Part 1 of 2 Parts
I have posted several articles listing reasons to not expand nuclear power. I decided to do another post on this subject today.
Former nuclear regulatory officials from the U.S., France, Germany, and the U.K. put out a joint statement last January that strongly opposed any expansion of nuclear power as a strategy to combat climate change. They said that there was not a single good reason to build new nuclear plants. Here is a list of reasons not to expand nuclear power.
1. Nuclear power is takes too long to implement to fight climate change.
Successful construction and operation of the new generation of proposed commercial nuclear power plants called Advanced and Small Nuclear Reactors are decades away at best. The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change points out that limiting global warming to two and seven tenths degrees Fahrenheit means that the world has to reach net zero carbon dioxide emissions globally in the early 2050s. Wind and solar power plants can be constructed and operating in a few months or years. Carbon Tracker is a financial think tank that believes renewables can power the world by 2050.
2. Nuclear Energy is just too expensive
Renewable power sources like wind and solar are already the cheapest energy in the world. Their prices continue to decline. By 2019, utility-scale renewable energy prices have already fallen to less than half the cost of nuclear energy. In combination with lower natural gas prices, there has been little to no momentum in the U.S. to construct new nuclear power plants for decades. Expanding nuclear power generation would definitely result in higher energy costs for consumers.
3. Nuclear power is not carbon-free or non-polluting.
While it may be true that electricity produced by an operating nuclear power plant does not emit carbon dioxide, mining and enrichment of uranium are carbon intensive and produce potent greenhouse gases called chlorofluorocarbons. Releases of radioactive materials into the atmosphere and water from operating nuclear power plants are common. The U.S. has already accumulated eighty five thousand metric tons of highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel which is the most dangerous pollutant known to man.
4. Permanent disposal of spent nuclear fuel remains technically unsolved.
Although the U.S. Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 mandated the construction of a permanent deep geologic repository to safely sequester spent nuclear fuel for a million years or more. Four decades later, there has been little progress. It is estimated that it will be 2050 before there can be an operating spent nuclear fuel repository in the U.S. The nuclear power plants in the U.S. for the foreseeable future are de facto nuclear waste dumps.
5. Nuclear power is not renewable.
Like coal, oil and natural gas, uranium is a finite resource. The U.S. imports about half of its uranium from Russia and two of its closest allies, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Uranium was not included in the Biden administration’s recent ban on importing fuels from Russia in response to the Ukraine invasion.
Please read Part 2 next