Last month President George W. Bush visited a
nuclear power plant in Maryland to proclaim, “It is time for
this country to start building nuclear power plants again.”
Bush has joined the nuclear industry’s public-relations
campaign for what it calls a “nuclear renaissance,”
putting construction of new nuclear plants on a fast track. One of
the first new nukes in the United States is proposed by Exelon
Corp. for Clinton, only 30 minutes from Springfield. Promoters give
as a major reason for reviving nuclear power their desire to
“fight global warming” because reactors themselves
produce few greenhouse gases.
This is the same Bush administration that
until recently denied that there is scientific proof that global
warming exists and recently stiff-armed British Prime Minister Tony
Blair’s effort to get the United States to sign on to
provisions of the Kyoto treaty to mitigate global warming. So,
considering the administration’s track record on the environment, promoting nuclear power for
its environmental benefits already smells bogus. And when it is taken
into account that enriching nuclear fuel depends heavily on processes
that produce greenhouse gases, and that fossil-fuel plants provide the
electricity to run enrichment facilities, the global-warming argument
for nuclear evaporates.
A June 29 report by the National Academy of
Sciences gives further evidence that nuclear power causes more
problems than it solves. It has long been known that nuclear
reactors give off low doses of radiation, both inside and outside
the plant, yet until now the industry has argued that the low-level
doses are harmless. But the NAS panel stated conclusively that
there is no safe level: “The scientific research base shows
that there is no threshold of exposure below which low levels of
ionizing radiation can be demonstrated to be harmless or
beneficial,” the report states. “The health risks
— particularly the development of solid cancers in organs
— rise proportionally with exposure. As the overall lifetime
exposure increases, so does the risk.” The more nuclear
plants that are built, the more people will be exposed to low-level
radiation.
During the Illinois drought, another environmental
problem has come to light. Researchers have shown that fossil-fuel and
nuclear power plants account for 84 percent of Illinois’ water
use, mostly from rivers. This raises the concern that in a future
warmer world, in which temperatures and evaporation will increase and
rain will decrease, water sources may not be capable of supplying
current power plants, let alone more nukes. According to the Nuclear
Energy Information Service, the problem became apparent during the
drought of 1988. “Over 100 reactor-days of operation were either
sharply curtailed or cancelled completely because the reactors’
thermal output into our rivers exceeded EPA thermal pollution standards,” says NEIS.
Add these concerns to the necessity of
isolating highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel from the
environment for thousands of years and the risk of accident or
terrorist attack at a nuclear plant, and it becomes clear that
nuclear power is no green bargain. It is no economic bargain,
either, as evidenced by the fact that the U.S. Senate recently
voted to spend more than $10 billion in subsidies to support
nuclear-power expansion. There are alternatives, including
clean-burning coal, wind, and solar power, as well as conservation.
Dollars spent on energy efficiency and conservation can displace
far more global-warming gases than dollars spent on nuclear power.
The United States can’t allow itself to
be duped by arguments that a “nuclear renaissance” is
the solution to energy or environmental problems. The campaign by
politicians and the nuclear industry must be stopped with facts and
reason before we may embark on a wiser course to the energy future.
This article appears in Jul 14-20, 2005.
