Beyond Nuclear International
“Low-carbon” misses the point
Arguments favoring nuclear power as a climate “solution” are fundamentally misframed
By Amory B. Lovins
The view that climate protection requires expanding nuclear power has a basic flaw in its prevailing framing: it rarely if ever relates climate-effectiveness to cost or to speed—even though stopping climate change requires scaling the fastest and cheapest solutions. By focusing on carbon but only peripherally mentioning cost and speed, and by not relating these three variables, this approach misframes what climate solutions must do.
The climate argument for using nuclear power assumes that since nuclear power generation directly releases no CO2, it can be an effective climate solution. It can’t, because new (or even existing) nuclear generation costs more per kWh than carbon-free competitors—efficient use and renewable power—and thus displaces less carbon per dollar (or, by separate analysis, per year): less not by a small margin but by about an order of magnitude (factor of roughly ten). As I noted in an unpublished 17 Aug letter to The New York Times:
…[The Times’s 14 August] editorial twice extols “wind, solar and nuclear power” as if all three had equal climate benefits. They don’t. New electricity costs 3–8 (says merchant bank Lazard) or 5–13 (says Bloomberg New Energy Finance) times less from unsubsidized wind and solar than from nuclear power. Renewables thus displace 3–13 times more fossil-fueled generation per dollar than nuclear, and far sooner. Efficiency is even cheaper, beating most existing reactors’ operating costs. Competing or comparing all options…saves more carbon.
Thus nuclear power not only isn’t a silver bullet, but, by using it, we shoot ourselves in the foot, thereby shrinking and slowing climate protection compared with choosing the fastest, cheapest tools. It is essential to look at nuclear power’s climate performance compared to its or its competitors’ cost and speed. That comparison is at the core of answering the question about whether to include nuclear power in climate mitigation.
The record-breaking failures of nuclear power
TVA’s Bellefonte cancelation is just the latest in a long line of nuclear debacles
By Linda Pentz Gunter
The Tennessee Valley Authority could likely rightfully claim a place in the Guinness Book of World Records, but it’s not an achievement for which the federally-owned electric utility corporation would welcome notoriety.
After taking a whopping 42 years to build and finally bring on line its Watts Bar Unit 2 nuclear power reactor in Tennessee, TVA just broke its own record for longest nuclear plant construction time. However, this time, the company failed to deliver a completed nuclear plant.
Watts Bar 2 achieved criticality in May 2016, then promptly came off line due to a transformer fire three months later. It finally achieved full operational status on October 19, 2016, making it the first United States reactor to enter commercial operation since 1996.
Now, almost five years later, TVA has announced it has abandoned its unfinished two-reactor Bellefonte nuclear plant in Alabama, a breathtaking 47 years after construction began.
TVA was apparently happy to get out of the nuclear construction business, because, as the Chattanooga Times Free Press reported, the company “did not see the need for such a large and expensive capacity generation source.” No kidding!
Read MorePoland’s nuclear folly
Refusing to learn the lessons from Chernobyl, Poland embarks on a rash nuclear power program
By Beata Cymerman
It was April 28, 1986, early morning in Poland. The radiation monitoring station in Mikołajki, Mazury area (north-eastern region of Poland) showed that the radioactivity in the air was 550,000 times higher than the day before. The radioactive cloud from Chernobyl had travelled to Poland. The story of the catastrophe began here.
The Chernobyl disaster in Poland
The government of Poland didn’t immediately release an official statement regarding the catastrophe. Poland was a satellite state of the Soviet Union. After the day of the explosion, April 26, no information was presented by the Polish media. One of the first people informed about the catastrophe was Prof. Jaworowski – Chairman of the Scientific Council of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection (CLOR) in Warsaw. He obtained information about the catastrophe from BBC radio and connected it to the unusual measurements from the Mikołajki station.
Together with the President of Polish National Atomic Agency, he set out to monitor the situation. After taking several more measurements on the same day, it became clear that they were dealing with a high radiation risk. Despite the obstacles presented by the Soviet bureaucratic system and with the help of Jaworski’s wife, who was affiliated with the Polish Academy of Science, they managed to directly inform the Prime Minister of their findings.
On April 29, members of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party (KC PZPR) and the government appointed Government Commission took measures to combat the crisis. The priority was overcoming the effect of exposure to the radioisotope I – 131, which greatly increases the risk of thyroid cancer. The rapid action of administering iodine, which began on the afternoon of April 29, serves as a model for action in the event of a radioactive crisis. It was the largest preventive action in the history of medicine performed in such a short time. In just three days, 18.5 million people were administered iodine solution, adults as well as children. In comparison, in Russia, iodine was distributed a month after the catastrophe.
From personal stories from our parents, I know that we were told not to eat salad, mushrooms and not to drink milk, while friends told us about the radioactive cloud coming to Poland. But there weren’t any official restrictions. Children had to go to school as normal. Moreover, the national bank holiday on May1, and the obligatory march that was customarily held on that day, went on as planned. That shows how the Soviet Union worked, placing political interests over human health.
