[THS] So you're against nuclear power. Do you know why?

[Peter Webster]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/042108G.shtml

The Nuclear Option
    By Judith Lewis
    Mother Jones

    May/June 2008 Issue

    So you're against nuclear power. Do you know why?

    A decade and a year after Enrico Fermi demonstrated the first atomic
fission chain reaction, President Dwight D. Eisenhower went before the
United Nations General Assembly to avert an apocalypse. Other nations
now had in their hands the weapon with which the United States had
pulverized two Japanese cities; altruistic scientists and eager investors
both had pressured the president to share the technology for peaceful
uses. And so Eisenhower had little choice on that December day in 1953
but to announce a new purpose for the force inside the atom: Properly
monitored and generously financed, he declared in his "Atoms for
Peace" address, fission could be harnessed "to provide abundant
electrical energy in the power-starved areas of the world."

    You could have been forgiven for thinking the president and his
advisers had just hatched the notion that month, so full of poetic
wonder and portent was that speech. In fact, not only were the Soviets
about to power up a five-megawatt reactor, but the Westinghouse
Electric Corporation was well on its way to building the country's first
commercial atomic power plant. Within five years, the Shippingport
Atomic Power Station would begin sending its 60 megawatts of
electricity to the city of Pittsburgh.

    That was probably about the best atomic power ever looked. For it
wasn't long before the electricity touted as "too cheap to meter" proved
too pricey for profit: The power that came out of Shippingport cost 10
times the going rate. Though in the coming years many more reactors
would be hitched to the nation's grid, Eisenhower's gallant dreams were
undone by rising construction costs, high maintenance bills, and risk.
The last application for a new nuclear plant was withdrawn in 1978. By
the time Three Mile Island nearly melted down in 1979, the United
States was through with nuclear-generated electricity.

    Until now.

    When President George W. Bush celebrated the Energy Policy Act of
2005 at the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant in Maryland, he may as well have
been delivering the 21st-century update of Eisenhower's 1953
manifesto, minus the poetry, and plus some dopey jokes. ("Pass the
Mayo," he chirped to Constellation Energy CEO Mayo Shattuck.) This
time, however, the marketing slogan was not about peace, but the very
future of the planet. "Without these nuclear plants," Bush said,
"America would release nearly 700 million metric tons more carbon
dioxide into the air each year." Half a century after Shippingport
powered up, the U.S. government has once again entwined its long
fingers under the heel of the big industry that couldn't.

    In his day, Eisenhower shared his vision with a number of vocal
pacifists: Redirecting atomic power to electricity, they believed, would at
least keep the military occupied with something other than blowing up
cities. And Bush shares his vision with some prominent
environmentalists: Stewart Brand, for instance, who founded the Whole
Earth Catalog and Fred Krupp, the director of the Environmental
Defense Fund, who believes that "the challenge of global warming is so
urgent we can't afford to take anything off the table."

    As far back as 1978, Tom Alexander - an award-winning science
writer with a deep knowledge of economics and ecology - urged utilities
in the pages of Fortune to resuscitate the already-flagging nuclear
industry lest a ramp-up in coal-fired electricity "trigger irreversible
changes in the world's climate." The ramp-up happened on schedule;
the changes in climate too. Which now makes it very hard to ignore the
fact that whatever else nuclear power does to the environment,
however many fish it kills or however much waste it leaves in our great-
great-great-great-grandchildren's hands, it emits neither soot nor
smoke nor mercury, and far less carbon dioxide than the coal that
keeps most of our lights on.

    Industry has been quick to take advantage of the shifting political
climate: Last year, UniStar submitted an application for a new nuclear
reactor to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the first to
cross the agency's desk since Jimmy Carter was president. Four more
followed, and 14 separate companies have notified the agency that they
will file applications in the next year. It's hard to imagine any of the
current presidential candidates slashing nuclear subsidies once in office.
(Senator Barack Obama, for one, represents a state with 11 of the
nation's 104 civilian reactors, and his donors include employees of
nuclear giant Exelon.)

    But can nuclear power really rescue our warming planet? And if you
answered quickly, answer this too: Are you for or against because you
know the science, or because someone said you should be?

