there are wildly contrasting claims about the true extent of the health and environmental impacts of nuclear disasters.

For example, in a video that was all over the internet after Fukushima, Helen Caldicott, perhaps the world's foremost anti-nuclear activist, made a number of very alarming statements, including the assertion that as a result of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster "nearly a million people have already died", and that "40% of Europe is still radioactive"; she even advises: "don't eat European food".

"But that's nothing", she goes on to say, "compared to what's happening now" at Fukushima.

Dr. Helen Caldicott

This video really effected a few of my friends, who noted that Caldicott is a doctor and a Nobel Peace Prize nominee. But equally relevant is that she has a history of sounding rather shrill alarms over nuclear safety: in 2010 she advised the 16,000 residents of Port Hope, Ontario to flee their town due to the presence of a uranium processing plant despite the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission's assertion that studies have shown the town to be safe.

To put the claims she makes in the video into perspective: the official story is that, after all is said and done, around 4,000 people will have died as a result of Chernobyl - which disagrees with Caldicott's claim by about 981,000 people.

Caldicott explains this discrepancy by claiming that "this is one of the most monstrous cover-ups in the history of medicine".

George Monbiot

Others have reacted differently to Fukushima. George Monbiot, for example, is an columnist for The Guardian and author who, in his 2006 book on climate change called Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning, wrote:

"Because of the industry's record of corner-cutting, because of its association with the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and because of the unresolved questions about waste disposal... nuclear power [is] second to last on my list of preferences, just above generation using coal".

But in the immediate aftermath of Fuklushima, Monbiot published a column in the Guardian called Going Critical: How the Fukushima disaster taught me to stop worrying and embrace nuclear power. In it, he admits:

"Yes, I still loathe the liars who run the nuclear industry. Yes, I would prefer to see the entire sector shut down, if there were harmless alternatives. But there are no ideal solutions. Every energy technology carries a cost; so does the absence of energy technology. Atomic energy has just been subjected to one of the harshest of possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet has been small."

Caldicott and Monbiot squared off on the issue of nuclear power just over a week later during a televised debate on Democracy Now! (watch it here). A week after that, following an email correspondence, Monbiot wrote a column entitled Evidence Meltdown: The Green movement has misled the world about the dangers of radiation in which he accuses Caldicott of

"Failing to provide sources, refuting data with anecdote, cherry-picking studies, scorning the scientific consensus, [and] invoking a cover-up to explain it".

Caldicott responded the following week with an article in The Guardian called How nuclear apologists mislead the world over radiation, to which Monbiot replied with an article called Why This Matters.

I highly recommend interested readers review this exchange, during which, in my opinion, Monbiot does as good a job as anyone could of dismantling Caldicott and exposing her alarmist assertions about the severity of past nuclear disasters and the health effects of exposure to low-level radiation as baseless fear-mongering.

(In another example of contrasting claims, this summer The Georgia Straight's Alex Roslin accused Health Canada of covering up the true danger Fukushima poses to Canadians with a series of incredibly irresponsible articles, at least one of which provoked a response from Health Canada.)

No one is claiming that nuclear disasters aren't extremely serious, but it seems very likely that they are far less serious than many people have been led by anti-nuclear activists to believe. In fact, it has been estimated that it would require a Chernobyl-sized nuclear accident every three weeks to match the death toll fossil fuels incur - and that's not counting the ill effects of oil spills, coal mining accidents (which cause significant loss of life), and international conflicts over increasingly scarce resources.

The Other Option: Renewable Energy

My case for nuclear rests primarily on the fact that our power has to come from somewhere. Anti-nuclear activists usually assert that the future lies with water, wind, and solar energy harvesting; some also mention bio-fuels. It is widely believed that it is unrealistic to expect these options to fill the huge gap that the retreat of fossil fuels and nuclear would leave, but anti-nuclear activists don't agree with that assessment.

Mark Z. Jacobson

Mark Z. Jacobson is one such person. Jacobson is coauthor of a 2009 article published in Scientific American called A Plan to Power 100 Percent of the Planet with Renewables which is easily one of the most optimistic assessments of renewable potential out there. In it, the case is made that a wholesale global shift to renewable energy is not only possible, but could be accomplished within 20 years.

Wind and Solar energy forms the basis of the plan, as, according to the article:

"wave power can be extracted only near coastal areas. Many geothermal sources are too deep to be tapped economically. And even though hydroelectric now exceeds all other [renewable] sources, most of the suitable large reservoirs are already in use."

(Biofuels are not mentioned by the authors, presumably because its mass production requires vast swathes of farmland; the global population is set to continue growing; and starvation is already a huge problem in the world today.)

There is no question, however, that if such a goal is even possible it would be a gargantuan undertaking: hydroelectric currently accounts for only about 7% of the world's energy, and all other renewable sources, taken together, account for only about 1.8%. In the article, Jacobson and his coauthor figure that their plan would require the construction of so many wind turbines and solar panels that they would blanket 1.33%* of the Earth's surface (nearly two million square kilometers), plus 270 new hydroelectric stations.

(*This includes the space between wind turbines, which the authors note could be used for other purposes.)

Finally, there is no doubt that such a plan would entail a large drop in global energy usage: according to the authors, their plan would provide 8% less power than the increasingly power-hungry world consumes today. And although they assert that "the wind often blows...when the sun does not shine" and vise versa (presumably with the exception of windless nights), a major problem associated with utter reliance on renewables is brought painfully into focus when we consider that the single largest battery in the world today is capable of supplying 12,000 people with power for under ten minutes.

Again, this is an optimistic assessment. Many others apparently do not share this optimism: Jacobson has been referred to as "the clown prince of the renewable energy circus."

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I don't think anyone is suggesting that we should turn our noses up at renewable energy sources. And I admit that it is arguably implausible to expect nuclear power alone to replace fossil fuels, due to the time and expense the construction of new reactors requires, plus the political problems posed by nuclear's great unpopularity. But fast-tracking abandonment of nuclear power, as anti-nuclear activists would like and as Germany is currently doing, entails a massive effort to replace it with renewable energy - during which fossil fuel use would almost certainly continue unchecked if not at an accelerated rate.

We should certainly continue to research new methods of energy generation, be it improved solar panels, new methods of biofuel production, or thorium reactors. But many dubious new "breakthroughs" - compressed air cars and other perpetual motion machines, water-fueled cars, cold fusion, and even extraterrestrial technologies - have, I think, lured many into believing that near-perfect solutions are on the horizon or being suppressed, and have thus only exacerbated the problem.

Right now, our options appear limited to renewable energy and nuclear. And, bearing in mind that minimizing carbon emissions should be far and away our overriding priority, it seems to me wildly irresponsible to outright reject outright either one of these options.

Admittedly, I'm not quite old enough to clearly remember the terror of the Cold War and Chernobyl, and I can only imagine how counter-intuitive a pro-nuclear argument must appear to those who are. But our intuitions are of limited use when it comes to weighing the risks of sudden, dramatic accidents against the inexorable, creeping advance of something far worse.