Skip to main content

Seeing the Light on Nuclear Energy

If you think that there is plenty of electricity, that the air is clean enough and that nuclear power is a just one among many options for meeting human needs, then you are probably over-focused on the United States or Western Europe. Even then, you’d be wrong.

That’s the idea at the heart of a new book, “Seeing the Light: The Case for Nuclear Power in the 21st Century,” by Scott L. Montgomery, a geoscientist and energy expert, and Thomas Graham Jr., a retired ambassador and arms control expert.

seeing the light the case for nuclear power in the 21st century

Billions of people live in energy poverty, they write, and even those who don’t, those who live in places where there is always an electric outlet or a light switch handy, we need to unmake the last 200 years of energy history, and move to non-carbon sources. Energy is integral to our lives but the authors cite a World Health Organization estimate that more than 6.5 million people die each year from air pollution.  In addition, they say, the global climate is heading for ruinous instability. Energy use has “revolutionized” human life, they write, but continued use of fossil fuels will make life “both more prosperous and at the same time more threatened.”

The solution, according to “Seeing the Light,” is nuclear power. And parts of that solution are already falling into place, as India and China, with the worst air pollution and the fastest-growing power demand, race to build reactors. Countries with rapid urbanization, which brings increased demand, are doing the same. People who look at the market difficulties of nuclear power in America and conclude that the technology is in decline, they write, are too focused on the West. 

Energy is a sprawling topic. When countries make energy decisions, they must take into account their national economies, energy security, energy-using industries, available natural resources, air and water quality, availability of skilled workers and other factors.

There are some factors that are harder to quantify, like psychology. Bad air kills millions annually. But in the West, at least, the focus is often on the potential of harm from nuclear reactors, instead of the observable harm from the alternatives. In fact, the authors argue, there is reason to doubt the whole structure of radiation safety regulation, which is built on an unproven assumption from the 1950s that every dose, no matter how small, increases risk.

Montgomery and Graham do not ignore the obvious, that over the years there have been nuclear accidents. At one of them, Chernobyl, in the Ukraine, radiation exposure was enough to kill dozens of emergency workers brought in from around what was then the Soviet Union. The circumstances were tragic, the engineering errors were reckless, and the public health response was a dangerous denial of reality. But they are unlikely to be repeated; that kind of reactor is not used anywhere else in the world, and it’s hard to imagine a government response as irresponsible as the Soviets’.

Wisdom, they counsel, is to recognize not only risk, but relative risk.

The debate over energy sources sometimes departs from reality and moves into an absolutist realm, they write; there are advocates of solar and wind who like them not because they are carbon-free, but because they are solar and wind. That, they say is “green ideology,” an exercise in absolutism, rather than a realistic effort to serve human needs.

There are two broad categories of emissions-free energy: renewables and nuclear. “To choose one and abandon the other is to amputate an arm from the effort that is needed,” the authors write. Distributed production from the sun and wind are not antithetical to centralized nuclear “any more than are factories and workshops.”

They also consider international politics. What supplier nations would they like to be aligned with for the next eight or ten decades? That is a consideration for potential exporting nations, including the United States, as we consider our future role in the world.

Meanwhile, in the United States we have the luxury of sometimes forgetting the importance of reliable, clean energy. The best solution yet found for poverty, the authors write, is economic development. And Third World economic development is in cities.

“Small may be beautiful, in some estimations, but cities are huge and growing,” the write. They will need big, clean energy sources, the definition of nuclear.

The above is from Matt Wald, senior communications advisor at NEI. Follow Matt on Twitter at @MattLWald.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

An Ohio School Board Is Working to Save Nuclear Plants

Ohio faces a decision soon about its two nuclear reactors, Davis-Besse and Perry, and on Wednesday, neighbors of one of those plants issued a cry for help. The reactors’ problem is that the price of electricity they sell on the high-voltage grid is depressed, mostly because of a surplus of natural gas. And the reactors do not get any revenue for the other benefits they provide. Some of those benefits are regional – emissions-free electricity, reliability with months of fuel on-site, and diversity in case of problems or price spikes with gas or coal, state and federal payroll taxes, and national economic stimulus as the plants buy fuel, supplies and services. Some of the benefits are highly localized, including employment and property taxes. One locality is already feeling the pinch: Oak Harbor on Lake Erie, home to Davis-Besse. The town has a middle school in a building that is 106 years old, and an elementary school from the 1950s, and on May 2 was scheduled to have a referendu

Why Ex-Im Bank Board Nominations Will Turn the Page on a Dysfunctional Chapter in Washington

In our present era of political discord, could Washington agree to support an agency that creates thousands of American jobs by enabling U.S. companies of all sizes to compete in foreign markets? What if that agency generated nearly billions of dollars more in revenue than the cost of its operations and returned that money – $7 billion over the past two decades – to U.S. taxpayers? In fact, that agency, the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im Bank), was reauthorized by a large majority of Congress in 2015. To be sure, the matter was not without controversy. A bipartisan House coalition resorted to a rarely-used parliamentary maneuver in order to force a vote. But when Congress voted, Ex-Im Bank won a supermajority in the House and a large majority in the Senate. For almost two years, however, Ex-Im Bank has been unable to function fully because a single Senate committee chairman prevented the confirmation of nominees to its Board of Directors. Without a quorum

NEI Praises Connecticut Action in Support of Nuclear Energy

Earlier this week, Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy signed SB-1501 into law, legislation that puts nuclear energy on an equal footing with other non-emitting sources of energy in the state’s electricity marketplace. “Gov. Malloy and the state legislature deserve praise for their decision to support Dominion’s Millstone Power Station and the 1,500 Connecticut residents who work there," said NEI President and CEO Maria Korsnick. "By opening the door to Millstone having equal access to auctions open to other non-emitting sources of electricity, the state will help preserve $1.5 billion in economic activity, grid resiliency and reliability, and clean air that all residents of the state can enjoy," Korsnick said. Millstone Power Station Korsnick continued, "Connecticut is the third state to re-balance its electricity marketplace, joining New York and Illinois, which took their own legislative paths to preserving nuclear power plants in 2016. Now attention should