    When we talk about nuclear power these days, we talk about
environmentalists for nukes, and about people posing as
environmentalists for nukes. We talk about Dick Cheney's energy bill
defibrillating a faltering industry with $12 billion worth of incentives and
tax breaks. We talk about who is for and who is against, and whether
we can trust them.

    But no one talks about fission. No one talks about the letter Albert
Einstein wrote to FDR in 1939, advising the president that "it may
become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of
uranium" to produce enormous amounts of power. No one mentions
that breathtaking moment on December 2, 1942, when Fermi, on a
squash court at the University of Chicago, had an assistant slowly pull a
control rod from a pile of uranium and graphite, sustaining a controlled
chain reaction for 28 minutes and thus securing atomic power's
industrial future.

    For the last four years, I have tried to shut out the chatter - the
goofy Nuclear Energy Institute ad (girl on a scooter says, "Our
generation is demanding lots of electricity ... and clean air."), and the
warnings of No Nukes godmother Helen Caldicott, who, rightly or
wrongly, cannot think of splitting atoms without thinking of weapons.
I've tried to focus instead on the awesome force that binds the nucleus
and whether it can ever be an appropriate source of civilian energy.

    The idea of nuclear power arose more than half a century ago out of
the most noble impulses of humanity's brightest minds, scientists who
hoped that the destructive force they'd harnessed, the most
concentrated source of energy on earth, could also be applied for good.
But atomic electricity strayed so far from its promise - corrupted by
government's collusion with industry, mismanagement for the sake of
profit, and ordinary bureaucratic incompetence - that we seem
flummoxed at the thought of ever reclaiming it.

    To consider a technology as terrifying as nuclear power requires
more than slogans. It requires looking beyond the marketing and
activism, into the physics and its consequences. It means thinking about
rocks. And waste. And fission.

    Hot Rocks, Warm Water

    Like so many sources of energy, nuclear power begins with a rock - a
brownish chunk of hard dirt, flecked with glittery particles. You can hold
uranium in your hand without much trouble: As it decays into other
elements - thorium, radium, and eventually lead - it throws off
radioactive particles, but most of them can't penetrate your skin. Nor
can they sustain a controlled chain reaction in most of the world's
nuclear reactors. For that, you need a certain neutron-rich uranium
isotope, U-235, which makes up only a tiny portion of raw uranium ore.

    Natural uranium comes out of the ground in Canada, Australia,
Niger, and several other countries. Uranium is finite, and it's not easy to
find - as a consequence of the impending nuclear revival, mines that
were once declared unprofitable may open once again, including some
in the western United States. This worries people who remember the
last uranium boom in the Southwest: From the 1940s through the
1980s, more than 15,000 men, many of them Navajo, worked the
mines, often without protection. Many eventually came down with
cancer or respiratory diseases. Few were compensated. When the
mines closed, piles of uranium tailings were left mouldering along the
Colorado River, leaching at least 15,000 gallons of toxic chemicals a day
into water destined for taps in Arizona and California.

    To be useful as nuclear fuel, uranium ore has to be refined into
uranium oxide (the yellowcake of Niger fame) and then enriched -
turned into pellets of 4 percent U-235. The sole U.S. plant that enriches
uranium for civilian power reactors, located in Paducah, Kentucky,
accomplishes this via an energy-hogging process that consumes 15
billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year. Even so, carbon emissions for
the entire nuclear fuel cycle come to no more than 55 grams of CO2 per
kilowatt-hour - roughly even with solar. By 2010, when the U.S.
Enrichment Corporation is slated to switch to the more efficient method
used in Europe, that number should come down closer to 12 grams per
kilowatt-hour - on par with wind.

    Nuclear power does have other environmental consequences,
drawbacks that have nothing to do with carbon: Aside from radiation
(more on that later), a particularly delicate one involves cooling water.
"Light water" reactors, used at the majority of the world's nuclear plants
(so named because they employ ordinary H2O, as opposed to water
made with a heavy hydrogen isotope), use water both to moderate the
chain reaction and produce steam to spin turbines - 2 billion gallons per
day on average. Most of it returns to the adjoining river, lake, or ocean
up to 25 degrees warmer, an ecological impact that could significantly
interfere with nuclear power's chances as a climate-change solution.
Already, wherever a light-water reactor sits near a sensitive body of
water, its intake pipes kill fish and its outflow distorts ecosystems to
favor warm-water species.

