Standard Deviations From the Beaten Path

I had an interesting chat with an old friend a few days ago. It started with the sunken oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico wreaking havoc with the environment, which was essentially a segue into accusing the oil and power companies of “suppressing” clean energy technology. I’m inclined to give the corporations the benefit of the doubt that they are not cartoonishly evil villains. Thus, I’d assume they would be more likely to actively develop cleaner technology since they will be able to make money just as easily off of it once it’s adopted, which it eventually will be.

However, I am told, that their “suppression” of technology is common knowledge (although no sources have been forthcoming from either my associate or my Google searches) and that they only want technology they can “control.” I’m curious as to what kinds of developments they’re sitting on. Do they need a control collar for a living spaceship a la Farscape? But I digress. Suppression of safe, clean, efficient power is a reality, but it is not the work of corporate technocrats. Rather, it is the environmentalists themselves carrying its banner. Its name: No Nukes.

People are scared of nuclear power. Mostly because of the worlds only major nuclear power catastrophe: Chernobyl. The Chernobyl reactor was of a design never built outside of the former Soviet Union. Modern reactors have passive safety features that stop the reaction if a meltdown begins, while the Chernobyl reactor intensified the reaction. Basic safety precautions were completely disregarded by the staff, and the containment was nothing more than a corrugated aluminum roof.

What I’m getting at is that something like Chernobyl cannot “just happen” in a modern reactor. The most recent safety survey I’ve found is the Severe Accident Risks: An Assessment for Five U.S. Nuclear Power Plants (NUREG-1150). Among its conclusions are the probabilities of an early fatality per reactor per year for pressurized water reactors (PWR) and boiling water reactors (BWR) at and respectively. For a point of comparison, consider the probability of dying in a car accident: 1.9% (thanks Stephen).

While we’re considering power production that has a chance of killing you, let’s look a geothermal. It causes earthquakes. Does every geothermal power station cause earthquakes? No. But there’s at least one example. Should we abandon it because it might eventually cause a catastrophic earthquake? I don’t think so. Do I think we should roll it out for wide scale deployment now? No, but it definitely merits research to further our understanding–a process nuclear power has already undergone.

Nukes are safe. Keep in mind that we also have 20 years of progress in reactor design including safety features and improved wast storage (store on sight, no transportation of waste, or use waste from one reactor as fuel for another type). I cannot put too much emphasis on this, but if you think nuclear power is dangerous you are wrong. Your anxiety is real, but the cold hard facts are that a car is more likely to kill you than a nuclear reactor in your backyard. So what causes for objection are left? I can think of but one: cost. Nuclear power must just be too prohibitively expensive compared to other alternatives. Wrong again.

The California Energy Commission has a report on the costs of energy generation methods available for the state of California. The number reported is called the levelized energy cost (LEC) and is the cost per mega-Watt for a particular method (see pages 14-15 of the pdf). Keeping in mind that this report is fairly specific to the state of California accounting for tax breaks, this isn’t absolute but it should be a good estimate. Nuclear is easily cheaper than gas, solar, tidal, fuel cells, and comparable to coal, geothermal, and wind. So it is competitively priced (and takes up a lot less space than wind farms).

So if you want us to reduce our use of coal and oil for power I reckon you have two options. Go nuclear, or wait a lot longer until we have wind, solar, geothermal, tidal, and/or biomass (my personal pick for the next best power plant, just not there yet) that are commercially competitive and capable of producing enough power to supply major metropolitan areas. I’d personally rather phase out coal now and go nuclear–it’s safe, it’s cheap, and it will hold us out for as long as it takes to build the next big thing. And I emphatically think that if environmentalism is your thing and you want to be logically consistent, going nuclear is the way to go.

Tags: environment, nuclear power, Politics, rants

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 5th, 2010 at 8:18 pm and is filed under General Miscelany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.