Say NO! to Nuclear Power and to Coal

by Mark Haim

In December 2005 Ameren CEO Gary Rainwater announced that the utility was actively considering building a new nuclear plant in Callaway County. Twenty years ago, this would have stirred major controversy. Unfortunately, to date the potential of a new nuke in our midst has drawn only a minimal reaction from Missourians, including the environmental community.

Nuclear power was originally sold to the American people as a source of limitless, clean energy that would be so abundant, it would be “too cheap to meter.” By the time I became a young adult in the early 1970s Richard Nixon was telling us that the United States would have 1,000 large nuclear plants installed by the year 2000. By then, however, many of us had learned not to trust what people like Nixon were telling us.

By the mid-1970s the once bright hope sold to a generation of baby boomers and our parents came crashing down as the realities of nuclear safety, routine radiation releases, worker contamination, potential meltdowns, mill tailings and the unresolved—perhaps irresolvable—nuclear waste quandary began to sink in to public awareness. Soon, instead of cheering crowds at ribbon cuttings, there were mass demonstrations, legal interventions, public debates, and grassroots safe energy organizations springing up all across the nation.

While the public rejected nukes based on waste, health and safety concerns, the utilities stopped ordering them because they were just too expensive. The last nuclear plant completed was ordered in 1973.

Today there are 103 aging nukes in the U.S. and we face a clear choice. We can gradually phase them out, moving forward to safer, more sustainable options, or we can buy the industry line that nuclear power is safer and more economical than ever, preferable to coal and a major part of the answer to global climate change.

Nuclear Revival? Nuclear Realities
While the Bush administration and the nuclear vendors are pushing new nukes full throttle, and sweetening the deal for the utilities with billions in new tax-funded subsidies, the reality is that:

1. Nuclear power’s problems have not gone away. No country has yet to establish a safe solution to the nuclear waste dilemma. Radiation is still being released—routinely and accidentally—from the plants and from each step in the fuel cycle. Catastrophic accidents are still possible.
2. The straw man argument pitting nukes against coal is bogus. The real choice is between the safe, sustainable path to an energy future based upon efficiency and renewables like wind and solar power, or the centralized, polluting path based upon coal, nukes and other destructive technologies, like shale and tar sands.
3. The claim that nuclear power is “climate friendly” is false. While the plants don’t release CO2, the overall process of producing electricity from uranium releases substantial quantities of greenhouse gases. The amount of CO2 will only rise if we revive the nuclear industry and therefore need to begin using lower grade uranium ore which takes far more fossil fuel to extract and process. We actually can cut CO2 emissions seven times more cost effectively through investments in efficiency and nearly twice as cheaply through investments in wind.
4. Nuclear power plants, waste facilities and transportation present a unique set of additional risks that include providing terrorist targets, proliferation risks, sabotage and diversion risks, etc. 
   Divide and Conquer?

We in the environmental community can’t let ourselves be fooled by the utilities’ scare tactics. It’s just plain wrong to accept the notion that if we don’t support them building new nukes, they will build new coal plants instead. We shouldn’t let ourselves be trapped into thinking that we need to choose between two dirty, dangerous technologies.

The potential for cutting energy consumption is vast. According to the Rocky Mountain Institute, just by investing in efficient lighting, we could shut down 120 large plants the size of Callaway I, saving massive environmental impacts and $30 billion a year in fuel and operating costs.

A Pacific Northwest National Laboratory study determined that, in the U.S., wind power alone, sited in environmentally acceptable locations, could supply more than three times current electric consumption. A June 2005 study by Cristina L. Archer and Mark Z. Jacobson published in the Journal of Geophysical Research found that globally, if we harvested just 20 percent of the available wind power, we could produce energy equal to all the world’s current usage in all forms, or more than seven times current electrical consumption.

Space precludes a more comprehensive analysis, but the bottom line is that there is plenty of clean, sustainable energy in many forms to meet our needs. We just need to invest in it.

Mark Haim is Director of Mid-Missouri Peaceworks and a co-founder of Missourians for Safe Energy. He can be contacted at mail@mosafeenergy.orËVgZ at (573) 875-0539.

Sierra Club’s Nuclear Power Policy has remained essentially unchanged for 30 years.

• In practice, nuclear power is neither safe nor affordable.

• Mining uranium risks worker’s lives and leaves behind toxic remains;

• current power plant technology is highly risky and vulnerable to terrorism;

• the waste transportation, security and storage problems remain unsolved;

• the industry is heavily subsidized everywhere it operates;

• and reliance upon the nuclear fuel cycle leaves the world permanently vulnerable to nuclear weapons proliferation and nuclear terrorism.