    The Cancer Conundrum

    Will a nuclear reactor operating under normal conditions give you
cancer? It's a question that, surprisingly, still hasn't been conclusively
answered. A 1995 Greenpeace study found an increase in breast-cancer
mortality among women living near various U.S. and Canadian reactors
in the Great Lakes region. Yet peer-reviewed studies by the Ontario
Cancer Treatment and Research Foundation as well as the National
Cancer Institute show no significant increase in cancer among people
living near reactors. An initiative called the Tooth Fairy Project is
currently trying to prove that concentrations of the radioactive isotope
strontium-90 are higher in baby teeth from children who grow up near
nuclear plants. But those tests are not complete, and no one else has
turned up persuasive evidence of such a link.

    "Without a baseline study, we don't have any credibility" on the
cancer issue, longtime Southern California anti-nuclear activist Rochelle
Becker once told me. "There are so many things wrong with the nuclear
industry that are confirmable that we try to stay away from that."

    We do know that nuclear plants routinely release small amounts of
radioactive gases, and that those releases expose nearby residents to a
small dose of radiation - one that the Health Physics Society, which
governs radiation measurements, says will probably not increase their
risk of getting cancer. We know that elevated levels of radioactive
tritium - which gets into water and is easily ingested - have been found
downstream from nuclear facilities, and we know that the scientific
consensus holds that no amount of radiation is good for you.

    But we also know this: 24,000 Americans per year die of diseases
related to emissions from coal-fired power plants, which release sulfur
dioxide, smog-forming nitrogen, toxic soot, and mercury - not to
mention 2.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually.

    It's a devil of a dilemma: One source of always-on "base load" power
kills people every day. Another kills people only if something goes
terribly wrong. And it could.

    Accidents Happen

    Early in the morning of March 28, 1979, a combination of
malfunctioning equipment and inadequately trained workers led to a
loss-of-coolant episode at Three Mile Island Unit 2 near Middletown,
Pennsylvania. Had workers not finally arrested the disaster 10 hours
after it started, the fuel inside the reactor could have melted completely
- the disaster scenario alluded to in the movie The China Syndrome,
which had arrived in theaters just a few weeks before. The partial
meltdown and subsequent radiation leak was the worst nuclear accident
ever on U.S. soil; in its wake, public support for the technology dropped
from 70 to 50 percent, where it remains today. Industry proponents
claim that no one died as a direct result of the accident, and in 1990, a
Columbia University study found no elevated radiation-related cancer
risk in the population near the plant. A later study, though, found a
tenfold increase in cancer among the people who lived in the path of
the radioactive plume.

    Because of Three Mile Island, the night crew performing an ill-
advised test at the Chernobyl plant on April 26, 1986, might have been
prepared for a loss-of-coolant episode. But they didn't know enough
about the plant they were tinkering with to have an idea what to do
when things went grievously wrong. The reactor exploded, and the fire
spewed a massive cloud of radiation across Europe.

    There are no reactors as fire-prone as Chernobyl in the United
States, and reactor safeguards have been upgraded dramatically since
Three Mile Island. Emergency core-cooling systems kick in if other
systems fail; operators have been trained to respond promptly when
something goes awry. But just because what has already happened
may not happen again doesn't mean we should relax: Human error has
infinite permutations, and near misses in the last decade have shown
just how vulnerable reactors remain.

    In March 2002, during a scheduled refueling outage at the Davis-
Besse Nuclear Power Station in Ohio, workers discovered that boric acid
deposits had gnawed a "pineapple-sized" hole into the six-inch-thick
steel cap bolted to the top of the reactor. Had the corrosion gone just a
third of an inch deeper, radioactive steam would have flooded the
containment dome, and Davis-Besse might have been the next Three
Mile Island.

