Atomic Dreams
(Page 4 of 9)
January / February 2008
by Jason Mark, from Earth Island Journal
A chorus of pundits, among them New York Times columnists Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof, have said that it’s time to expand nuclear power production to head off carbon emissions. Some members of Congress are rethinking their positions. Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California, long a skeptic of nuclear energy, appears to be shifting. She recently said in a statement that “if we can be assured that new technologies help to produce nuclear energy safely and cleanly, then I think we have to take a look at it.” Al Gore says nuclear energy should be a “small part” of the climate solution.
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Even as debate churns in the newspapers, there is a striking amount of unanimity among the leading environmental organizations that nuclear power is not a smart way to address climate change. The National Wildlife Federation, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) are among the many groups arguing that there are quicker and cheaper ways to reduce greenhouse gases. What the industry heralds as a “revival” these groups dub a “relapse.”
“Nuclear power is the most expensive way to make minor emissions cuts,” says Michael Mariotte, executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. “You add this to all of nuclear power’s other problems—safety and proliferation and radioactive waste—and it’s not a good solution.”
Josh Dorner, a spokesman for the Sierra Club, agrees. “The industry is putting lipstick on a pig here,” he says. “Solving one problem and creating another isn’t a durable solution. It doesn’t make sense to solve global warming by creating a ton of nuclear waste that we don’t know what to do with.”
More than 50 years after the establishment of the civilian atomic energy program, the country still lacks a safe way to handle the radioactive waste formed during the fission process. Waste is stored at the individual power stations, an arrangement that no one—including the nuclear plant operators—believes is a long-term solution. “Long term” in this case means 10,000 years, the time the government says a waste repository needs to contain spent nuclear fuel. Many environmentalists say even that mind-boggling time frame is too short, since some waste will be dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years.
Industry representatives and federal officials have fought to build a single national nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert. Recent studies, however, show that the mountain, formerly believed to be bone dry, may leak water, which would make it an unacceptable vault. Another major concern about waste storage is the logistical nightmare of relocating tons of spent fuel to Yucca Mountain. The most optimistic scenario doesn’t envision Yucca Mountain’s opening until 2017.
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