A nuclear future?

Being born in 1979, the year of Three Mile Island, and seven years old when Chernobyl blew its lid in the Ukraine, it's no surprise I haven't been a big fan of nuclear power. The spent fuel is highly radioactive and contains a number of toxic heavy metals too boot. That might explain why the United States still lacks even one long-term storage facility for waste.

Furthermore, nuclear power brings along with it the risk of nuclear proliferation, a challenge we see in India and Pakistan (and Israel) - nuclear powers who have refused to sign the non-proliferation treaty - and in North Korea and Iran. Matters aren't improved when the US President threatens the use of nuclear weapons on some of these "rogue states." After all, if someone threatens to use a big gun on me, it might be to my benefit to build my own big gun, eh?

So, it's with some interest that I saw an article this Sunday by a Greenpeace founder defending nuclear power. Why?

Because the threat of global climate change is so real and so huge, and nuclear power is the only known, large-scale power supply that can replace baseload power plants like coal. The reason wind and solar can't do it, unfortunately, is because they are "intermittent" power sources (we can never be sure when and how hard the wind blows or the sun shines). Nuclear, according to Patrick Moore, can supply steady baseload power, is cheap (if you don't count construction costs), safe (from accidents), and more resilient to terrorism than many fossil fuels. Plus, it's carbon-free.

This is a big bonus, because the challenge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is titanic. In fact, to merely avoid the doubling of pre-industrial carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, the world has to reduce project carbon emissions by 7 billion tons (7 gigatons) by 2055. To give you some perspective, changing almost all of the 600 coal power plants in the U.S. to nuclear would reduce carbon emissions by .7 gigatons. That's 600 new nuclear plants!

The Princeton Carbon Mitigation Initiative describes this kind of emission reduction strategy as the "wedge game," since emissions reductions have to get larger as time goes on. Other wedge game solutions (wedges) include increased energy efficiency, solar and wind power, higher fuel efficiency standards, etc. However, it will take multiple strategies to make it.

Since nuclear is a known commodity, even if some of its externalities such as spent fuel and proliferation aren't solved, it might be a way toward stopping climate change.