Organizing for America | Steve Molnar's Blog: Some Amazing Facts about Nuclear Power

Some Amazing Facts about Nuclear Power

By Nevada - Jun 29th, 2009 at 9:21 pm EDT

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American public has been led to believe that nuclear power is extremely dangerous and that nuclear waste disposal is an unsolved problem. Those beliefs are based on preposterous distortions perpetrated by irrational environmentalists and an irresponsible mass media. In reality, a reactor meltdown would have to occur every two weeks to make nuclear power as deadly as the routine emissions from coal-fired power, from which we get about half of our electric power in the United States. (Note: some newer nuclear power plant designs cannot possibly meltdown.) And if the United States went completely nuclear for all its electric power for 10,000 years, the amount of land needed for waste disposal would be about what is needed for the coal ash that is currently generated every two weeks.Anti-nuclear activists like to scare us with horror stories about the "thousands of tons of nuclear waste" that have been produced since nuclear power began some four decades ago. That sounds like a lot -- until you put it into perspective, which anti-nuclear activists and the mass media never do. Consider that one pound of plutonium can produce as much energy as the Yankee Stadium full of coal. And coal-fired power generates something like 100 million tons of waste annually in the United States, or about three tons of ash per second. Every few hours, more coal ash is generated than high-level nuclear waste has been generated in four decades!Oh, but nuclear waste is far more dangerous than coal waste, isn't it? Actually, it isn't. For a given amount of energy produced, coal ash is actually more radioactive than nuclear waste. How can that be? Simple. The quantity of coal ash is literally millions of times greater than the corresponding quantity of nuclear waste, so even though the radioactive intensity of the coal ash is much less, the overall amount of radiation and radioactive matter is greater.But nobody worries much about the radioactivity of coal ash because the chemicals in it are far more dangerous. They include several thousand tons per year of mercury and other heavy metals, along with huge amounts of lead, arsenic, and asbestos, for example. Yet even the huge quantities of chemical waste in coal ash are of little concern compared to the gaseous emissions from burning coal, which kill an estimated 10,000 to 50,000 Americans every year, depending on which study you believe. As a point of reference, even the lower estimate approaches the rate at which Americans died in the Viet Nam war, and the higher estimate greatly exceeds it, yet the media rarely report on those deaths.So let's get this straight. For a given amount of energy produced, coal waste has more radioactive matter than nuclear waste, yet the radioactivity of coal waste is nowhere near as dangerous as the solid chemical waste, which in turn is nowhere near as dangerous as the gaseous emissions. Are you starting to get the picture yet?But even those staggering figures fail to capture the major environmental advantages of nuclear power over coal-fired power. Why? Because the solid and gaseous emissions from coal burning are generated in such a huge quantity that they cannot possibly be contained. They can only be spewed into the atmosphere and dumped into shallow landfills. There is no conceivable way to isolate waste that is generated at the rate of three tons per second. Nuclear waste, on the other hand, is so miniscule in comparison that it can be almost completely isolated from the environment at a very modest cost. And even though that cost has been greatly inflated by the anti-nuclear hysteria, it is still very manageable.If all the high-level nuclear waste that has ever been generated were simply dumped into the middle of the ocean, it would be many thousands of times less harmful than the coal waste generated over the same period. But the nuclear waste is so miniscule in quantity that it can be isolated almost completely from the environment. In fact, that is exactly what is being done all over the world. Basic technology exists to convert nuclear waste into a solid, water-impermeable glass form, encase it into stainless-steel-lined concrete containers, and put it thousands of feet underground where water hasn't flowed for hundreds of thousands of years. And nuclear power produces no gaseous emissions, of course.Yet, amazingly, a large percentage of the American public has been hoodwinked into believing that nuclear waste disposal is an "unsolved" problem. In order to perpetuate the absurd mythology of nuclear waste, anti-nuclear extremists have concocted the absurd idea of a "nuclear priesthood" to warn people of the dangers of buried nuclear waste thousands of years in the future. Never mind that coal waste contains more overall radioactivity and is not contained at all. The idea of a "nuclear priesthood" is based on another absurd anti-nuclear distortion: the idea that nuclear waste is "dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years."Oh yes, nuclear waste would indeed be "dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years" if we were stupid enough to leave it lying around untreated, but did someone forget to mention that coal ash is dangerous forever? That's right: solid chemical waste never decays. It will be as dangerous in ten million years as it was the day it was generated. And there is so much of it that we have no choice but to leave it lying around untreated. So do we need”coal-ash priesthood"? Only if we've lost our sanity and common sense. Note, incidentally, that uranium comes from the ground in the first place, where it is neither encased in stainless-steel-lined concrete containers nor isolated from groundwater.The whole notion that nuclear waste is "dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years" is fundamentally misleading. Nuclear waste contains a combination of many radioactive materials with a wide range of half-lives, ranging from a fraction of a second to millions of years. The short-lived materials radiate very intensely but for a short period of time (they are safely dissipated at the power plant long before they are ever put into long-term storage). The long-lived materials such as uranium and plutonium, on the other hand, radiate for a very long time but at an extremely low level -- so low that their danger is essentially chemical. The materials with intermediate half-lives on the order of a few decades are the most problematic, but even they are easily manageable.Coal-fired power is many thousands of times more dangerous and harmful to the environment than nuclear power. Does that mean coal-fired power should be stopped? Absolutely not. Even coal-fired power is far better than no power at all. Without economical electric power, we will rapidly degenerate into a third-world nation, and average lifespan will drop precipitously. Even though emissions from coal-fired power cost many lives, the net effect of coal-fired power is to extend average lifespan. The point is not that coal-fired power is bad, but rather that nuclear power is thousands of times cleaner and safer. And the fact that so many so-called "environmentalists" vociferously oppose nuclear power -- even while they agitate for draconian measures to stop "global warming" -- should tell you something about them: they are either ignorant or they have ulterior ideological motives -- or both.

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