The rise of the nuclear greens
The emergence of the pronuclear Greens represents an important schism in modern environmentalism. For decades, groups like the Sierra Club and Greenpeace have pushed an antinuclear agenda and contended that the only energy path for the future is the widespread deployment of wind turbines and solar panels. But fear of carbon emissions and climate change has catalyzed a major rethinking. As Brand puts it in a new documentary, Pandora’s Promise, which explores the conversion of antinuclear activists to the pronuclear side: “The question is often asked, ‘Can you be an environmentalist and be pronuclear?’ I would turn that around and say, ‘In light of climate change, can you be an environmentalist and not be pronuclear?’ ”
Newfound support can only help the nuclear-energy sector, but it remains to be seen whether nuclear will play a major role in the burgeoning global electricity market, which has grown by about 3 percent per year since 1985. It’s already clear that the Greens’ pronuclear stance won’t have a significant impact on the American electricity market over the next decade or so, for a simple reason: the shale-gas revolution here has produced abundant supplies of low-cost natural gas. In 2010, one of the largest electric utilities in the country, Exelon, said that for new nuclear projects to be economically viable, natural gas would have to cost at least $8 per million Btu. Today, the price is about $3.50, and the shale-gas boom means that a price anywhere near $8 is exceedingly unlikely for years to come. Four nuclear reactors are now being built in the United States—the Vogtle 3 and 4 reactors in Georgia and the Summer 2 and 3 reactors in South Carolina—but the projects are going forward only because regulators in those states have allowed the utilities that own them to recover costs from ratepayers before the projects are finished.
Blowback
Note from Hot Air management: This section is for comments from Hot Air's community of registered readers. Please don't assume that Hot Air management agrees with or otherwise endorses any particular comment just because we let it stand. A reminder: Anyone who fails to comply with our terms of use may lose their posting privilege.
Trackbacks/Pings
Trackback URL
Comments
So true. No one can (rationally) take the Greens seriously on energy so long as they oppose nuclear.
petefrt on March 8, 2013 at 10:23 PM
Exactly; because sans nuclear power there is absolutely no way to power a first-world society. None. Wind & solar are supplementary ONLY, and hydro is limited by where the water is.
Although honestly I’d rather live next to just about any different kind of power plant…I’d sleep much easier knowing there was never even the tiniest chance of terrorists trying to steal the fuel to make a bomb or of a meltdown.
MelonCollie on March 8, 2013 at 10:41 PM
Rest easy, civilian nuclear fuel can’t be used for bombs. Not possible.
Charlemagne on March 8, 2013 at 11:36 PM
Meltdowns in most modern powerplants are all but impossible. You’d need to hit a reactor with an earthquake 100 times more powerful than the ones they are designed for (as happened at Fukushima).
As it is, civilian nuclear reactors are simply NOT terrorist targets. Not only is the 6 foot thick steel reinforced containment dome on a modern nuclear reactor impenetrable to truck-bombs and 9/11 style attacks. Nuclear reactor security teams routinely take top place at SWAT competitions, outscoring actual police SWAT teams.
And as Charlemagne pointed out, civilian nuclear reactor fuel can’t be used in a bomb.
Uranium from the ground is about 0.7% fissile U-235 and the rest is fertile U-238. LWR/PWR fuel is enriched to 3% to 5% U-235. In a nuclear weapon, the material needs to be enriched to at least 20% and is usually enriched to 90%+ (this is called “weapons grade” material). CANDU reactors have such high neutron economy that they can run on almost unenriched fuel and they can even burn spent fuel from other reactors.
Simply put, the fissile atoms in a LWR/PWR fuel assembly are too few and far apart to be able to generate an explosion.
But if radiation dosage is your biggest concern, moving close to a nuclear reactor is your best bet to reduce your overall dosage. People living close to coal fired powerplants recieve a hundred times the level of radiation that those living close to nuclear reactors do. Coal fired powerplants are constantly releasing radioactive waste into the air and water. An average coal fired plant releases several tons of radioactive waste into the environment every year, most of which has a half-life of greater than a billion years.
Alberta_Patriot on March 9, 2013 at 1:12 AM
Worse than that, there’s a very strong case to be made that wind and solar are not energy sources, but are net energy sinks, per this source.
We would have to import more oil and mine more coal, to supply the energy needed to deploy more windmills and solar panels. Note that it takes a LOT of energy to build a solar panel, more than you are likely to ever get out of that panel. And wind only works intermittently, and only in a narrow range of wind speed.
ZenDraken on March 9, 2013 at 3:08 AM
The reality is that most “environmentalists” are not actually aiming at protecting the environment, but are in fact Malthusians who want to destroy the vast majority of humankind and live on a planet of a few tens of thousands of humans. Any energy source that supports more than a few is automatically deemed against the “environment”. This is why they push for solar power and wind power even though they require vast amounts of rare materials to produce which require massive mining operations and are also very low density energy sources requiring thousands of times the physical footprint to create the same amount of energy as traditional power plants.
Anything that subverts a thriving human society ultimately becomes environmentally friendly. Mercury in light bulbs. No problem, because it ultimately lowers the quality of life of the humans who use them. Putting food into your gas tanks, even though it creates more pollutants? No problem, because it ultimately lowers the quality of life of the humans who use them. Spreading millions of acres of wind turbines, solar panels and destroying the habitats of endangered species? No problem, because in the end, it lowers the quality of life of the humans who use them.
Poke an “environmentalist” hard enough and you find either a Marxist or a Malthusian inside. Green on the outside, red on the inside.
astonerii on March 9, 2013 at 5:16 AM
Thorium Salt Reactors. Some new reactors. Are effectively meltdown proof. Thorium is not weaponizable. Thorium Reactors have been around since the 1950′s but because they were not able to produce weapons materials, the United States government went uranium. Thorium is more abundant and leaves very little radioactive waste. They have also been studying feeder reactors which consume radioactive waste.
astonerii on March 9, 2013 at 5:20 AM