How Clean Is Nuclear Energy?

A CUB member recently called and left us a phone message with this question: Why wasn’t nuclear power included in the recent CUB report (Bear Facts Summer 2006) on the Clean Energy Agenda we are working to put together for the 2007 Legislative Session? This member said he understood that environmentalists had safety concerns about nuclear waste storage, but he cited the following as reason to open the debate again: “The Bush administration will open negotiations with Russia on a long-discussed civilian nuclear agreement that is to pave the way for Russia to become one of the world’s largest repositories of spent nuclear fuel.” (New York Times, 7/09/06.)

With global warming threatening the future health of the entire planet (seen Inconvenient Truth yet?), a significant group of people believe that nuclear power—which contributes fewer greenhouse gas emissions—needs to be part of the energy discussion. According to Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy, “If well managed, nuclear energy is a very clean energy, does not reject polluting gases in the atmosphere, uses very few construction materials (per kWh) compared to solar & wind energy, produces very little waste (almost totally confined), and does not contribute to the greenhouse effect (no carbon dioxide).”

However, concerns about a nuclear waste repository in Russia remain: “The United States has traditionally opposed any such arrangement, in part because of concerns about the safety of Russian nuclear facilities, and because the country has helped Iran build its first major nuclear reactor.” (New York Times, 7/09/06.) Columnist Jim Hoagland further discusses the fact that: “[T]he planned Russian nuclear expansion has not been widely publicized by the Kremlin in this 20th-anniversary year of the Chernobyl meltdown. That disaster immediately caused more than 30 deaths, the evacuation of 135,000 people from the region and a global panic about the safety of nuclear reactors. Bush noted May 24 that no new atomic energy plants ... have been approved in the United States since the 1970s.” (Washington Post, 07/14/06.)

To a great extent the de facto ban on new nuclear power generation in the U.S. has been fallout (forgive the pun) from the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979. With that incident, America got a taste of the possibility of nuclear meltdown, but the American experience of meltdown was minor compared to the 1986 catastrophe which occurred at Chernobyl. In addition to the immediate and longer-term deaths due to exposure to radiation from Chernobyl (in parts of Belarus the cancer morbidity rate increased by more than 50%), vast swathes of land became uninhabitable, and people as far away as Scandinavia were told not to drink milk, since the cows who produced it were breathing in contaminated air that had traveled from the scene of the nuclear disaster. Here in Oregon, lawyer Greg Kafoury worked as an activist against PGE’s Trojan nuclear power plant for many years, and had this to say about the Oregon nuke’s many safety issues: “We were one broken pipe away from Chernobyl.” (Willamette Week, 3/09/05.)

Nuclear catastrophe aside, concerns about nuclear power and its accompanying radioactive waste products are more generally articulated in a 2003 report produced by MIT on “The Future of Nuclear Energy.” The report states: “[T]he prospects for nuclear energy as an option are limited, the report finds, by four unresolved problems: high relative costs; perceived adverse safety, environmental, and health effects; potential security risks stemming from proliferation; and unresolved challenges in long-term management of nuclear wastes.” [Italics in original.]

To call nuclear power “clean” may seem like a stretch when you take into account that it produces a waste product that remains toxic for a very long time. “One of the major problems associated with radioactive waste is the fact that much of it will be radioactive—and thus will require isolation from the human environment—for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years. Since this is a time period far longer than all of recorded history, the problem of waste disposal presents an enormous challenge.” IEER On-Line Classroom. You may recall that Oregon voters passed a law in 1980 prohibiting the construction of more nuclear power plants, until the problem of safe nuclear waste storage had been solved, and even then citizens reserved the right to vote on it. Yucca Mountain in Nevada has become a battleground in the debate, wherein locals and Nevada Congresspeople have fought against a proposed nuclear waste siting, while others in Washington D.C. have promoted it as a fine solution to the problem. Suggesting that Russia play the role of nuclear waste repository does effectively solve the “not in my backyard” problem seemingly inherent in the use of radioactive material, but raises a whole host of other questions about international transport, foreign military usage of nuclear weapons, and the basic issue of whether—in a global economy and global ecology—any place on Earth should become a nuclear by-product dumping ground.

Proponents argue that the “new generation” of nuclear power will be safer and cleaner than ever before. But who wants their community to be the test subjects? Oregon has already had a spotty history with nuclear energy. At the time voters passed the “no new nukes” law, Oregon’s only nuclear plant, Trojan, was undergoing safety and maintenance problems, and the law stopped construction of Pebble Springs, the next nuclear plant on PGE’s agenda. Trojan has since been closed down (and was recently demolished) after serving only half of its expected power-generating life. After the failure of Trojan and Pebble Springs nuclear facilities, and after the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS) went into default on their nuclear program, utilities in the region are not proposing new nuclear plants and might not be able to get financing approved to cover the costs of building them.

We at CUB are advocates of clean, affordable energy, and as such we are willing to look closely at any and all functioning power options. With the Northwest’s existing base of hydroelectric plants, and its potential for economic wind power, and with an abundance of solar and geothermal resources, it is doubtful that nuclear power will revive itself in this region. We are skeptical about the so-called “new generation” of nukes, since the fact remains that any nuclear power production will still burden many generations of humans to come with deadly radioactive waste. This is not an energy source with which we feel it is wise (or in Public Utility Commission lingo, “prudent”) to be cutting edge. As CUB Executive Director Bob Jenks puts it, “We like sleepy little utilities that make efficient use of proven technologies.”

Most importantly, we still have thousands of Average Megawatt Hours (aMWh) of energy efficiency to be achieved, by far the cheapest and cleanest energy gain of all. Where energy efficiency falls short, we believe that wind and other renewable resources can produce additional thousands of aMWh to power our homes and businesses. Many options lie before us, but nuclear is way down at the bottom of our list. We maintain that nuclear energy does not belong in Oregon’s Clean Energy Agenda. Free of carbon emissions it may be, but trouble-free it is not. CUB believes that the safety risks, cost risks, and legal obstacles for nuclear power in Oregon outweigh the benefits.

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