Saucier reported August 1, 2021 Part 2 "The Nuclear Option" of the article series in the AAPG The EXPLORER. "Net-Zero Emissions by 2050? Not Without Nuclear"
In his $2.2 trillion infrastructure plan, President Joe Biden is including funds for new energy sources in an ambitious attempt to cut carbon emissions. The plan includes developing advanced nuclear reactors and reclaiming domestic uranium mining - a boon to nuclear energy proponents. While states have been erecting wind farms for electricity generation, some scientists believe increasing the nation's reliance on nuclear power makes more sense than renewables.
After decades of improvements to design and cost, modern nuclear reactors have been shown to be the safest and one of the most affordable forms of clean energy - and capable of the heavy lifting needed to reverse the country's ever-growing emissions, said AAPG Member Dr. James L. Conca, a 33-year Earth and environmental scientist and consultant for federal and state environmental and energy agencies as well as industry.
Nuclear power's benefits might be clear on paper, but the energy source still grapples with a public relations problem in the United States stemming from "exaggerated reporting" of incidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, said AAPG Member Michael D. Campbell, chair of the Energy Minerals Division's Uranium Committee and chief geologist/chief hydrogeologist at I2M Consulting, LLC, in Houston. As more countries around the world turn to nuclear power - some at rapid rates - will its new trajectory be appealing enough for the United States to embrace it?
Nuclear Misunderstanding
Although the United States produces the largest amount of commercial nuclear power, its history as an energy source has been something of a rollercoaster ride, explained Paul Goranson, the new CEO of Encore Energy Corp., a U.S. uranium mining company. Strongly backed by the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s, nuclear energy really caught on in the 1970s, with most reactors built between 1970 and 1990, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. However, the partial meltdown of a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979, followed by the 1986 meltdown of a reactor at Chernobyl, brought new development of nuclear energy in the United States to a screeching halt.
Although the deregulation of power companies in the 1990s prompted proposals for 16 new reactors in the United States in the early 2000s, with five starting construction, Goranson said the nuclear renaissance was short-lived, drying up with the 2011 meltdown of the reactor in Japan after a tsunami.
Today, with global calls for cleaner energy and the Biden administration's goal to cut emissions roughly in half by 2030, Goranson said nuclear power could gain greater traction in the United States, just as it has in other top-producing countries, including France, China, Russia and South Korea.
Contrary to mainstream media coverage at the time, Campbell said the Three Mile Island incident was the result of inadequate procedures and poor training that hampered operators from responding (more). While an estimated 2 million people were exposed to radiation, the amount was only a fraction of the exposure from an X-ray, stated an August 2020 editorial entitled, "Don't let nuclear accidents scare you away from nuclear power," published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
The meltdown at Chernobyl has been widely attributed to "profound defects in reactor design, lack of a requisite safety culture and mistakes made by the power station operators," stated the editorial. It also has been reported that the Soviets chose not to immediately disclose the incident to the public or perform evacuations in a timely manner. Reflecting on remarks made by Yukiya Amano, the late director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the editorial stated that Japan's mistake was building a reactor too close to its vulnerable coast and assuming it was "too safe for a disaster of this scale" to occur. Even when factoring in the fallout from Chernobyl, the World Health Organization states that nuclear energy is considered the safest of all energy sources.
Nuclear waste also has been a point of contention, Campbell said, but explained that the total amount of nuclear waste produced by the United States since the 1950s is about 83,000 metric tons - an amount that can fit into a football field 30-feet deep. What's more, Russia is beginning to use "breeder" reactors, which consume almost all of their fuel, reducing the amount of waste, Campbell added.
Read on. Part 1 was also linked.
Managed & Built by I2M Consulting, LLC | © 2010-
