I’ve written about nuclear power here a number of times. To be upfront with you: I’ve been an opponent for almost 40 years, since long before Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. I have seen very little along the way to change my views. In the light of the specter of climate change, I’ve tried to be open-minded. However, there are still too many negatives. In teaching my class on climate change this summer, I used an excellent paper from the Union of Concerned Scientists: Nuclear Power in a Warming World. Among the concerns they flag – and they don’t close out the option by any means – are the safety of operations, defending against sabotage, nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism, and waste.
In reading the paper, I was reminded of a very near miss that happened at the Davis-Besse unit in Ohio in 2002. “Cooling water had indeed leaked-most likely beginning in 1995, and this leakage had corroded a large hole through the reactor vessel’s head. Only a thin stainless steel veneer-less than one quarter-inch thick-had prevented a loss-of-coolant accident more serious than that at Three Mile Island in 1979. Had the corroded reactor vessel head ruptured, the loss of cooling water would likely have led to both a reactor meltdown and a containment failure. [My emphasis.] Davis-Besse was designed for a loss-of-coolant accident, but its two key backup systems were seriously impaired. The debris created by fluid jetting through a ruptured vessel head would likely have blocked and disabled the pumps needed to cool the reactor core and containment, triggering a reactor meltdown and failure of the containment barrier.” (For more on this, see the paper itself, page 17.)
I just wanted to flag an article here from Dave Elliott a professor of technology policy in Britain: Nuclear power – dead end, or in with a chance?. The paper comes via the excellent environmentalresearchweb. He makes the argument that it’s difficult to have nuclear power and renewables. (This is an argument I made to a British nuclear power official a couple of years back.) In any event, Elliot summarizes his brief eloquently here:
“What’s the best bet for the future? An energy source with limited resource availability and major waste and security implications? Or a range of new technologies based on natural energy flows, with no emissions, no wastes, no fuel resource limits, no fuel price rises, and no security implications, unless that is we start squabbling over the wind and solar resource around the planet?”
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