    As frightening as the near-accident was the way Davis-Besse owners
FirstEnergy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission responded: by soft-
pedaling procedural flaws and scapegoating plant workers, in particular
Andrew Siemaszko, a systems engineer who they claimed had failed to
report the corrosion. The NRC has since barred Siemaszko from working
in the nuclear industry, and in 2006 he was indicted on five counts of
lying to the government and falsifying records. But documents show
that Siemaszko repeatedly told his employers the reactor head needed a
thorough cleaning. FirstEnergy didn't complete that job because it was
taking too long (keeping the reactor idle was costing the company $1
million a day) - and the NRC delayed a scheduled inspection of the
reactor at FirstEnergy's request.

    Watchdog or Lapdog?

    The Davis-Besse incident puts into sharp relief a history of regulatory
neglect that goes back for decades. The Union of Concerned Scientists
(UCS) has counted 47 incidents since 1979 in which the NRC failed to
adequately address issues at nuclear power plants - until the troubles
got so bad the plants had to be shut down for repairs. In some cases,
"the NRC allowed reactors with known safety problems to continue
operating for months, sometimes years, without requiring owners to fix
the problems."

    There's evidence, too, that the commission has tolerated serious
lapses in security, even after 9/11. In March 2007, an anonymous
whistleblower wrote a letter to the NRC claiming that guards at Exelon's
Peach Bottom plant in Pennsylvania were "coming into work exhausted
after working excessive overtime" and thus "sleeping on duty at an
alarming rate." The NRC ignored the letter until a guard videotaped the
naps in progress and WCBS in New York aired the tape. The Project on
Government Oversight claims a skilled infiltrator would need just 45
seconds to penetrate the area where Peach Bottom stores its spent fuel.

    The corporation that provides those sleepy guards, Wackenhut, has
also been accused of cheating on security exercises: One DOE inspector
general's report found that in 2003 guards had been tipped off in
advance about security drills at a government nuclear facility in Oak
Ridge, Tennessee. The same year, Wackenhut was fired from Entergy's
Indian Point plant in New York after guards there admitted they had
been improperly armed and trained.

    Critics often point out that the NRC is funded by industry fees;
despite his cautious support of nuclear power, Obama declared it "a
moribund agency...captive of the industries that it regulates." (NRC
spokesman Scott Burnell insists that because those fees come to the
NRC through the U.S. Treasury, there's no conflict of interest. "It's not a
case where the industry is handing us a check," he says.)

    Dave Lochbaum, UCS's nuclear-safety expert, believes the problem at
the NRC is a lack of money - and congressional attention. "There have
been more hearings on lunches in the White House," he notes, "than
on whether the NRC's doing a good job."

    The French Connection

    Just as there are arguments against public investment in nuclear
power, there are arguments for it - and one huge living example.
France shifted from oil-burning electric plants to nuclear during the oil
crisis of the early '70s, and over the past 20 years it has invested $160
billion in nuclear programs, making the country the largest exporter of
nuclear electricity in the European Union. Sixteen percent of the world's
nuclear power is generated in France. And where once the French were
buying nuclear technology from the United States, now it's the other
way round: 6 of the 20 applications expected to be submitted to the
NRC before 2010 are for the U.S. Evolutionary Power Reactor (EPR)
designed by the French conglomerate Areva.

    Instead of just two coolant loops like the traditional "Generation II"
reactor, the EPR has four. If one leaks, another kicks in: No more Three
Mile Islands. "The EPR has more defensive depth than reactors created
for the U.S. market," acknowledges Edwin Lyman, a senior scientist at
the UCS.

    His cautious approval of the EPR is significant: Two years ago, Dan
Hirsch of the anti-nuclear group Committee to Bridge the Gap warned
me not to make too much of the alleged environmentalist enthusiasm
for nuclear power. "All of the people supporting it now supported it
before," he argued. "It's not news. But when the Union of Concerned
Scientists comes out in favor of nuclear, now that will be news."

    That hasn't happened exactly: The UCS remains ambivalent about
nuclear power, and its position papers reflect deep worries about the
technology. But as far as the UCS is capable of liking a reactor, it likes
the EPR.

