So a friend linked me to this article on the Wall Street Journal site, “There Is No Such Thing as Nuclear Waste,” in which William Tucker describes why nuclear power really is clean energy, and the issue of nuclear waste is a non-issue.
As someone who has generally been pro-nuclear in the past, the article basically confirmed what I’ve always thought, that nuclear power was a no-brainer, waste notwithstanding. The fact that nuclear waste could be reprocessed to reduce its volume was news to me, as illustrated by the writer’s claim in the article:
France, which completely reprocesses its recyclable material, stores all the unused remains — from 30 years of generating 75% of its electricity from nuclear energy — beneath the floor of a single room at La Hague.
Today, in a possibly rare bit of getting the opposing perspective, or perhaps I was subconciously suspicious of the article, I decided to see what Greenpeace had to say about nuclear power. They have an anti-nuclear brochure available as a PDF file online. Unsurprisingly, they have a lot of arguments counter to what Tucker claims in his article. I don’t necessarily agree with or believe everything in the Greenpeace document, but there are two points I found interesting.
First, they don’t argue that nuclear power plants are dirty, per se, but that the entire nuclear fuel life cycle produces a lot of waste. As illustrated in the PDF, uranium ore mining produces air and water pollution; the uranium enrichment process produces useless* waste such as depleted uranium (DU); and even uranium reprocessing itself, which lowers the overall volume of waste material, produces air pollution. Even after all that, there is still high level radioactive waste left over, for which no permanent solution has yet been found. I find it telling that Tucker’s article completely omits the whole fuel cycle in terms of waste, focusing only on the “clean” part.
Second, and this is also something that bugs me about the oil industry, the auto industry, etc., is the fact that if we took the billions of dollars spent on crap like “clean coal” and more off-shore drilling and, in this case, subsidizing and improving the nuclear power industry, and put that money instead toward “green” renewable energy forms that are already viable and available, we’d be far, far ahead of the curve and we wouldn’t even be debating the pros and cons of nuclear power; it would be obviated by the cleaner alternatives already in use.
Anyway, I’m now less pro-nuclear than I was previously, although it would perhaps be more accurate to say I am even more pro-cleaner-energy. Interestingly, the Union of Concerned Scientists currently opposes nuclear power until and unless it is made safer and cheaper. Read up yourself on Wikipedia’s articles about nuclear power, nuclear power debate, and the nuclear fuel cycle.
*: I’m aware of depleted uranium’s use in armor and munitions (armor-piercing penetrators) by the US and UK. The amount required for munitions use is far less than is actually produced (I’m guessing, heh). In addition, after all the health problems by veterans and Iraqi civlians after the first Gulf War, I’m leaning more and more toward phasing out the use of depleted uranium by the military. Here’s a bit I found in an NIH article:
In the operation Desert Storm, over 350 metric tons of DU was used, with an estimate of 3-6 million grams released in the atmosphere. Internal contamination with inhaled DU has been demonstrated by the elevated excretion of uranium isotopes in the urine of the exposed veterans 10 years after the Gulf war and causes concern because of its chemical and radiological toxicity and mutagenic and carcinogenic properties. Polarized views of different interest groups maintain an area of sustained controversy more in the environment of the public media than in the scientific community, partly for the reason of being less than sufficiently addressed by a meaningful objective interdisciplinary research.
Hm, maybe munitions production does use up quite a bit of the DU waste material, heh.
