Time out on nuclear power?
Speculating now about the implications of the Japanese nuclear crisis on U.S. policy would be like trying to assess the political fallout of Hurricane Katrina while people were still being plucked from rooftops in New Orleans. As frustrating as it may be in the era of the 24-hour news cycle, we simply cannot know the impact of this event until we know the final outcome, and that could still be days away.
We do know that certain things are probably not going to happen. There isn’t going to be an explosion of the reactor core, as we saw at Chernobyl in 1986. There, human error caused the nuclear chain reaction to spiral, leading to a massive explosion. At Fukushima, the chain reactions have been successfully stopped by the insertion of control rods.
Moreover, the Russian-designed reactor at Chernobyl had no containment structure, so the roof literally blew off, and the reactor materials were sent flying into the air. At Fukushima, the massive containment structures are still intact. Some outer walls have been breached by explosions of gases that have built up during the cooling of the rods, but these are vastly different and far less dangerous than the core explosion at Chernobyl.
That is not to suggest that the situation in Japan isn’t serious – it is. We are witnessing the second worst disaster in the history of civilian nuclear energy. Still, as we ponder the future of nuclear energy in the United States, we must focus on the questions of relative risk.
Nuclear is a major source of baseload electric power, and our biggest source of such power is coal. Annual deaths from the mining, transport and burning of coal number are in the tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands. The day-to-day operation of coal plants even emit more radiation – vastly more – than nuclear plants. To date, the number of Americans killed or injured by the production of nuclear energy is zero. No one was killed or hurt by the worst American nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in 1979.
Then there is the ultimate relative risk assessment – climate change. Nuclear is the only major source of baseload power that does not emit greenhouse gases. At Third Way, we simply do not see a way to power the United States with zero or low emissions without a significant increase in our use of nuclear energy. Indeed,as MIT professor Michael Golay has noted, if the damage at Fukushima remains limited, “the greatest nuclear-related harm of the Japanese earthquake may be the lost opportunities for nuclear power in reducing climate change.”
-Jonathan Cowan