    Lyman stresses that the EPR's improved safety doesn't mean that
Areva "is a warm and fuzzy company." It only means it designed the
EPR to meet the safety standards of the European Union, which happen
to be better than ours. "The NRC's whole presumption is that the
current reactors are safe enough," Lyman explains. "The NRC is afraid
that if it makes too much fuss about how the new ones are safer than
old ones, it will mean that the old ones aren't safe enough.

    "An opportunity is being squandered," he adds. "If this renaissance
is going to happen, you're going to build a new fleet of reactors to last
60, 80, 100 years. Why not lock in a safer reactor design?"

    The $50 Billion Question

    In 1960, the price of a brand-new light-water reactor hovered
around $68 million, just under what it cost to build a new coal plant at
the time. (Actual costs were often higher, but eager manufacturers
offered "turnkey" plants at a fixed price, absorbing any overruns.)
Having recouped their start-up costs, these older reactors now produce
electricity - a fifth of the country's power, all in all - at prices that easily
compete with coal. But a new plant will have a harder time breaking
even: An Areva reactor may start at $3 or $4 billion, already twice as
much as a coal plant, but actual construction costs and interest will
probably boost total plant cost to $9 billion.

    Which is why not a single one will get built without help from the
government, says Craig Nesbit of Chicago-based Exelon. "These are
huge capital projects," he says. "The largest capital projects on a
private scale you can build. We wouldn't be building them without loan
guarantees." Nuclear lobbyists have been asking for $50 billion in such
guarantees, which, they point out, are given to other industries,
including wind and solar: "There's nothing exotic about it," Nesbit says.
Companies also want "production tax credits" for the actual power they
generate, on the order of a penny or two per kilowatt, also akin to wind
energy. So far, Congress has pledged up to $6 billion worth of
production tax credits for new nuclear plants. But in 2007, it capped
loan guarantees for plant construction at $18.5 billion - scarcely enough
to fund a couple of reactors. "We considered that a win for our side,"
says anti-nuclear activist Becker.

    The industry does get another massive taxpayer-funded benefit,
however: Since 1957, plant operators have been protected by the Price-
Anderson Act, which limits their liability in a catastrophic accident. The
2005 energy bill updated the act, which required reactor operators to
carry insurance policies worth $300 million and contribute $95 million to
an accident compensation fund. The rest is covered by taxpayers - not
a bad deal, considering that it cost $1 billion to clean up after Three
Mile Island.

    The debate over whether nuclear power deserves this kind of public
investment is second only to the debate over whether reactors can ever
be safe. Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, long a foe of
nuclear power, argues that "about three-quarters of all electricity we
use in North America can be saved cheaper than just running a coal or
nuclear plant, even if the capital costs of the plant were zero." Lovins
has argued for 30 years that redirecting nuclear investments toward
energy efficiency, solar, wind, or tiny gas turbines that could be located
in every neighborhood would yield carbon-free power much faster,
without the federally mandated insurance policy. Nuclear power, he's
famously said, "is like cutting butter with a chainsaw."

    But wind and solar have still not fully conquered their intermittency
issues: Wind power works only when the wind blows; solar panels are
no good at night. "Distributed micropower" could make progress fast;
efficiency would do even better; and we should look forward to the day
when they put the mammoth, centralized energy providers that feed
our national grid out of business. But given the current economic
structure of our energy market, can any of those things quickly replace
coal? And how fast? Barring a president who can infuse us with the
political will to roll out a Jimmy Carter-style conservation plan, electricity
demand will continue to rise. We may be stuck with our devil of a
dilemma.

    Wasted Promise

    The Atomic Age has left behind many kinds of radioactive garbage,
from the rags that mopped up hot spills to the concrete from
decommissioned reactors to the liquid residue of plutonium warheads.
Some is low-level waste, already tucked away in various locations, from
Hanford in southwestern Washington state to Barnwellin South Carolina.
The waste fuel from nuclear reactors is high-level stuff that will remain
dangerously radioactive for millions of years. In volume it's not that
much: All the detritus from a half-century of civilian nuclear power "can
fit on a football field piled six meters high," says Harold McFarlane,
deputy associate laboratory director for nuclear programs at Idaho
National Laboratory. "It grows at about three yards a year [in length]."
But we still have no place to put it.

