One of the more contentious proposals in President Barack Obama’s 2011 budget request is for a considerable increase in nuclear power investment and management.
Such an increase might seem counterintuitive while emotions run high in the wake of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster, but intuition isn’t the best guide to sound policy.
As a staunch conservative, it might be a bit unsettling to have the Obama administration side with me rather than Greenpeace, but it is also very heartening and refreshing.
If we are to make any progress on limiting our dreaded carbon footprint or decreasing energy dependence, nuclear power has to play a big role.
As it stands, 20 percent of America’s electricity generation comes from nuclear power plants that contribute absolutely nothing to carbon emissions, take up a tiny fraction of the space required for wind and solar farms and expose even the nearest residents to only 1/50 of the naturally occurring cosmic radiation in Denver, Colorado.
Are there drawbacks and risks involved? Of course. But it’s important to recognize that every currently available energy source comes at a cost and the demand for energy is only going to increase.
Nuclear power should be judged based upon its relative cost/benefit ratio and not written off for its imperfections.
Critics say that nuclear power is simply too dangerous. They bolster their argument by citing Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and now Fukushima. Don’t such accidents demonstrate that harm is inevitable and so disastrous as to offset any benefits?
Let’s consider each case.
The incident at Chernobyl in Ukraine was the result of poor design and lax safety standards under the Soviet Union; it does not warrant comparison to the strict regulation and high priority on safety seen in the U.S.
One reason the Chernobyl disaster was so dramatic was because the reactor that exploded wasn’t encased by a containment structure — a ubiquitous feature at American nuclear power plants.
As for Three Mile Island, which we are often led to believe took us to the brink of Armageddon, there were no deaths and, according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, radiological exposure to the surrounding community averaged 1 millirem per person.
The exposure from a chest x-ray is about 6 millirem — getting an x-ray is more dangerous than being present at Three Mile Island.
Fukushima was the result not only of the largest earthquake on record, but of a massive tsunami that wiped out backup measures for providing power to cooling pumps. The highly criticized 1960s-era Mark 1 reactor design, used at Fukushima, has been widely blamed for the failure.
Some Mark 1 reactors remain operational in the U.S. and the appropriateness of their continued use is a legitimate question, but the failure of one outdated reactor under exceptional circumstances in Japan is not an argument for scrapping investment in modern nuclear power technology here.
None of this is to say that some level of nuclear disaster is impossible in America. The point is that a society that so readily accepts massive pollution and the death of coal miners from cave-ins and black lung in exchange for coal power ought to reconsider its sometimes-hysterical opposition to nuclear power.
Reach David at dcolthar@asu.edu
