The Green Glance | Nuclear phobias should not block cleaner future

Nathan Zucker Columnist

“Nuclear” is a dirty word within the environmental movement. For many years, organizations such as Greenpeace have lobbied to convince the public that nuclear power is harmful to citizens’ health, dangerous to national security and ecologically unsustainable. These tactics exploit the public’s fear of another Chernobyl, Three Mile Island or worse yet, Hiroshima.

Harsh critics of nuclear power are doing a disservice to society, as they are preventing the expanded use of the only power source that produces large amounts of electricity without accompanying greenhouse gas emissions. Given the rapid pace of global warming and the languid progress of alternative energy, the construction of new nuclear facilities may offer the only hope of stabilizing the planet’s swiftly deteriorating climate.

At present, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is about 380 parts per million, a level 35 percent higher than it was prior to the advent of the Industrial Revolution. Considering society’s increasingly voracious appetite for power, concentrations are expected to surpass 600 parts per million within 50 years. According to most researchers, such high levels will cause devastating heat waves, widespread agricultural failures and huge storms.

Coal-fired power plants are largely to blame for the expected rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide. In the coming years, the United States, India and China are slated to build more than 850 new coal-fired plants that will pour an extra 2.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air. This overwhelms any of the gains brought about by the Kyoto Protocol, which will reduce carbon emissions by a mere 483 million tons. This is, in simple terms, madness.

Although building more coal plants is an absurd way to increase generating capacity, there is certainly a need to expand the availability of power in coming years. Of course, optimists hope that clean, alternative energy sources such as solar, wind and hydrogen will accomplish this task.

Unfortunately, the facts fail to support this idea. Photovoltaic cells, which harness the energy of the sun to create electricity, currently have a maximum worldwide capacity of 9,000 megawatts. Wind power, which tends to be more efficient and less expensive, has a total capacity of approximately 74,000 megawatts. Although these seem like large numbers, one must remember that nuclear plants produce a total of 366,000 megawatts of power per year. Moreover, most scientists admit that a hydrogen economy is many decades away, as this source of energy is plagued by problems of infrastructure and security. Thus, it is time to accept the reality of the current situation and embrace nuclear power.

Despite arguments to the contrary by environmental groups, there is nothing particularly terrible about nuclear power. Nuclear plants release only a tiny amount of radiation into the surrounding area; the health effect of such emissions has been proven negligible. Ironically, coal-fired plants actually produce more harmful radiation in the form of uranium and thorium; coal also releases mercury, sulfur and nitrogen into the air.

In terms of national security, the dangers of nuclear plants have certainly been exaggerated. A terrorist attack on a nuclear facility would be extremely difficult to coordinate, and it would not necessarily result in the catastrophic meltdown that everyone fears. More importantly, the nuclear materials used at power plants are dissimilar to those employed in the manufacture of nuclear weaponry; thus, terrorists could not simply use the nuclear industry as a source of arms. Although nuclear waste is certainly a negative consequence of this method of power generation, it pales in comparison to the pollution and greenhouse gas emissions produced by coal plants. Overall, the advantage of a power source that does not disturb the planet’s climate outweighs any problems that currently exist with nuclear technology.

James Lovelock, a renowned British ecologist, upset much of the environmental community when he proposed in 2004 that nuclear power is the only solution to our energy crisis. According to Lovelock, global warming is the most serious threat to civilization, and there is simply not enough time to experiment with various forms of alternative energy. The negative reaction to Lovelock’s comments reveals the dangerous idealism of the ecological movement, one which could prevent the development of a realistic solution to climate change. Although nuclear power is definitely not the ideal answer, it is a practical one. In an era characterized by imminent danger to our planet’s ecosystems, practicality certainly counts for something.