NUCLEAR FISSION: THE MOST WASTEFUL, STUPID, AND COSTLY SYSTEM FOR BOILING WATER

By Hazel Henderson and - - Reprint | | Print |

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SAINT AUGUSTINE, Apr 5 2011 (IPS) - I have opposed nuclear power since my service on the US Congress Office of Technology Assessment Advisory Council, from 1975 until 1980. Even back then it was clear that nuclear power was a fearsome military technology looking for a civilian second life. President Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” was a strategy devised to subsidise this technology, despite the fact that it was never economically viable. The public was told that it would produce electricity too cheap to meter but it was never given all the facts: that there were health risks and no plans to provide storage for the spent fuel rods, which would be radioactive for centuries.

Strange for a society as dedicated to the “free market” as the US, nuclear power was the first truly socialist industry, created by government, given billions in taxpayer subsidies, and indemnified from all risks of accidents by the now-infamous Price-Anderson Act, which protects nuclear power operators from all liability by foisting it onto taxpayers and future generations. Thus, the private power companies operating nuclear plants can garner the profits while the risks are socialised.

There is still no solution for the safe long-term storage of radioactive nuclear waste, of which the US has 71,000 metric tonnes sitting in pools of water alongside most reactors. This seems to be the case in Japan’s Fukushima reactors as well. And even if a safe location for storage is ever found, this waste is difficult and hazardous to transport. Moveover, nuclear plants need to be de-commissioned after 25-30 years, even though many, like the crippled Japanese reactors, are almost 40 years old. De-commissioning is estimated to cost about as much as building the plants.

But the most important point to make is that, according to many well-researched studies (see www.EthicalMarkets.com and www.greentransitionscoreboard.com), nuclear power plants are simply not needed. The Scoreboard, which totals all private investment since 2007 in growing green, cleaner energy worldwide (which topped USD 2 trillion in February, 2011) shows that a combination of ramping up investments in energy-efficiency, solar thermal central plants (power towers) and photovoltaics (rooftop panels, new roof tiles), wind turbines, and water and geothermal energy, makes these technologies cost-competitive even when the massive subsidies to nuclear and fossil energy are factored in. Not only are wind and solar far more cost effective, they can be built and brought online in a matter of months, as opposed to the ten years it takes on average to build a nuclear plant. In addition there is the availability of geothermal power, especially in Japan and Iceland, countries that sit on the boundaries between tectonic plates.

The fundamental case against nuclear power is that fission is simply the most wasteful, stupid, and costly system for boiling water. Electricity is usually generated by boiling water and using the steam this creates to drive turbines to produce flows of electrons. The water can be boiled with oil, gas, coal, solar, wind, or geothermal power, which are the simpler methods that have been used for most of the Industrial Era. Building a vast, costly nuclear plant, digging up uranium and using coal to enrich it, shipping it by rail to the nuclear reactor is the staggeringly cumbersome and mindless way of boiling water!

Moreover, the argument that nuclear power is somehow climate friendly is bogus, in spite of the industry’s efforts to present itself as “carbon-free” -which it clearly is not. In the last count, as Ervin Laszlo suggests in his “Pact with the Devil” for The Huffington Post and on his site www.burningissuesforum.com, “nuclear future” is an oxymoron, and it is irresponsible.

Once all the social and environmental costs and health risks are properly assessed and the nuclear subsidies are suspended, we will see how wrong governments were to back nuclear power. We will also see how unjust it was to allow these external costs to be passed on to taxpayers and future generations. After Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and now Fukushima, as well as the hundreds of near-miss accidents, many of them un-reported, economists will no longer be able to call these costs “externalities” (a Freudian slip!), or claim that they were unexpected. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Hazel Henderson, the author of numerous books, is president of Ethical Markets Media (US and Brazil) and co-developed with the Calvert Group the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators ( www.calvert-henderson.com) and co-authored “Qualitative Growth” (2009).