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Nuclear Power Is Green Power - Or Is It? By Dana Childs The demand for energy is forecast to rise 20 times in the next 10 years alone. The U.S. nuclear industry has reputedly billions of decommissioning dollars to spend on public opinion to develop a favorable public face for building more plants. In an effort to bring our readers and consumers of energy a rounded education into the benefits or deficits of a new round of nuclear energy, we offer this and many more infomercials from both sides of the issue. Pressure will mount for more and cheaper energy and some will not care about the consequences decades after they are gone. With so much focus on renewable energy, the industry would do well to remember the benefits - and, yes, the drawbacks - of nuclear energy, writes a columnist on Inside Greentech. Nuclear power is particularly green energy: get used to it, Joseph Neil writes that nuclear plants create no greenhouse gas emissions, release less radiation into the atmosphere than coal, gas or oil, have the lowest overall long term cost structure of any fuel and cause less damage to rivers than major hydro projects. Of course he has no answers to where spent radioactive waste is to be deposited. Neil worked for 7 years for the French Commission d'Energie Atomique at Cadarache in Provence, France during the development of both the Liquid Sodium Fast Breeder Reactor technologies and the first fusion processes. He's also worked in the oil industry and was CEO of HydroVenturi - a power-from-water startup in Europe. "For two thousand years or more, we have mined the earth ferociously, polluting our backyard with toxic slurry and destroying surrounding agricultural land. We have been doing the same with coal fired power plants for nearly two hundred years, and we have been spraying large quantities of oil across the planet for well over one hundred years," writes Neil. "We haven't really done very much to aggressively control either of these industries, yet it's arguable that with nuclear power, we have gone too far the other way and indulged in emotional and irrational fears based almost exclusively in fact on one or two isolated incidents that have had far less impact on the environment than major oil spills or a normally functioning coal plant." Normally-functioning nuclear plants release levels of radiation indistinguishable from natural background levels, he says. "In other words, if you wanted to find a nuclear power plant using a Geiger counter, you probably couldn't." There have been several major refinery explosions in the past decade in the USA alone, with more people killed in them than the 50 or so verifiable deaths directly attributed to Chernobyl, he writes. "Oil incidents have given rise to much more horrendous pollution and loss of wildlife." Opponents of nuclear energy argue that using more nuclear reactors poses greater risk of terrorist attack, and the possible resulting exposure to radiation. They also cite its contribution to fostering nuclear proliferation. While the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986 in Ukraine still looms large in the minds of many, the accident was found to have been caused by a combination of faulty reactor design, the lack of a properly designed containment building, poorly trained operators and a non-existent safety culture. Advocates like Neil argue that the cost effectiveness of nuclear and modern advances in its technology make it a clearly safer and more environmentally responsible option than gas, coal or oil - and more cost-effective than renewables. |
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