    Since Congress in 1987 picked Yucca Mountain as the repository for
the country's high-level waste, the state of Nevada has sued several
times to block it, mostly on the grounds that the Department of Energy
relied on bad science to select the spot: Among other things, an
earthquake fault runs under it, and water percolates through the
porous volcanic tuff. (When I visited after a wet desert winter in 2005,
Yucca - which the feds have always characterized as arid - was
positively green.)

    The repository's most recent opening date was set for 2017. But that
date "is clearly out the window," says Ward Sproat, who directs the
Yucca project for the DOE. "Based on what I'm seeing right now it's a
two- to three-year slip from that." Others predict that the $11 billion
facility won't open at all. Still, the DOE has announced that it will file its
long-awaited license application in June. For now, nearly all the nation's
spent-fuel assemblies sit at individual reactor sites in water-filled basins
about the size of swimming pools but 30 feet deeper, and reinforced
with concrete. Most of the pools are close to full and, according to a
2002 report by the National Academy of Sciences, vulnerable to terrorist
attack.

    If Yucca Mountain ever does open, another perplexing problem
emerges: transporting waste from the 200-plus reactors around the
country. Trains can come off their rails; sabotage and hijackings
happen. According to a map the state of Nevada circulates, only the
Dakotas, Montana, and Rhode Island lie outside planned nuclear waste
transportation routes.

    DOE spokesman Allen Benson, who gives tours of Yucca Mountain to
journalists, contends that "we've been shipping nuclear waste around
the country since the beginning of the atomic age." Still, the DOE
intends to build a dedicated rail line 300 miles into the Nevada desert
and instruct residents along its route in how to respond to emergencies.
Everyone along the route will know where those trains are going. And
what they carry.

    Dirty Recycling

    So why don't we do like they do in France, where they recycle the
fuel from their own 59 reactors, along with some from other countries,
into neat little piles of useful radionuclides? By dissolving nuclear waste
in acids and separating the isotopes, they can reduce 20 years' waste
from a family of four's electricity use to a glasslike nugget the size of a
cigarette lighter.

    France's eager embrace of nuclear technology has yielded some
spectacular benefits. The country, which relies on nuclear for nearly 80
percent of its electricity, emits only two tons of carbon dioxide per
person per year, less than half the U.S. load. But its reprocessing
operations, as with Britain's notoriously leaky site at Sellafield, have
racked up such a roster of problems that in the United States they'd be
shut down as gross violators of the Clean Water Act. Every year Areva,
the French conglomerate that handles reprocessing, dumps so much
radioactive liquid into the Channel that, says Lochbaum of the Union of
Concerned Scientists, "there are certain beaches where the effluent
pipe is where you can get a suntan at night.

    "I'm not going to say the French are 'no blood, no foul,'" Lochbaum
told me, "but they're not quite as concerned about effluents as we are.
They tend to believe more in 'the solution to pollution is dilution.'" They
are, however, in violation of European Union pollution regulations -
largely because the waste contains the dangerous isotope technetium,
which so far no one has found a way to remove.

    "Ten European governments have come together to get them to
stop, saying, 'You're polluting all the way to the Arctic,'" says Arjun
Makhijani of the watchdog group Institute for Energy and
Environmental Research. "But they haven't stopped. They haven't
stopped because there's no way for them to stop."

    The dumping has grim consequences. In 1997, researchers
surveying children and young people who lived near the Normandy
Coast town of La Hague where reprocessing takes place found a
correlation between beach visits and leukemia risk. Yet Areva continues
to argue that its operations have "zero impact" on the environment.

    In addition to pollution problems, the reprocessing of nuclear waste
isolates plutonium. Currently, France has 80 tons of it socked away,
enough to make 10,000 nuclear bombs. "They store it in what looks like
11,000 sugar cans," says Makhijani. "It's a huge security issue." In
1974, India made its first nuclear bomb with plutonium skimmed off
reprocessed nuclear waste. For that reason, President Gerald Ford
placed a temporary hold on the technology in 1976, a hold President
Carter turned into a ban.

