Another Voice / Energy
Nuclear power freighted with troubling consequences
In last Sunday’s Nature Watch column, Gerry Rising displayed his own admitted lack of atomic energy expertise.
Nuclear power is not carbon-free. It consumes more fossil fuels in the uranium mining, refining, fuel fabrication and actual power plant construction and operation processes per unit of installed generating capacity than do the trio of the cleanest alternative sources — wind, geothermal and solar — in their production and deployment. A dollar invested in wind produces more energy, leads to a greater reduction in carbon emissions and creates more jobs than one invested in nuclear power, according to experts.
In addition, as Rising admits, nuclear power has other significant, albeit frequently glossed-over, externalized costs and risks. These include the increasingly problematic issue of nuclear weapons proliferation, the large consequences of accidents and taxpayer liability for them, and the unsolved problem of safely managing nuclear waste and decommissioning old reactors. Sandia National Laboratory has estimated the cost of a worst-case scenario accident in this country at $700 billion. Yet, through the Price Anderson Act, the federal government has limited the liability to reactor operators from a major accident to only $10 billion.
The cost of the high-level spent fuel repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada has risen to $96 billion. Originally scheduled to open in 1998, the repository is now set to open in 2017. It may never open due to site wetness issues that eventually will compromise waste storage methods.
In recommending West Valley as a storage site, Rising clearly doesn’t understand this issue of wetness insofar as maintaining environmental isolation of nuclear waste is concerned. West Valley’s location and climate make it uniquely unsuitable for the long-term storage of nuclear wastes; the site drains into Lake Erie, part of the largest freshwater basin on the planet.
These simple facts have prompted both the Coalition on West Valley Nuclear Wastes and the government’s own stakeholder group at West Valley — the Citizens Task Force — to call for the removal of all radioactive wastes from the West Valley facility. Far from being an economic boon, this failed commercial nuclear fuel reprocessing facility has already been a drain on taxpayers to the tune of $2 billion since 1980.
The cost of complete cleanup of the West Valley site, including the two nuclear waste dumps, was pegged at $8 billion in the Energy Department’s 1996 estimate. While this necessary cleanup may be a boon for local industry, as Rising points out, it will cost New York and federal taxpayers big time.
In summary, nuclear power already costs twice as much as electricity produced from the wind, not including the additional externalized costs and risks.
James Rauch of Amherst is a member of the steering committee of the Coalition on West Valley Nuclear Wastes and the scientist and secretary for F. A. C. T. S. (For A Clean Tonawanda Site) Inc.
