Nuclear Energy Goes Green
- Posted by: GOOD , JohannaGoodman
- on December 14, 2007 at 3:45 pm
Ever since the Chernobyl disaster and the Three Mile Island scare, the idea of nuclear power in America has been marred by visions of radioactive meltdowns. But now that more and more people accept that the imminent threat of climate change is fueled by coal-burning power plants, scientists and policymakers are reconsidering the nuclear option. Inspired by skyrocketing energy prices and generous federal subsidies, utility companies want to build more than two dozen reactors over the next decade. At last, the environmental movement, after fighting new plants for decades, has warmed up to the idea.
BIG THINKER:
Lawrence Lessig
Every government faces hard policy questions—storing nuclear waste, controlling teen drug addiction, improving education. What is striking about our government is how often the easy questions become impossibly hard. Think of how long it took (and has it happened yet?) for the government to acknowledge that global warming is real; or the FDA pushing sugar as an essential part of a daily diet; or Congress extending the term of existing copyrights, benefiting the tiny proportion of near-century-old work that continues to have a commercial life.
What unites these cases is money: vast amounts on the wrong side, queering the ability of government to get even the easy cases right. A corruption of government, not from quid pro quo bribes, but from an economy of influence, too often hides what policymakers should see. Our system of campaign finance can’t help but exaggerate the influence of some, regardless of any public sense in the views they privately push.
This corruption, of course, is nothing new. What is new is recognition that it’s critical to solve the corruption. A government that can’t get global warming right can’t be trusted. But not trusting the entity that is spending close to 40 percent of our GDP each year is not really practical.
This year will see the birth of a movement to restore this trust. Not tied to any particular party, and not focused on any single election, this movement will begin a long campaign to leverage the power that digital technology has reallocated, to refocus the influence that makes the government run. No doubt an impossibly difficult movement, with almost no hope of succeeding, but precisely the sort of movement that new centuries need, and that we need right now.
Lawrence Lessig is a professor at Stanford Law School.
DISCUSSION: 5 Comments
“At last, the environmental movement, after fighting new plants for decades, has warmed up to the idea.”??? Did anyone tell your staff the LEDs are going to reduce global electric consumption by 60%… What are you guys doing?
Dear Mr Lessig,
Where’s your evidence that nuclear has “gone green”? I read nothing substantive, just arguments that price changes and federal subsidies will “improve” the bottom line for an uncompetitive and irreversibly dangerous industry.
Nuclear electricity is a vastly over-engineered response to our wishes for electrical energy.
Solutions such as efficiency improvements, wind and solar electricity have been gaining steep ground, without generous subsidies, and will always have the moral high ground over nuclear.
Visit Amory Lovins’ Rocky Mountain Institute, and find out about some real answers to our global energy crisis:
http://www.rmi.org/
And ask yourself – if you are downwind of a nuclear reactor targeted by local insurgents or ICBM, if this is what you really want for you, your family, your neighbors, your neighboring countries.
As the atmospheric tests of the ’50’s and ’60’s told us, as Chernobyl reminded us, we all live downwind.
It’s worth checking out a couple of interesting podcasts of shows that were broadcast on a CBC show called Ideas. “The Hydrogen Solution- Part 2″ makes some good arguments for the future of nuclear energy.
http://limelight.collectik.net/collectik/feed/16069
It may not change your mind but it’s a good solid argument from David Sanbourn Scott.
Smelling Land-The Hydrogen Defense Against Climate Change
As a former systems engineer for a now-defunct photovoltaics house, my bias is certainly toward renewables. But I can also do a cost-benefit analysis, and I know that the only way right now to generate enough power to keep our world going without strangling ourselves on burning petroleum is nuclear fission.
Of course waste storage and storage is a difficulty with nuclear power, but it pales in comparison to the damage caused to Earth by drilling, transporting, storing, and burning fossil fuels. Engineers know that there is no perfect answer to any engineering problem; our job is to take the “least worst” and run with it until something better comes along.
I’d like to point out, not what nuclear power will do, but what it WON’T do:
It WON’T release megatons of CO2 into the atmosphere, exacerbating climate change;
It WON’T damage old-growth forest vegetation with acid rain;
It WON’T destroy a major marine ecosystem if a ship carrying uranium ore goes aground; and most importantly…
It WON’T force us to choose between destroying our own northland by drilling — and buying oil from people who don’t like us very much, pushing our balance of trade deficit sky-high, and being the underpinning of our unfortunate and dangerous foreign policies and military adventures in the Mideasst and elsewhere.
Nuclear energy has its problems, but most of them can be met and overcome with sound engineering and careful planning. The same cannot be said of our continued addiction to petroleum.
While I certainly like the idea of LEDs and other conservation measures, using LEDs will not cook my food, cool my house, smelt aluminum, or propel my Prius Hybrid.
I believe a University of California Santa Barbara study said that LEDs have to potential of cutting LIGHTING costs by half, but LEDs aren’t going to stop the burning of petroleum products which power the rest of the needs people have.
And, of course, the cost of switching all our lighting appliances to LEDs and the costs involved in scaling LEDs up to the same production rates as incandescent and fluorescent bulbs will be quite high, too.
Again, there’s simply no perfect answer to the Earth’s energy problems, all we can do is pick the “best worst” one.
LEDs will certainly help, but they’re NOT the answer.