Posted by
Stay Red on Tuesday, March 04, 2008 6:27:50 PM
Twenty-nine years ago, a string of mechanical failures, compounded by human error, led to a reactor meltdown at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. No one was hurt and TMI was far and away America’s most serious nuclear accident. And TMI’s performance has since been near-flawless.
Yet nearly three decades later, in the face of rising energy costs-oil pegged $120 per barrel today-and increasing concerns about the environment, the American public remains resistant to nuclear power, a source of cheap, environmentally friendly energy.
Today less than 40 percent of Americans favor nuclear power; roughly one person in ten advocates the outright decommissioning of America’s 104 nuclear power plants.
This public resistance to nuclear power generation has effectively deterred the development of new power plants; the last time the US issued a new permit for a nuclear plant was more than thirty years ago.
In 2007, US nuclear facilities generated a
record 807 billion kWh of electricity (with record uptime, too), about twenty percent of the nation’s electrical power. That output would not be quick or easy or cheap to replace.
American facilities currently using
renewable energy sources such as hydroelectric, wind and solar are all running at or very near capacity. And each of the renewables is currently limited in its ability to add to, let alone replace, the electrical power currently generated by atomic energy.
There are already hydroelectric dams at many of the best spots. What few good spots are left are often unavailable due to environmental or safety concerns. The
Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, signed into law by President Johnson in 1968, also prohibits building dams on some rivers.
Wind power is unstable and unpredictable, making it tricky to connect to the electrical grid. The electrical grid, in turn, also is limited in its capacity to store surplus power generated by wind. The typical wind farm takes up a sizeable amount of open space and not everyone likes the idea of a couple hundred multi-story (some as tall as 400 feet) structures-required to replace a single conventional power plant-spoiling their view of the landscape. Just ask Teddy Kennedy and his Massachusetts neighbors, whose protests led
Congress in 2006 to block the "Cape Wind" project in Nantucket Sound. Cape Wind’s 130 towers would have generated seventy-five percent of the power required for Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.
Solar power has produced mixed results; using the sun’s energy to make electricity via steam generation appears economically unviable, but there has been encouraging success with
photovoltaic cells.
Where it can be difficult to predict the availability of wind power, solar power is very predictable: If the sun shines, the cells generate power. And solar electrical power is often at its best when people need the most electricity: hot, sunny days when air conditioning use drives up electrical demand.
But solar cells share some disadvantages with wind power; namely they take up plenty of space and not everyone finds them pleasing to the eye. The solar cells required to supply all of the power for an average home would cover one-half of a regulation football field, or about half an acre (No truth to the rumor that it would take solar cells spread over an area the size of Manhattan for Al Bore’s palatial estate; Manhattan is a little too small). And large banks of solar cells are aesthetically objectionable to some onlookers.
Based on current technology, solar electric is still somewhat expensive; upwards of $150,000 for that half acre of solar cells required for the typical home. Then there’s issue of the cells sitting idle when the sun doesn’t shine.
Random factoid: it takes anywhere from
2-5 years for a solar cell to capture the energy originally used to produce it.
Since renewables are not a ready option for replacing nuclear power generation, that leaves the old standby: fossil fuel. There are downsides there, too.
Coal
is the most common fuel used in power generation. It is cheap and abundant; some experts say the Earth has a limitless supply of coal. But coal is about the dirtiest fuel currently used to generate electricity in America.
A typical 1000 megawatt power plant will burn more than 100 railcars of coal per week. Burning a ton of coal produces three tons of carbon dioxide, a major source of greenhouse gas. The combustion process also produces sulfur dioxide, a primary component of
acid rain.
In 2007, American power plants burned one billion tons of coal and pumped three billion tons of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.
One may safely debate the effects of acid rain on the environment. And skepticism is abundant-and growing-about the effect of greenhouse gases on the Earth’s climate. But it is a pretty safe bet that few people would advocate a double-digit annual increase in America’s greenhouse gas output. That is what would likely happen if America eliminated nuclear power generation in favor of coal.
From GQ’s "
Meltdown" here is some additional perspective on replacing nuclear with coal:
To produce the same amount of electricity, a coal-fired power plant would have to incinerate more than 3 million metric tons of fuel, producing 500 pounds of carbon dioxide per second, as well as 1,200 pounds of ash per minute and 750 pounds of sulfur dioxide every five minutes. SNIP
Picking up on public concerns about pollution from burning coal, three of the largest Wall Street investment banks are
imposing environmental standards that will make it tougher to finance construction of coal burning power plants.
Oil
burning power plants generated less than 2 percent of America’s power in 2006, the last year of published statistics from the Energy Information Administration. Oil is not quite as big a polluter as coal, but burning it is wasteful when there are so many other, more productive uses for oil. Like the plastic in your computer, for example. Or the tires on your car. Or your detergent. Or that aspirin you feel like taking right now.
Natural gas
burning power plants produced about the same percentage of US power as the nuclear plants. And the current trend is upward, increasing over the past ten years from about 14 percent to roughly 20 percent today.
Natural gas is the cleanest burning of the fossil fuels. But it is not as abundant as coal. Back in the 1990s, America became a net importer of natural gas. Today Canada supplies about 15 percent of the natural gas consumed in the US. It is not cost effective to ship natural gas due to its bulk, so most natural gas is transported via pipeline. This restricts competition; even if there is a surplus of natural gas in Siberia, there is no economical way to get the gas to America. Restricted supply and rising demand are at least part of the reason that natural gas prices have increased more than 60 percent since 2000.
Like oil, there are plenty of other, better uses for natural gas (heating water, for example) than making electricity. Natural gas is used to manufacture plastic, fabrics and even pharmaceuticals.
On Wednesday (perhaps Thursday if today’s Dim primaries make big news): Why the continued fear about nukes?
Stay red…