Quick and Dirty Tips Podcasts

Episode Transcript

Nuclear Power
Episode 24: October 16, 2008

Hi and welcome to Make it Green Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for an Earth Friendly Life. I was watching the first presidential debate of 2008, and it hit me that energy figures prominently in both candidates buzzword vocabulary. Just over half of the electricity generated in America comes from fossil fuels, meaning coal, oil, and natural gas. Only 19% of our national energy budget comes from nuclear power. In a time that we are trying to wean ourselves off fossil fuels, avoiding nuclear power is the energy equivalent of the pre-Christmas crash diet without the soda pop. The quick and dirty tip for today is that if we're to create a sustainably energy economy, we must invest in nuclear energy -- now.

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How Nuclear Stacks Up - Proven Technology

Nuclear power is proven technology - France get's 76% of it's electricity from nuclear fission. The nuclear power industry is far more mature than any of the other alternative energies, except maybe hydro-power from dammed rivers. With solar, wind, biomass, and geothermal still in the cradle, we need to spend our time and money on something we know how to do. Nuclear energy is the bridge between the industrial-aged fossil-fueled economy and a sustainable renewable one.

Cleaner fossil fuels are also a long way off, too. "Clean coal" is a term used to describe taking the carbon-dioxide emissions from a coal power plant and 'sequestering' them in some remote place. Carbon sequestration is only a budding technology, and we're nowhere near ready to install scrubbers on the thousands of coal-fired power plants across the country. At the current stage, we don't even know if the carbon dioxide will stay in time-out, or just leak away to suffocate us later.

The Beginning -- Uranium Mining

Uranium mining involves many familiar evils; toxic mine tailings, open pit mining, degradation of the landscape, and danger to mine workers. But most uranium now mined is the US is recovered in situ, which literally dissolves the ore that is sucked to the surface (an incredibly expensive process). By comparison, coal is mined using open cuts and mountaintop removal, which destroy entire ecosystems that were carefully assembled by nature over geologic time scales -- millions of years. Not only that, but it takes 3,200,000 (three million two hundred thousand) tons of coal to run a 1,000 MW plant for a year; it only takes 27 tons of uranium to generate that same 1,000 MW year.

Uranium is found in the US, but nowhere near as plentiful as our nations natural coal reserves. Our estimated reserve of uranium ore is some 890 million pounds; reactors in the US are currently using 53 million pounds a year, but less than 10 percent of it domestically produced. A lot of fuel also comes from the conversion of the fissile material (stuff that's suitable for power plants) that once lay in nuclear bombs. Plus, if we were to recycle the waste, we could drastically cut the need for new uranium.

We already have one of the worlds five uranium processing facilities, too, so the infrastructure already exists. We do not need to build extensive off-shore drilling platforms or develop techniques for squeezing gasoline from oil shale.

The Middle -- Nuclear Fission

Nuclear power begins in the fuel rods. Uranium is bombarded with small energetic particles, which excite the uranium so much that it tears itself apart into fragments. This process is called nuclear fission, because at the end you have totally new atoms, their nucleii mixed up, split, and rearranged.

Fission produces heat, so the essential part of a fission power plant is a steam turbine engine, the same as a coal-fired boiler. The water in contact with the fuel rods is cycled through heat-exchangers to heat steam to turn a turbine and do mechanical work, which is then converted into amazingly cheap electrical energy -- one and three-quarter cents per kilowatt-hour on average, compared with two and a half cents for a kWh of coal, and thirty cents for solar. When you put a price on carbon dioxide emissions -- or when you internalize the negative externality of those emissions -- coal is left far behind.

Since nothing is being burned, there are no carbon dioxide emissions to regulate, no mercury emissions falling into our rivers and oceans to poison us through the fish, and no sulfur or nitrous oxide emission to cause acid raid and damage the US soil.

Safety concerns begin with memories of the 1979 Three Mile Island, where poor engineering controls and operator error combined to create a near disaster; and the 1986 Chernobyl accident, where mismanagement caused a global catastrophe that confirmed our worst fears. Incidentally, both of these accidents were caused by coolant failures, not a nuclear meltdown. Now, every nuclear power plant is equipped with extensive engineering and managerial safety controls. Each and every plant has a so-called "Red Phone" that connects directly to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission engineer, 24-hours a day, and plant operators are given far more extensive training.

