The elephant in the room still is reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel! Storing it in pools, at Yucca Mountain or wherever, is truly a costly misuse of a valuable resource. Labeling it "nuclear waste" compounds the problem of perception and unfairly characterizes the asset. Reprocess the fuel, treat the byproducts in a controlled and circumspect manner, and nuclear will finally fulfill its promise and potential as the most economic, clean and reliable energy source we have.
Dick Kneiser
So Jerry Taylor and Peter VanDoren say that without subsidies, investor interest in nuclear power would be zero. With all due respect, I'm afraid that that doesn't cut any ice with this teacher of economics and finance.
The Swedish nuclear sector was built as a government project, the reason being that this country needed a large amount of reliable, inexpensive energy, and in the light of the first oil price shock needed it fast. But even if those reactors had been privately constructed, substantial subsidies would have been necessary. In any case, taxpayers apparently footed all or a part of the bill, whether they were in favor of nuclear energy or not.
The key word above is "apparently". Together with hydro, nuclear helped to produce the lowest cost electricity in the world. The price was also relatively low, especially for the industrial sector, which meant that in one sense or another the aggregate of taxpayers recovered every penny of those subsidies, and recovered them with interest. In fact, without the crazy deregulation of electricity and membership in the European Union, it would have been possible to realize an even higher employment and more welfare.
What then was the problem? Why was it necessary for Sweden to begin a nuclear retreat? The answer is that the people who are against nuclear are fanatics with a fanatical hatred of science, and nuclear energy might turn out to be what the physicist Dennis Gabor called it: the most important invention of the twentieth century.
Ferdinand E. Banks
Professor
The answer to the waste storage problem, which is holding up nuclear power development, is to recycle the waste. We have developed, at Idaho National Labs (INL), a less costly, cleaner, and more effective nuclear waste reprocessing system than those currently in use by the British, French, Russians, and Chinese. If we reprocess and reuse the uranium, the plutonium and other fissionable byproducts and then burn up the residue, we end up with waste that has a half-life of 30 years and a storage requirement of only 300 years. We also reduce the amount needed to be stored by 95%. That waste can be stored on-site.
This process requires the re-construction of a fast burner reactor (we had two until the Clinton administration) and the construction of an industrial scale electro-metallurgical reprocessing facility. We have had an engineering scale facility at INL for the last 11 years. The last link in the reprocessing and reuse cycle is to create new fuel rods with the plutonium and other fissionable products extracted in the reprocessing. We are already making these mixed oxide (MOX) fuel rods using the leftover weapons-grade plutonium and uranium from our and the Soviet Union's cold war stockpiles.
The INL process has just been bought into by the South Koreans and they plan to set up the entire process within 5 years.
If we reprocess and reuse the spent nuclear fuel rods, Yucca Mountain becomes irrelevant and we get started replacing our old nuclear power plants and building safer, more efficient new ones.
John Scire, PhD
Adjunct Professor
Energy Policy
University of Nevada, Reno
The phrase "relatively no harmful emissions" is presumably meant to apply to the generation of electric power. I think everyone concedes that. But people who look no farther than that are using the same blinders as those who hail ethanol as the solution to the problem of auto emissions, when the deal breaker is the manufacture of the stuff. So for nuke. Is anyone paying attention to the pollution resulting from uranium mining? I've seen an Indian documentary about its effects on the health of the native population there, which is pretty appalling. Then of course there's the waste storage problem, still unsolved. Let the nuke industry people address both these problems, out front and publicly - or let them try to dodge the accusation of latter-day moral cannibalism.
Paul Nay
Santa Barbara, CA
You should also mention that the lifecycle emissions from nuclear power are not insignificant. A report from a Dutch team a couple of years ago (van Leeuwen and Smith) found that with today's uranium ore the emissions from construction, transportation, refining, disposal and decommissioning are approximately 40% of the emissions from a natural gas plant. With lower quality ores, which we are already utilizing because high quality ores are running out, the emissions rise to about 100% of a natural gas plant's emissions. This issue has for the most part been ignored in the nuclear debate.
Also, a recent report from the Keystone Center (attached) found that the cost of new nuclear plants would likely be 8-11 cents per kWh, on a levelized cost basis - far more than power from wind, biomass or geothermal plants (the last two of which are baseload power sources with high capacity factors), which have none of the downsides of nuclear power. Another report from UC Berkeley and Stanford researchers found that the actual cost for electricity from US nuclear plants has averaged 7 cents or so per kWh - far higher than industry proponents state (see attached).
I am personally confident that we will see no more than a few new nuclear plants built in the U.S. and then a final withering away of interest because nuclear power is simply too expensive, too dangerous, and not necessary.
Tam Hunt
Energy Program Director / Attorney
Community Environmental Council
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