Provisional
Truth |
Essays | Revised April 22, 2007 | Originally
Published November 2006
Nuclear Power Necessity
To say we have been shortsighted about
nuclear power would be an insult to people with poor vision.
Frankly we have been morons, which one day we likely will
regret, and our love-affair with petroleum has blinded us to
the disastrous ramifications of our energy policies in the
last quarter-century.
Our dependence on oil – our addiction as
the president rightly defined it – and mostly imported oil
at that should be near the top of a very short list of
threats to our national security in this new millennium, and
should rank far above the possibility of terrorism and
perhaps ahead of our exploding, unsustainable national debt
and its growing ownership by foreign governments (but that
is another story)..
Since 9/11, however, we have taught
ourselves to live in fear of terrorists and the countless
ways those evildoers may bring about the end of our
“non-negotiable” way of life, instead of teaching ourselves
how to end this madness of imported oil dependency.
In reality, for half a century we
have had the means to reduce our energy dependence from
those less-than friendly men who control the faraway sands
under which the fix for our addiction lies and upon which
the blood of our military sons and daughters, and
innumerable innocent civilians, now flows.
Those men whom in only a generation we
have enriched beyond the capacity to imagine, helping to
finance, in a macabre way, our own destruction, as
undoubtedly some of our American petro-dollars since 1973
ultimately found their way to the generous inheritance Osama
bin Laden has so cruelly used to plot and act against us.
Yet we have done nothing in the
span of that same generation to rekindle our faded interest
in the benefits of nuclear power as a substitute for our oil
addiction, and little to explore other clean, pollution-free
sources of electricity.
While we have worsened our petroleum habit
in the last three decades, other countries thoroughly have
embraced the technology of the atom, notably France which
derives nearly 80 percent of it's power from nuclear energy,
and China and India which each are building more than 20 new
nuclear facilities as if their civilizations depend upon
them.
In contrast, only 14 percent of our
electric power is generated by nuclear technology and the
last U.S. nuclear plant brought on line was Watts Bar 1 in
Tennessee in 1997. Work on that facility began in 1973,
requiring a construction, licensing and testing span of 24
years to begin its return on investment. (The Great Pyramid
of Giza, in case you forgot, required only 20 years to
build.)
Construction of a sister-facility was 80
percent complete in 1988 when it was halted, officially due
to “slower electricity demand,” (?!) but more likely from a
combination of then-cheaper alternative fossil fuels and
endless, costly legal challenges from anti-nuclear
activists.
(Watts Bar 1, by the way, provides
electricity for about 250,000 households from its location
in the Chattanooga-Knoxville area. Had the second facility
been completed, its combined power output could have covered
the entire electrical needs of a million-plus-residents
metropolitan area.)
Thanks to Three Mile Island in 1979,
Chernobyl in 1987 and an amnesiac cheap-oil fiesta lasting
most of 20 years from the mid-Eighties, no publicly held
utility executive or political officeholder has had the
courage to seriously discuss this nuclear option.
At least
until the recent developments of $75-a-barrel oil and our
foreign policy misadventures in the Middle East which has
done nothing but further inflame hatred of us among those
young Arab men eager to die killing infidels in the service
of their deity.
It's said the best time to plant a tree is
twenty years ago and the next best is today. Comparatively,
the best time to have built a nuclear power plant would have
been 1973, but today, no new nuclear plants are under
construction anywhere in the United States and not
one since 1978.
In the last year, however, no doubt
prompted by spiraling petroleum prices, utilities in South
Carolina, Mississippi and Alabama have announced they are
considering additions to existing nuclear facilities and
another power company is looking at building a new plant at
a site in central Florida.
That's a start, but if they all began
construction tomorrow, it probably would be
2026
at least, and likely longer, before we would begin to
benefit from this carbon-dioxide-free source of energy.
To begin again a reasonable debate about
nuclear energy we need to set aside for a moment our fear
of the security issues. If, as a country we now are willing
to use military troops and equipment to defend our southern
border from the horrors of illegal immigration, we certainly
could protect nuclear facilities, fuel movement and disposal
with our military. That would be an entirely appropriate use
of our forces, compared with patrolling our borders, given
the nature of the consequences should we fail to provide
adequate protection.
We also must put aside the fear of
the safety issues – survival of our country, as a whole,
ultimately should be more important. Plenty of Americans
live near hurricane-prone coastlines, earthquake fault
lines, dormant volcanoes and tornado alleys, and yet
rationalize as “acceptable” those risks of property
destruction and loss of life. In 50 years of public nuclear
energy there never has been a civilian fatality in the
United States from unsafe operation.
So the real issues -the facts - in this
debate are these: 1) we now import far too much petroleum
from unfriendly sources; 2) oil and natural gas needlessly
are used today for electricity generation (about 20 percent
of our electric power) and residential/industrial heating
that otherwise could be provided by nuclear power; 3) our
consumption of a quarter of the world's daily petroleum
output (21 million barrels a day) is projected to increase
to 30 million barrels a day in 20 years, and, more
importantly, 4) there are not now, nor will there be in the
next two decades, any suitable, scalable, liquid-fuel
alternatives to oil sufficient to sustain our free-wheeling,
automobile-dependent lifestyle and consumer economy.
Not hydrogen, not used French-fry oil and
certainly not ethanol. In fact, we could appropriate the
entire U.S. corn crop for automobile ethanol and the
entire soybean crop for bio-diesel, and together they
hardly would make a dent in our current, much less future,
petroleum demand: only 12 percent of fuel demand for autos
and 6 percent for diesel could be satisfied by diverting the
entire yearly crops. Clearly ethanol and bio-diesel are not,
and never will be, the happy-motoring panaceas we are
being led to believe.
Which brings us back to our now nearly
desperate, yet almost universally unrecognized, need for
pollution-free electricity generating and heating
alternatives like nuclear power (and wind, and hydro, and
geothermal) which would allow us to concentrate all
oil and natural gas products for other uses.
Recently I read an obituary of 89-year-old
Carrie Dickerson, of Claremore, OK, which detailed her 1973
campaign to prevent construction of a nuclear power plant in
the eastern part of the state by Public Service Company of
Oklahoma.
“She did not want to see Oklahoma
contaminated with something so deadly as nuclear energy,”
according to a long-time friend quoted in the story.
At the end of her successful, nine-year
bid to prevent the plant's construction, selling her farm in
the process to finance her legal challenges, Dickerson was
quoted as saying “our children won't have that legacy to
live with” perhaps in reference to her perception of the
many, yet not insurmountable, risks of nuclear power.
Mrs. Dickerson didn't stop there. As
recently as 2002, she protested the movement of nuclear fuel
through Oklahoma. She lived in fear such shipments, or a
functioning nuclear power plant, would “attract terrorists,”
the story mentioned.
“My neighbors and all Oklahomans don't
need to be taught the terrorism lesson a third time,” she
said, referring to the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 and the
2001 terrorist attack on New York and Washington, DC.
Interstate shipments of nuclear fuel were “a terrorist's
dream,” she believed.
Her obituary saddened me, not only because
of her death, but also, with all due respect, because of the
unfortunate millstone she and others similarly obsessed with
preventing nuclear power have hung around our collective
necks. The road to our current energy addiction and
insanity, however, no doubt was paved with the good
intentions of the many, including Mrs. Dickerson, who never
could have foreseen the extent of our now precarious
situation.
Perhaps some day her descendants – yours
and mine too – may rue her admirable tenacity and that of
the many others who joined her cause in Oklahoma and around
the nation in the Seventies and Eighties.
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