In the end, all of our electricity generation systems have ways of killing us. The chances of nuclear meltdown causing fallout to spread across the nation is a remote chance with today's technology. There is a one-hundred percent chance that coal-fired power plants using today's technology are slowly killing us with mercury in our fish, acid rain on our soils, and ozone, NOx, and particulates in our lungs.

The End -- Waste

After uranium fuel rods have been cooking for about 2 years, they're removed and put into highly secured storage on site at the power plant. The spent fuel rods contain all those daughter species produced during the reactions, which are radioactive, each in their own way. Some are very 'hot,' which means they produce copious energetic radiation. Some products have an extremely long half-life, which is the time it takes for half of the radioactivity to go away. For example, it takes 24,000 years for half of the Plutonium-239 produced by nuclear fission of the original Uranium-235 to decay away. That's just half. Imagine how long it takes for the radiation to drop to safe levels.

The most unattractive thing about the nuclear industry is this waste stream. On-site storage is filling up fast, as the US produces some 2,000 tons of radioactive waste each year. The US government has permitted deep geologic disposal for these high-level wastes, at Yucca Mountain in my home state of Nevada. But, by the time Yucca Mountain opens it's doors, we will have already produced more waste than Yucca's 70,000 ton capacity. Further study of the site suggests it wasn't as stable as we thought, either.

There is a way out. Spent fuel is not really 'spent;' it still contains 99 percent of the nuclear energy of the virgin fuel -- energy we can harvest by technological means that are proven in countries like France, the UK, Japan, and India. If we recycle this waste, we will produce far less waste, in forms that are less radioactive and has shorter half-lives. We would not need to mine new uranium for centuries. In that time, we could be finding even better ways to reprocess fuel, and plan the eventual retirement of the transitional nuclear economy.

President Reagan lifted the ban on reprocessing in 1981. Fear of nuclear proliferation, which is when materials for bomb making get into the hands of people who mean to use them as weapons of mass destruction, is the emotional issue keeping us from taking the final step of investing in fuel reprocessing centers. First generation fission products are easy to make into a nuclear weapon. But is it safer, then, to hoard the precious deadly substance, to attempt to transport it securely across thousands of miles from plant to repository in the face of global terror, to allow it to live on for thousands of years waiting for someone to dig it up? Sounds like an easy question to me - I'd rather use the stuff and get some energy that was once called "too cheap to meter."*

Conclusion

It will take many years for us to develop truly renewable, sustainable energy. Nuclear power is not itself considered 'renewable.' But it is a long term solution to our resource woes, because it will give us the time we need to create the safe, renewable, sustainable energy solutions our society needs to get off oil. Let's invest in it, before everyone who ever knew anything about nuclear power plants retires and dies.

Administrative

Thanks all for joining me for another episode of Make-it-Green Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for an Earth Friendly Life. Remember to try GoToMeeting today FREE for 30 days. Just visit GoToMeeting.com/podcasts. That’s GoToMeeting.com/podcasts. Do more and travel less with GoToMeeting. Don't worry -- those of you waiting for the composting episode will be rewarded soon. In the meantime, you can find a transcript of this show at quickanddirtytips.com. Send your questions and comments to greengirl@quickanddirtytips.com, or leave me a voicemail at 206-600-3051.

Resources

*1955 Lewis Strauss, chair of the Atomic Energy Committee

Environmental Protection Agency on Nuclear Power
http://www.epa.gov/cleanenergy/energy-and-you/affect/nuclear.html

Nuclear Regulatory Commission
http://www.nrc.gov/

Nuclear Energy Institute
http://nei.org/

Coal: A Human History by Barbara Freese

Seeds of Wealth by Henry Hobhouse

Physics for Future Presidents by Richard Muller <-- MIGG Highly recommends this one! Her sister had professor Muller for PffP at Berkeley

