If you haven’t figured it out already, I’m on vacation this week, which is why my blog posts have been half hearted at best. Still, given the new-ness of all this, it seems important to keep on posting! Any day now I’m expecting a flood of comments…
Seed magazine has an interesting piece of the debate between coal and nuclear energy. While balancing energy demands and environmental concerns is a challenge, I personally remain firmly against the proliferation of nuclear energy. You can read more about why in the article I wrote for last month’s issue of This Magazine.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
While I’m not especially bullish on nuclear power, my primary concern is economic more than anything else, simply because inconsistent funding, regulatory hurdles and supply problems in the nuclear industry inevitably result in huge cost and time overruns. I’m pretty optimistic that renewables will end up being both cleaner and cheaper in the not too distant future, though base load is always a concern…
But anyway, that’s all a bit of a digression from the main point I wanted to make about the toxicity of nuclear. I was going to point out that coal _already_ emits more nuclear material than fission reactors do, but then I noticed that said point was already neatly made in the article.
“And as far as pollution goes, 120 million tons of unregulated coal fly ash pours into thousands of American slurry pits each year. It contains toxic heavy metals and enough U-235 to run all of our 104 power reactors. Coal pollution exposes people within 50 miles to low-dose radiation—about 100 to 400 times greater than from a nuclear plant. Harmless—yet one tiny nuclear-plant water leak harboring less radioactivity than you’d get from eating a single banana unleashes misinformed sensationalism. ”
Yes, nuclear waste is a bad thing, and it seems especially bad because we see concentrated barrels of the stuff with scary warning labels. But is that really worse than having a greater volume of the stuff being spewed directly into the environment without people even knowing it? “See no evil…”
It’s a little bit like compact fluorescents, actually. They get a bad rap because of the small quantity of mercury in them, but even if I willfully smashed every single CFL at the end of its lifespan, they would _still_ put less mercury into the air than if I’d used incandescents, because of the mercury emissions I would displace from coal peaker plants.
Ohhh, sustainability…how complicated you are.
I’m still firmly against nuclear – as far as funding goes, we simply don’t have the regulation longevity to hold corporations accountable for the the life cycle of toxic byproduct that nuclear produces. We’ve seen this before in Canada – in Eliot Lake, where nuclear tailing spills destroyed the Serpent River. Who was there to clean it up after the decommissioning of the uranium mine? Nobody.
I agree that coal is no solution either. It’s a pity it always comes down to either or. Beyond renewable sources (wind, photovoltaic) there is plenty of opportunity to expand small scale hydro electric, which I know has it’s own environmental concerns, but still seems favorable to the toxic by products of both coal and nuclear.
Sustainability, complicated indeed!
Re: regulatory longevity – who’d have thought that privatizing power generation could ever have detrimental social consequences? What a preposterous notion…
To be fair, tailings ponds (and associated accidents) are part and parcel with most mining, and just because uranium happens to radioactive doesn’t make it much more toxic than most other heavy metal byproducts. (Or the tar sands, for that matter. Guh) It’s easy to decry mining practices for raping our environment, but it’s much harder to live on a daily basis without ubiquitous interaction with the necessary spoils of said mining. Sucks.
But yeah, holding people accountable is key.