Reconsidering Nuclear Power

Even before the colossal oil spill off Louisiana highlighted the downside of fossil fuels (as if we needed reminding), nuclear energy was looking better to me. In a previous column, “No More Nukes,” I criticised President Barack Obama for trying to revive nuclear power. Nuclear-energy materials, equipment and expertise can be diverted toward building nuclear weapons, I argued, and every reactor and waste repository represents a potential dirty bomb.

Then Rod Adams emailed me. Adams is a U.S. Navy officer and who served on nuclear submarines, founded a firm to promote small reactors and blogs about nuclear power at Atomic Insights. Adams asked if he could talk to me to make the case for nuclear power, and I agreed. Here are some of the points that Adams made in our hour-long conversation:

- Nuclear energy, far from undermining anti-proliferation efforts, can supplement them. Shortly after the Cold War ended, the U.S. started buying warheads from Russia and converting the weapons-grade uranium into fuel suitable for commercial reactors. This so-called Megatons to Megawatts Program has eliminated 15,000 Russian warheads over the last 18 years. Ten percent of the electricity produced in the U.S. over the past decade stems from Russian warheads. The program will soon start consuming Russian plutonium as well as uranium. “It’s an amazing example of beating swords into plowshares,” Adam said.

- Nuclear waste can be viewed as a feature, not a bug, of nuclear energy. First of all, spent fuel rods from a typical plant cannot easily be converted into weapons-grade explosives. “The mixture of isotopes of just way too complicated to be able to effectively do that,” Adams said. But spent reactor fuel, which still contains more than 90 per cent of its potential energy, can be reprocessed to make it reusable as fuel. “There is an enormous amount of energy in the 60,000 or so tons of used nuclear material in the U.S.,” Adams said. The 900,000 tons of uranium waste generated by the U.S. nuclear-weapons program represents an even larger potential source of energy, “more than all our oil, coal and natural gas combined,” Adams said.

- Terrorists cannot easily blow up nuclear plants to create dirty bombs. Reactor vessels and waste-containment pools are heavily guarded, and they offer much smaller targets for planes than the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which terrorists struck on 9/11. If a plane did smash into a reactor containment shell, it would probably not penetrate it; the shells typically consist of concrete 3-4 feet thick reinforced by iron rebar as thick as a man’s forearm. A test by Sandia National Laboratory showed that an F4 jet, which is denser than a commercial airliner, simply vaporised when it struck a reinforced concrete wall.

- The spread of nuclear power need not lead to nuclear-weapons proliferation. Many countries that have nuclear-power plants do not possess weapons. And almost every country that has nuclear weapons today acquired them before acquiring nuclear reactors. (India is sometimes cited as an exception to this rule.) More importantly, nuclear power can promote peace by making nations less reliant on outside sources for energy. “Historically, you can write the history of world conflicts over the past 100 years as a battle over resources,” Adams said.

- Nuclear energy is cheaper as well as cleaner than fossil fuels. Adams cited these statistics from the Nuclear Energy Institute: The average production cost from a US nuclear power plant in 2008 was 1.87 cents per kilowatt hour, much less than coal (2.75 cents) or natural gas (8.09 cents). The nuclear-energy costs include “labor, material & supplies, contractor services, licensing fees, and miscellaneous costs such as employee expenses and regulatory fees… amortised costs associated with the purchasing of uranium, conversion, enrichment, and fabrication services along with storage and shipment costs, and inventory (including interest) charges less any expected salvage value.” Adams believes that the costs of nuclear power could be reduced much further by small, mass-produced reactors.

I still dream of a breakthrough in solar energy that gives us a truly clean, cheap, inexhaustible source of energy. But Rod Adams has forced me to reconsider the nuclear option.

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