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The 3,122-megawatt Civaux Nuclear Power Plant in France, which opened in 1997.
The 3,122-megawatt Civaux Nuclear Power Plant in France, which opened in 1997.
GUILLAUME SOUVANT / AFP / Getty Images

Opinion
Why Nuclear Power Must Be Part of the Energy Solution
By Richard Rhodes • July 19, 2018

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Many environmentalists have opposed nuclear power, citing its dangers and the
difficulty of disposing of its radioactive waste. But a Pulitzer Prize-winning
author argues that nuclear is safer than most energy sources and is needed if the
world hopes to radically decrease its carbon emissions.

In the late 16th century, when the increasing cost of firewood forced ordinary
Londoners to switch reluctantly to coal, Elizabethan preachers railed against a
fuel they believed to be, literally, the Devil’s excrement. Coal was black, after
all, dirty, found in layers underground — down toward Hell at the center of the
earth — and smelled strongly of sulfur when it burned. Switching to coal, in houses
that usually lacked chimneys, was difficult enough; the clergy’s outspoken
condemnation, while certainly justified environmentally, further complicated and
delayed the timely resolution of an urgent problem in energy supply.

For too many environmentalists concerned with global warming, nuclear energy is
today’s Devil’s excrement. They condemn it for its production and use of
radioactive fuels and for the supposed problem of disposing of its waste. In my
judgment, their condemnation of this efficient, low-carbon source of baseload
energy is misplaced. Far from being the Devil’s excrement, nuclear power can be,
and should be, one major component of our rescue from a hotter, more
meteorologically destructive world.

Like all energy sources, nuclear power has advantages and disadvantages. What are
nuclear power’s benefits? First and foremost, since it produces energy via nuclear
fission rather than chemical burning, it generates baseload electricity with no
output of carbon, the villainous element of global warming. Switching from coal to
natural gas is a step toward decarbonizing, since burning natural gas produces
about half the carbon dioxide of burning coal. But switching from coal to nuclear
power is radically decarbonizing, since nuclear power plants release greenhouse
gases only from the ancillary use of fossil fuels during their construction,
mining, fuel processing, maintenance, and decommissioning — about as much as solar
power does, which is about 4 to 5 percent as much as a natural gas-fired power
plant.

Nuclear power releases less radiation into the environment than any other major
energy source.
Second, nuclear power plants operate at much higher capacity factors than renewable
energy sources or fossil fuels. Capacity factor is a measure of what percentage of
the time a power plant actually produces energy. It’s a problem for all
intermittent energy sources. The sun doesn’t always shine, nor the wind always
blow, nor water always fall through the turbines of a dam.

In the United States in 2016, nuclear power plants, which generated almost 20
percent of U.S. electricity, had an average capacity factor of 92.3 percent,
meaning they operated at full power on 336 out of 365 days per year. (The other 29
days they were taken off the grid for maintenance.) In contrast, U.S. hydroelectric
systems delivered power 38.2 percent of the time (138 days per year), wind turbines
34.5 percent of the time (127 days per year) and solar electricity arrays only 25.1
percent of the time (92 days per year). Even plants powered with coal or natural
gas only generate electricity about half the time for reasons such as fuel costs
and seasonal and nocturnal variations in demand. Nuclear is a clear winner on
reliability.

Third, nuclear power releases less radiation into the environment than any other
major energy source. This statement will seem paradoxical to many readers, since
it’s not commonly known that non-nuclear energy sources release any radiation into
the environment. They do. The worst offender is coal, a mineral of the earth’s
crust that contains a substantial volume of the radioactive elements uranium and
thorium. Burning coal gasifies its organic materials, concentrating its mineral
components into the remaining waste, called fly ash. So much coal is burned in the
world and so much fly ash produced that coal is actually the major source of
radioactive releases into the environment.

Anti-nuclear activists protest the construction of a nuclear power station in

Seabrook, New Hampshire in 1977.
Anti-nuclear activists protest the construction of a nuclear power station in
Seabrook, New Hampshire in 1977. AP Photo

In the early 1950s, when the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission believed high-grade
uranium ores to be in short supply domestically, it considered extracting uranium
for nuclear weapons from the abundant U.S. supply of fly ash from coal burning. In
2007, China began exploring such extraction, drawing on a pile of some 5.3 million
metric tons of brown-coal fly ash at Xiaolongtang in Yunnan. The Chinese ash
averages about 0.4 pounds of triuranium octoxide (U3O8), a uranium compound, per
metric ton. Hungary and South Africa are also exploring uranium extraction from
coal fly ash.

ALSO ON YALE E360

Industry Meltdown: Is the era of nuclear power coming to an end? Read more.

What are nuclear’s downsides? In the public’s perception, there are two, both
related to radiation: the risk of accidents, and the question of disposal of
nuclear waste.

There have been three large-scale accidents involving nuclear power reactors since
the onset of commercial nuclear power in the mid-1950s: Three-Mile Island in
Pennsylvania, Chernobyl in Ukraine, and Fukushima in Japan.

Studies indicate even the worst possible accident at a nuclear plant is less
destructive than other major industrial accidents.
The partial meltdown of the Three-Mile Island reactor in March 1979, while a
disaster for the owners of the Pennsylvania plant, released only a minimal quantity
of radiation to the surrounding population. According to the U.S. Nuclear
Regulatory Commission:

“The approximately 2 million people around TMI-2 during the accident are estimated
to have received an average radiation dose of only about 1 millirem above the usual
background dose. To put this into context, exposure from a chest X-ray is about 6
millirem and the area’s natural radioactive background dose is about 100-125
millirem per year… In spite of serious damage to the reactor, the actual release
had negligible effects on the physical health of individuals or the environment.”
The explosion and subsequent burnout of a large graphite-moderated, water-cooled
reactor at Chernobyl in 1986 was easily the worst nuclear accident in history.
Twenty-nine disaster relief workers died of acute radiation exposure in the
immediate aftermath of the accident. In the subsequent three decades, UNSCEAR — the
United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, composed of
senior scientists from 27 member states — has observed and reported at regular
intervals on the health effects of the Chernobyl accident. It has identified no
long-term health consequences to populations exposed to Chernobyl fallout except
for thyroid cancers in residents of Belarus, Ukraine and western Russia who were
children or adolescents at the time of the accident, who drank milk contaminated
with 131iodine, and who were not evacuated. By 2008, UNSCEAR had attributed some
6,500 excess cases of thyroid cancer in the Chernobyl region to the accident, with
15 deaths. The occurrence of these cancers increased dramatically from 1991 to
1995, which researchers attributed mostly to radiation exposure. No increase
occurred in adults.

The Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, located near Avila Beach, California, will
be decommissioned starting in 2024.
The Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, located near Avila Beach, California, will
be decommissioned starting in 2024. Pacific Gas and Electric

“The average effective doses” of radiation from Chernobyl, UNSCEAR also concluded,
“due to both external and internal exposures, received by members of the general
public during 1986-2005 [were] about 30 mSv for the evacuees, 1 mSv for the
residents of the former Soviet Union, and 0.3 mSv for the populations of the rest
of Europe.” A sievert is a measure of radiation exposure, a millisievert is one-
one-thousandth of a sievert. A full-body CT scan delivers about 10-30 mSv. A U.S.
resident receives an average background radiation dose, exclusive of radon, of
about 1 mSv per year.

Yale School of the Environment