One of the main problems with the debate over nuclear power has to do with the scope of the debate. There are many different issues in the debate and it can be difficult to understand the connections between them and the trade-offs that may be present.
The debate has to start with the need for electricity. The increasing population of the world and the increasing industrialization of the developing world demands more electrical power for consumer and industrial purposes. There are a number of different ways to generate electrical power. Coal, oil, natural gas, biomass and nuclear energy can all be used to heat water to turn steam turbines. Water and wind can turn turbines. Solar energy can be captured and converted to electricity. Fuel cells can convert hydrogen and other fuels to electricity. There are devices that can convert heat directly to electricity. This wide diversity of sources complicates any discussion of electric generation.
Because of the many different ways to generate electricity, comparing the cost of any one type of generation to any other type can be very difficult. Some methods require a fuel that must be extracted from the earth but even these types vary greatly in extraction processes. Some fuels must be refined which can be expensive and polluting. Some are renewable but cannot generate power consistently. Some types of generation can be done locally with small infrastructure investment and some require enormous investment to create a centralized generation facility. Some methods generate pollution as a side effect and some create waste that threatens the ecosystem and must be dealt with properly to prevent harm.
Some sources of energy also have other uses benign and hostile. The petrochemicals used to create fuels are also used as chemical feed stocks and weapons. The radioactive materials created in nuclear reactors have wide uses in industry and medicine but can also be used for weapons.
When comparing the pros and cons of any source of electrical energy, there are a number of different dimension that can be part of the discussion but any particular type of electricity generation may not even appear on a dimension that is important for the other type being compared. For instance, fuel and waste are not relevant to renewable such as wind and solar but are very important for petrochemicals and nuclear power.
When different groups with different agendas and priorities are discussing power generation, they may difficulty even agreeing on what is important in the debate. Environmental groups will focus on threats to the ecosystem while industrial groups will focus profits and governments will focus on stability and availability.
It would be great to have a simple scale that would allow you to assign a rating to any given power source so they could all be compared and an informed choice could be made as to which was the “best.” Instead, we have a messy set of dimensions of varying relevance which makes comparison and selection extremely difficult. Nuclear energy may have high positive ratings on some indexes and high negative ratings on other indexes. And, the different interest groups emphasize different dimensions as being important. Nonetheless, it is necessary to do the best we can to compare the pros and cons of different energy generation methods and make the best choice we can.
