Uranium Fuel is a Finite Resource
Uranium is a metal that must be extracted from the earth. Unlike sun and wind, our supply of uranium is finite. We’ve already mined the most accessible sources, and at current rates of use, all cost-effective sources of uranium will be exhausted in about a century. Plutonium (which is synthesized in nuclear plants) is sometimes substituted for uranium, but it’s one of the most toxic substances on the planet, and increased use dramatically increases the risk of nuclear weapon proliferation.
Nuclear Energy: Nothing Clean About It
There are more than 15,000 abandoned uranium mines in the United States. Corporations walk away from these radioactive sites leaving the cost of clean up to the public. There are no federal laws that require clean up of these hazardous sites. You can learn more at CleanUpTheMines.org.
Poster: Roughly 10 million people in the US live within 50 miles of an abandoned uranium mine. That’s about 1 in 7 people in the western United States (source).
Nuclear Power is Far From Carbon-Free
While nuclear plants emit negligible carbon dioxide during operation, the mining, milling, fabrication—and especially the enrichment of uranium fuel rods—are extremely carbon-intensive. In fact, there are utility-size coal power plants devoted entirely to powering US uranium enrichment facilities.
Additionally, the huge amount of material required for plant construction—principally energy-intensive concrete used in containment structures—is very carbon-intensive. Conservative analyses have found that nuclear power is 7 TIMES more carbon-intensive than its closest renewable competitor – wind power generation. Time is also a factor in reducing future carbon emissions, since new nuclear plants inevitably take much longer to construct than solar or wind farms. Utilizing nuclear plants to reduce overall carbon emissions is inefficient and will actually result in additional fossil fuel emissions while they’re under construction.
Nuclear Power Plants are Uniquely Threatened by Climate Change
All nuclear plants require constant and massive amounts of water to cool their superheated cores. Besides contributing to thermal pollution of lakes, rivers, and bays, the plants simply can’t operate if their coolant water becomes too warm or is unavailable due to drought. Many nuclear plants are located at or near sea level and will be increasingly threatened by severe weather and sea level rise. (The Fukushima disaster happened when catastrophic flooding knocked out their cooling systems, resulting in a meltdown.) There have also been several instances where nuclear plants have had to shut down during heatwaves. This is absolutely a concern as our ocean and air temperatures continue to rise.
Severe Weather Events Raise Concerns
In 2011, flooding of the Missouri River enveloped the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant in Nebraska. Nearly every nuclear power plant in this country is located next to a body of water, many in tornado, earthquake, or hurricane-prone regions.
While the Fort Calhoun plant did survive the 2011 flood, it was closed town for good on October 24, 2016 because it had simply become too expensive to operate. Even shut down, the decommissioning process for this facility will take 60 years and will cost an estimated 1.5 billion dollars. The plant was only 43 years old when it was shut down.
As extreme weather events become more common, new concerns arise about the safety of nuclear power plants.
Photo: Fort Calhoun Nuclear Station under water in 2011.
Nuclear Power cannot exist without huge government subsidies
With the recent focus on downsizing government and cutting back on unsustainable services and subsidies, it’s odd that little attention has been paid to the continuing billions of taxpayer dollars going every year to prop up an aging nuclear industry. The industry receives countless tax breaks, government research and loan guarantees for new plants, and the biggest subsidy of all—the Price-Anderson insurance policy. This policy limits plant owners liability to roughly $12 billion in costs for major accidents, even though numerous studies (and proof in Japan) project the cost of a nuclear accident to be hundreds of times that amount – all of which will be bankrolled by us, the taxpayers.
Learn about the many subsidies (our tax dollars) given to the nuclear industry in Nuclear Power: Still Not Viable Without Subsidies written by Doug Koplow for the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Nuclear facilities lack agility, versatility, and resilience
Smart power grids of the future will require agility, versatility, and resilience. Safety concerns aside, nuclear power can only begin to be cost-effective when generated in huge centralized facilities which, by nature, have to run on a continual basis as base-load power.
The smart power grid of the future will be agile and able to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances. An inflexible, centralized, vulnerable power source like nuclear will not integrate well into that system.
The necessity for immediate shutdown (known as a scram) whenever a nuclear power plant is threatened by outside events or internal accidents means that blackouts and other crisis situations will quickly intensify and last longer. This was demonstrated in Japan during the Fukushima disaster as well as the Great Northeast Blackout of 2003.
We still haven’t solved the issue of waste storage
Nuclear waste remains radioactive for millions of years. The half–life of Uranium 238 is 4.5 million years. No one has figured out how to sustainably store radioactive waste for the tens of thousands of years required for public safety.
The nuclear storage debacle at Yucca Mountain has left us with about 70 de facto unsecured, long-term nuclear waste dumps around the country, as nuclear plants are left with on-site dry cask storage and spent fuel pools, a costly and dangerous non-solution. Nuclear countries in Europe have not fared much better, despite having 60 years of experience trying to grapple with this problem.