    Nevertheless, the 2009 federal budget request includes $301.5
million for research into reprocessing technologies. For a nuclear future
to flower, industry executives want assurances that the waste problem
won't continue to haunt them. "Unless we see a clear path," says
Exelon's Craig Nesbit, "we don't believe that we or anyone else should
be building new nuclear plants. We don't think it's right to saddle a
community with more high-level spent fuel than already exists."

    Breeding Reactors

    In his 1974 book The Curve of Binding Energy, John McPhee
speculated that by the end of the 20th century, reactors using nuclear
fusion - the kind of reaction that powers the sun - would be in
operation, "and the energy crisis will cease to be a crisis for many
millions of years."

    Okay, so that hasn't happened. But what if a nuclear reactor could
be invented that was safe, sustainable, and clean, even using plain old
fission? What if it could reuse spent fuel until it was no longer
dangerous, curtailing the pesky problems of waste, mining, and a finite
uranium supply all at once?

    These are the questions du jour of research facilities around the
world, places like Idaho National Laboratory, which sprawls over 890
square miles of desert land bounded by some of America's most prized
national parks. In the 1950s and '60s, it was a bustling facility, drawing
the best in young talent from the world's science academies. Now, says
nuclear programs director Harold McFarlane, the lab - which has
expanded into other fields, such as biotechnology and alternative
energy - is back full bore in the nuclear business, bolstered by federal
programs to encourage the development of "Generation IV" reactors.
(The 2009 budget request includes $70 million for such programs.)

    One reactor in the offing, the Next Generation Nuclear Plant, can be
cooled with helium instead of water and might be capable of producing
industrial hydrogen to power emission-free cars and other power plants.
Another, the Advanced Fast Reactor, can burn up the radioactive
elements that remain behind in a light-water reactor. Other countries -
India, China, South Africa - are working on their own prototypes.
"There's also a great deal of interest in designing smaller reactors for
developing nations," McFarlane says, "anywhere from 20 megawatts to
600 megawatts, to provide distributed power to outlying areas."

    McFarlane has noticed that nuclear engineering has become a hot
major in college again. "We're seeing a fantastic increase in
undergraduate enrollment," he says. "A lot of universities are reinstating
nuclear engineering programs they dropped back in the '80s and '90s."

    The Ultimatum

    When Tom Alexander recommended nuclear power as a hedge
against climate catastrophe 30 years ago, he did so not because it was
perfect, but because he thought that with better information its
imperfections could be addressed. He was no industry shill; he also
blasted the Reagan administration for blowing $10 billion on a badly
conceived uranium-enrichment plant, and the government in general,
whose "inability to untangle its licensing, fuel, and waste-storage
policies has all but destroyed the electrical companies' brief infatuation
with nuclear power." As with the early proponents of nuclear power
(who in the 1940s staged sit-ins and hunger strikes to call for the
"peaceful uses of atomic fission"), Alexander believed that there was a
way to apply atomic technology against poverty, environmental collapse,
and certain doom.

    Alexander died in 2005 at the age of 74, never writing one last story
to say he told us so: We shouldn't have built so many coal plants. And
just maybe, instead of destroying that "brief infatuation with nuclear
power," we should have fixed the nuclear industry instead.

    The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns of global
mayhem should we fail to cut our carbon emissions in half by
midcentury. For nuclear power to make a significant dent in the U.S.
carbon footprint, the Colorado-based Keystone Center for Science and
Public Policy reported last year, we would have to build five new 1,000
megawatt reactors every year for the next half-century.

    "The world we have made as a result of a level of thinking we have
done thus far creates problems we cannot solve at the same level at
which we created them," said Albert Einstein. In other words, we have
driven ourselves into a technological quagmire. There is no easy route
back, but there may be many paths forward. Nuclear power is
expensive, flawed, dangerous, and finicky; it depends on humans to
run properly, and when those humans err, the consequences are worse
than the worst accident involving any other energy source. If there isn't
a way to do it right, let's abandon it - but only because we're secure in
the belief that we can replace coal-fired electricity with energy from the
wind, the sun, and the earth. When rising seas flood our coasts, the
idea of producing electricity from the most terrifying force ever
harnessed may not seem so frightening - or expensive - after all.

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