The Chris Moeller Archives

Phasing out nuclear energy

Is it surprising to anybody else that, after this past week, there's still political support anywhere for nuclear energy? A potentially long-term nuclear crisis is only beginning in Japan, and not a week after the emergency began, the legislature in Iowa is preparing to approve a second nuclear plant in the state. (President Obama is pushing ahead on plans to subsidize new plants at the federal level also.) Great timing.

Iowans are being told by many experts that "it can't happen here," yet why am I lacking confidence? Maybe because the people in Fukushima, Japan were surely told that same thing after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, and after the near-catastrophe and partial core meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979.

The Duane Arnold Energy Center in Palo, Iowa is one of 23 nuclear plants in the world that has the same 1960s-era, General Electric-designed boiling water reactor as the Fukushima reactor. (I grew up on a farm less than 10 miles away from the DAEC.) Of course, Iowa is at great remove from the so-called "Ring of Fire" of shifting tectonic plates in the Pacific Rim, but other natural disasters are capable of greatly impacting Iowa. Ninety percent of the structures in Palo proper suffered flood damage in 2008, and a technician at Duane Arnold told me last weekend that the flood waters that summer rose within 5 feet of flood level for the nuclear plant just outside of town (though he adamantly vouched for the safety of the plant).

And of course, natural disasters are just one of many threats that exist. Let's not dismiss or forget about the ongoing threat of terrorism against our nuclear plants, or the fact that we still haven't solved the dilemma of how to dispose of the continually-produced highly-radioactive waste materials. Nuclear disasters are of a different scale than any other. Earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and tornados can impact areas for generations, but nuclear devastation could stay with us for a million years. Chernobyl will be a dead spot for most living organisms on the planet even after humans have become extinct.

We're finding out now that Japan's nuclear power industry has been riddled with corruption over the years, but the U.S. also has a privatized nuclear industry that combines itself with too little public transparency and with corrupt federal and state energy departments in which industry leaders are often deputized to write the safety and environmental regulations.

In the mid-'80s in California (now we're in the Ring of Fire), the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant was built less than a mile from a major fissure in the Earth's crust. The Nuclear Regulation Commission, at the time, fought against a mandate that the plant's emergency response plan provide for earthquakes. Shockingly, a quarter century later, it's still not required.

Few new plants have been built in the U.S in decades, and there's a reason they haven't. Companies won't invest in nuclear power unless they get waivers on liability, and therefore, plant construction requires tremendous subsidies from taxpayers (like the ones Obama was still preposterously pushing on Wednesday on Capitol Hill). The free market has even spoken then: the proliferation of nuclear energy is not feasible.

According to the Des Moines Register, Iowa currently derives 5% of its total energy from Duane Arnold. Here's my solution: Instead of adding another nuclear plant, how about every Iowan conducting a personal audit to cut back their energy usage by only 5% and we close the plant we've got? The original operating permit (in 1970) for Duane Arnold was for only 40 years, but in December, it was relicensed for another 20 years. We're driving in reverse.

I'm not advocating that all the plants in the U.S. be immediately closed, but shouldn't that be the eventual aim of our national energy policy, rather than increasing the number of plants we have because no politician has the balls to ask his or her constituents for personal sacrifice in their lifestyles? In the 1970s, there was a citizen movement in this country willing to boldly confront the powerful lobbying efforts of the nuclear industry, but like the peace movement and others, the "no-nukes" cause was allowed to be co-opted by the Democratic Party and destroyed. With every passing year between major incidents, the industry lobbyists come charging back. Do engaged citizens really have to be constantly reminded of the threat by new disasters? Let's try to be smarter than we've been.

I am by no means an energy expert or an expert on energy safety, but you also don't have to be a scientist (or even a mathematician) to count the number of nuclear episodes we've had to deal with in less than a century. In addition to Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, there have been at least three notable nuclear submarine events (in the 1960s and '80s), to say nothing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As of 2007, the United States alone has accumulated more than 50,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel, most of which has been transported across the country by railroad and on federal highways-- through your city and mine-- and shoved into a mountain in Nevada because what the fuck else are we going to do with it?

We're forced to think in longer time increments and of greater potential devastation when it comes to nuclear science. What will be left of our planet if we endure a Chernobyl or Fukushima-type contamination event-- somewhere-- every 25 years for the rest of human history? We're engaged in utterly irrational behavior.

posted by CM @ 8:23 PM