Read MoreVested interests
How monolithic institutions decide what is safe for the rest of us
By Christine Fassert and Tatiana Kasperski
In December 2020, twenty years after the final closure of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine announced its intention to prepare an application to include certain objects in the exclusion zone around Chernobyl in the UNESCO World Heritage List.
The ministry planned to submit its application in the spring of 2021, as a way to mark the 35th anniversary of the accident on April 26.
This project would allow the establishment of a scheme to preserve the site, but above all to highlight its universal historical importance.
On the UNESCO list
Two sites linked to the dark nuclear past are already on the UNESCO list: the Hiroshima Peace Memorial and the Bikini Atoll Nuclear Test Site.
The Chernobyl site would symbolize the long history of accidents that have marked the atomic age, from Kychtym and Windscale (1957), to Three Mile Island (1979) and Fukushima (2011), whose tenth anniversary we commemorated this year.
Moreover, the Chernobyl accident constitutes a particular moment in this history, namely the beginning of the institutionalization of the international management of the consequences of nuclear accidents, whose impact became fully apparent at the time of the Fukushima accident.
A small group of organizations
If the origins of accidents are most often explained by factors related to the development of the nuclear industry and its regulatory bodies at the national level, the “management” of their consequences gradually extends beyond national borders.
In this respect, Chernobyl established the monopolization of the authoritative knowledge of ionizing radiation by a small group of organizations — the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) and the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR).
Through a series of alliances and co-options, these organizations formed a monolithic bloc on the issue of radiological risk.
Read MoreThe Lorax and the Peregrine
“When you break a single strand, you weaken the entire web”. Simon Barnes, On The Marsh*
NOTE: Join our web event, New Nuclear: What’s at Stake for Wildlife, to learn more about the destructive impacts of nuclear power plants on ecosystems, habitats and the creatures who live and depend on them. Our event is on October 7. Register here to join, see local time and special guests.
By Linda Pentz Gunter
When the Walrus and the Carpenter were “walking close at hand” on Lewis Carroll’s fantastical beach, the predatory pair lured the trusting and abundant oysters from their beds to their own demise. They also:
“…wept like anything to see
Such quantities of sand:
If this were only cleared away,
They said, it would be grand!”
They strolled along the shore in a world where the sun shone at night and where:
“No birds were flying overhead —
There were no birds to fly.”
These wily and unlikely companions of nonsense verse were, in many ways, all too recognizably human, their birdless world thrown out of whack — the one later warned of by Rachel Carson.
The companionable pair’s luring and then devouring of every last oyster was indeed “a dismal thing to do.” But we’ve been doing it, metaphorically, ever since. How much habitat have we cleared away, how many dark nights extinguished by light pollution? How many species have we preyed upon to extinction, how many birds silenced?
Theodor Geisel, under his more familiar pen name, Dr. Seuss, warned of this unfettered environmental destruction in his children’s book, The Lorax, the title character a marvelous environmental champion who “speaks for the trees”. Geisel was angry when he wrote The Lorax and viewed it as his best work — with which many of us might agree. The book warns that our greed-driven destructive behavior will lead to extinctions, to a natural world erased and replaced by choking, smoking towers of pollution and death. And here we are.
Read MoreGroups call for no US nuclear bailouts
240 organizations ask Congress to eliminate nuclear subsidies from the budget
Note: Beyond Nuclear was among 240 organizations who have signed a letter sent to the House and Senate Majority and Minority leaders urging them to omit nuclear bailouts from the federal budget and instead direct funds toward investment in carbon-free, nuclear-free clean energy.
This moment is our opportunity to launch a wholesale transformation of our economy and our energy systems to save our country and the world from the rapidly advancing climate crisis. Yet, legislation now before Congress would provide billions of dollars in subsidies to aging and uneconomical nuclear power plants, an effort that will cause us to miss the narrow window of opportunity we have left to act effectively on climate.
If the events of the last year have taught us anything, it is that we must marshal our national resources to address structural inequities and injustices that undermine our safety, health, economic security, and sustainability. We can achieve the goals of racial, economic, environmental, and climate justice upon which the Biden administration and Congressional leaders have promised to deliver—but not if we continue to invest billions of dollars in nuclear power and other false solutions.
Both the energy legislation proposed for the larger reconciliation package (S.2291/H.R.4024) and the bipartisan infrastructure bill would grant up to $50 billion to prop up old, increasingly uneconomical nuclear reactors for the next decade. The electricity generated by these reactors will need to be replaced by renewable energy in the coming years anyway, so every dollar we spend to prolong their operation has an opportunity cost in terms of dollars, jobs, and environmental pollution.
As a July 2021 report by Dr. Mark Cooper finds, the best investments to phase out greenhouse gas emissions in the electricity sector are the same in the short-term, medium-term, and long-term: renewable energy, efficiency, storage, and grid modernization. Money slated for nuclear bailouts would be much better spent on these resources instead.
Read More
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