Comments (6) for Nuclear Power | Subscribe to Comment

IO Says:
10/30/2008 9:16:10 AM

Emily, I didn't miss MIGG's point, that's why I wrote that nuclear power plants should not be shut off this instant. The problem is, though, that the nuclear power lobby will take over from the oil lobby and green technologies will never be developed to the extent that's possible. I'm from Germany and here, the government has a plan to wean the country off the nuclear power. (What good that will do is questionable, because we'll still be surrounded by countries using nuclear power plants, so in case of accident, we'd be screwed anyway, but at least, we'll have done our best.) When there was this almost accident in Forsmark, Sweden 2 years ago (when the generators and their backups didn't start up at first), the public was hardly informed, there was barely a mention in the print media, instead there was a huge article on how great nuclear power is and how in Chernobyl only 3 people died (which is a deliberate lie), so it's not really dangerous. And Vattenfall, the energy company responsible for the powerplant in Forsmark aggressively placed ads everywhere. In the South of Germany, we have a small town that's completely independent of outside energy sources, except for gas for the cars I assume. In other cities, solar panels are placed on the roofs of all public buildings and I don't see why the government shouldn't give tax reductions to people who build environmentally friendly houses or drive low emission cars. With cars, the trend goes in the right direction already, though we're not quite there yet. The incentive here is the gas price. However, green technologies will in all likelihood be more expensive than nuclear power, so nuclear power will have that edge over green technologies. That edge should be eliminated by excluding the expansion of nuclear power plants and by giving financial incentives to people for going green.

EmilyInVegas Says:
10/27/2008 5:02:00 PM

I’m disappointed at some of the comments I’m reading here. Make it Green Girl’s point, in case you missed it, was that we cannot switch from our dependence on fossil fuels to solely green technologies overnight. Because we are SO dependant on those imported items, we could invest billions in green technologies and it would still be decades before we have enough research and the economies of scale development to make it efficient to use. The point was that nuclear power is a logical and a better temporary solution to wean ourselves off our current dependence without expensive off-shore drilling and opening up ANWR, which by the way, don’t lessen our dependence, they just change the source.

IO Says:
10/22/2008 11:31:26 AM

I agree with Daniela. We need to invest in the development of green technologies, make them more efficient and less costly for the average person. Energy-efficient houses and transportation would be another step. Expanding nuclear energy is a horrible idea. Yes, the accidents (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl) were coolant failures, but those coolants are essential to the power plants and it's really nit-picking to say that the nuclear material wasn't the reason for the failure. I'd rather have a faulty solar panel on the roof than a faulty nuclear power plant anywhere. And what's with those "little" accidents in nuclear power plants, those that almost resulted in desaster or at least in people getting a good dose of radiation. Generators failing to start in case of emergency, leakages etc. (3 months, approx. 100 people were contaminated during maintenance work in a French nuclear power plant) And don't forget the human factor - people are going to make mistakes. Talking about global terror - what about the time when people thought the 4th plane on 9/11 was hijacked to be crashed into a nuclear power plant? I see the advantages of nuclear power as well as anyone, but that doesn't mean I'm blind when it comes to its disadvantages. I'm not saying we should shut down the power plants this instant, but instead of investing in new ones put the money into the development of green technologies that have been waiting in desk drawers for the grip of the oil lobby to slacken.

Jamie Says:
10/21/2008 10:09:37 AM

Thank you so much for this podcast!! People who don't know the facts like to just brush nuclear power under the rug, but it's an invaluable source for that freedom from foreign oil that politicians keep harping about. This was a well-rounded and thoughtful podcast and I hope it opens some eyes.

Heather Says:
10/20/2008 6:02:06 AM

Greetings from Australia!! Hi Make it Green Girl – you have mentioned soda streams in earlier episodes - we have been using a soda stream for a while now and love it! It is a great way to get h2o into the whole family. We typically have two cylinders at any one time, so we can replace one immediately when it runs out. Another tip, I buy lemons and limes, slice them up and freeze them. I then use them as ice in the drink, to give it a little bit of a chill and add a bit of flavour. Joe our local grocer recently had a huge bag of lemons in the ‘second’s area’ selling for $1.50, I bought them and have cut them all up. I think I will have enough lemons to last me till a nice hot Aussie xmas. Heather Smith MYOB Certified Consultant

Daniela Says:
10/19/2008 6:07:23 AM

How on earth can anyone who is talking about green life really advise to invest in this! How stupid can we get? Don't invest time and money in something that dangerous, invest it in green technologies which would be far more developed already if they weren't blocked all the time for oil or nuclear power developement!