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Solving "Fission Impossible"Is nuclear power's comeback for real?

By Daniel Gross
Posted Saturday, Oct. 20, 2007, at 7:04 AM ET
The Exelon Byron Nuclear Generating Stations in Byron, Illinois. Click image to expand.

We all know that $30-a-barrel oil isn't coming back, just as we know that simply turning off a few lights won't halt global warming. Yet the search for a low-emission, nonfossil-fuel source of energy has been a bit like American Idol: One after another, fresh-faced alternative-energy-rock-star wannabes are eliminated. Wind and solar are nice and clean—but the sun doesn't work 24/7, and the wind is fickle. Ethanol offers politicians the irresistible combination of grow-your-own energy independence and the potential to make Iowa primary voters rich. But because it's corrosive and soluble in water, it's hard to transport ethanol over long distances through pipelines. And to raise a crop sufficient to meet our gasoline thirst, we'd have to plant the entire continental United States with maize, leaving only a small corner of Delaware for bedrooms and a den.

As contestants are eliminated, it's worth looking at the geezer in the bunch: nuclear power. Last month, nearly 50 years after the Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania became the first commercial power plant to go online, the New Jersey-based utility NRG filed papers seeking permission to build a nuclear power plant in Texas. This represents the first such new application since 1979, nuclear's annus horribilis. Two weeks after the debut of the fear-inducing nuclear-disaster flick The China Syndrome, life imitated art, as the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania suffered a partial meltdown. That effectively forestalled the creation of new nuclear power plants for a generation. The last reactor to come online was the Watts Bar reactor in Tennessee, in May 1996.

So, what's changed? Twenty-eight years of safe operation (in the United States, at least) have helped pave the way for NRG and for a couple of dozen other possible plants in the works. Indeed, even as they're mocked in popular culture—see The Simpsons—the nation's 104 commercial nuclear-generating units have been quietly humming along without significant incident. "The Bureau of Labor Statistics will tell you that the nuclear industry is the safest place to work—safer than real estate and Wall Street," says former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman. (You remember her—she played the environmentalist in the first Bush term.) Through the first half of this year, nukes provided 19.8 percent of U.S. electricity generation, about the same proportion as they did in 1990.

More important, thanks to developments in the broader environment, many longtime critics are changing their tune. As a co-founder of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore used to call nuclear energy "synonymous with nuclear holocaust." But he now believes "nuclear is the cleanest, safest and has the smallest footprint" of any major energy alternative source. He says that nukes are cheap and reliable, unlike alternative-energy sources such as wind and solar. Neither do nuclear plants spew sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, as coal-powered plants do, or create massive volumes of CO2 emissions, as gas-fired plants do. The attitude of Moore, who co-chairs the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, an industry-backed supporter of nuclear energy, is virtually indistinguishable from that of David Crane, chief executive officer of NRG: "Advanced nuclear technology is the only currently viable large-scale alternative to traditional coal-fueled generation to produce none of the traditional air emissions—and most importantly in this age of climate change—no carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases."

Another megatrend is working in nuclear's favor: demographics. In 2006, an estimated 41.3 percent of the population was under 30. Which is to say that the percentage and number of Americans who remember the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl decline with every passing year.

To be sure—in any article dealing with alternative energy, there's always a "to be sure" section—nuclear power has some serious problems. It takes a lot of money, and a lot of time, to add new capacity. NRG says that if all goes well, its new nuclear units, which could power 2 million homes, may come online in 2014 and 2015. And investors aren't eager to commit billions of dollars to controversial long-term projects that might never get built. The government is trying to help by providing risk insurance and streamlining the approval process.

There's also still the huge problem of where to put the waste. But as Rudy Giuliani suggested recently, if a bunch of European socialists can figure out what to do with the radioactive leftovers, why can't we? "France is ahead of us in nuclear power," he said recently, with the same sort of disgust he might use in reporting that the Red Sox were ahead of his beloved Yankees. "Eighty percent of the electricity in France comes from nuclear power."

But when it comes to reaching a definitive solution on how to deal with nuclear waste, our vieux allies are stuck in the same quandary as we are. For years, Congress has been debating a proposal to store nuclear waste in Nevada's Yucca Mountain. In France, where plans to bury waste in rural areas raised similar hackles, the response has been to change the conversation. France has developed a program to store waste temporarily, while researchers figure out what to do with it. It's hardly an elegant solution. Which explains why nuclear energy, which has been the energy of the future for the last 50 years, may continue to be so.

This article also appears in the Oct. 29 issue of Newsweek.

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Daniel Gross is the Moneybox columnist for Slate and the business columnist for Newsweek. You can e-mail him at . He is the author of Pop! Why Bubbles Are Great for the Economy.
Photograph of nuclear generating stations by Jeff Haynes/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.
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Remarks from the Fray:

The reason the French are ahead of us in nuclear power is that the French system of government stifles local objections to what the national government decides to do. For almost a generation, a combination of political NIMBYism and environmental litigation has kept the US government from building a nuclear waste facility in Nevada. That didn't -- and couldn't -- happen in France.

France has riots and the occasional revolution, but in between it doesn't suffer from a whole lot of due process or local democracy. When the French bureaucracy decides that something should be done, that's what the French government does. Period. Governments come and go, regimes come and go, sometimes the Germans come and go, but what the French call the Administration goes on forever.

Forty years ago the Administration decided that France needed to generate electricity from nuclear power because it doesn't have much coal and has no oil. The national electric utility, EdF, picked two standardized designs (one big, one small), and built them all over the country. There was a modicum of complaint from environmentalists, but it didn't matter.

--jack_cerf

(To reply, click here.)

While Europe (mainly France) is utilizing nuclear energy, they are also investing heavily in solar, wind, and biofuels. Germany is a leader in both solar and wind power, and nobody thinks of Germany as a sun-drenched nation or particularly windy place, certainly not like the U.S southwest (sun) or central plains (wind). Biodiesel is also used widely in Europe, where about half of the cars have diesel engines.

If you say the nuclear waste issue can be solved, go ahead and solve it first. Don't build these expensive plants, and then figure it out. Also, no community in America wants to deal with the waste, and few of them want to be near a nuclear power plant.

There are lots of people investing hundreds of billions of dollars on renewable energy in the U.S., with very little of it coming from the government. If the nuclear industry wants the public to get behind their technology, they need to invest their own money in developing a solution for the waste problems that will be economically viable (dealing with waste and de-commissioning nuclear plants makes the cost of producing that kind of electricity too expensive, but the builders of those plants don't have to deal with those expenses - they typically leave it for taxpayers).

--kgsbca

(To reply, click here.)

In a world of however many billion people, you can't discuss a technology without factoring in the cost of the back end: where does the waste go? How do we protect it, how do we protect ourselves from it? The article's shortsighted argument that nuclear power plants here and elsewhere have been humming along without incident since the TMI disaster is not proof of the technology's safety, any more than a jumper's survival from the top of the Empire State Building to the 40th floor is an argument for the safety of launching oneself into the air.

--Isonomist

(To reply, click here.)

Eventually solar thermal and wind power will be the only source of our electric power. Because the source of power is intermittent, they cannot provide a significant fraction of our electric power until inexpensive methods to store the electric energy they generate are developed. Development of solar and wind technology and storage methods should be pursued vigorously but until these technologies can be brought on line we HAVE to generate our electricity from nuclear power.

--dan-51

(To reply, click here.)

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