Slashdot | Americans Favor Moratorium On New Nuclear Reactors
While a drop in public support for nuclear power would be expected after an incident like the Fukushima reactor crisis, the nuclear disaster in Japan has triggered a much stronger response among Americans. When Japan — the nation that President Obama held up as an example of safe nuclear power being used on a large-scale basis — is unable to effectively control its considerable downside, Americans are understandably leery about the same technology being used even more extensively in this nation. And safety concerns about the existing nuclear plants also deserve serious attention.
I was just waiting for a story like this to pop up… I knew it’d happen before too long. Americans are irrationally afraid of nuclear power at the best of times, and it doesn’t take much to throw them into a panic. Now we’re talking about a straight-up moratorium…
Remember that image I posted a few days ago, showing various doses of radiation? Notice how a coal burning power plant actually gives of more radiation than a nuclear power plant? And then you’ve got all the extra pollution that a coal power plant spews out, that a nuclear power plant doesn’t… But somehow coal is perceived as safer than nuclear.
Those reactors at Fukushima were commissioned in 1971. They’re 40 years old. They were hit with a huge earthquake and then a tsunami. Granted, they’re leaking radiation and I wouldn’t want to live too close to there right now… But they still haven’t failed catastrophically, and nobody has actually died as a direct result of those reactors yet.
Do you really think a pile of 40-year-old coal or oil power plants would’ve weathered this any better? You don’t think there’d be any raging fires, or spilled fuel, or toxic clouds of pollution?
And we’re talking about power plants that have been up and running for 40 years. New power plants are designed better, with more safety features. You could expect them to be even safer than what’s in Fukushima right now.
But we’re talking about a moratorium… Because radiation is scary…
Right now, today, the US gets about 20% of its power from nuclear reactors. All of those reactors are old and overworked. Many of them are operating beyond their original specifications… Many of them were scheduled to be decommissioned, but they were kept on-line because there was no replacement available. What are we going to do when we finally have to start shutting them down? Where are we going to come up with 20% of our power if we aren’t going to use those nuclear power plants?
If we were at all serious about “energy independence” we’d be rolling out pebble bed reactors here in the US. We could drop micro nuclear reactors into various rural locations rather than having to pipe power across the country, and our infrastructure would actually be more resilient to disasters and attacks. And any spent fuel that was still radioactive enough to worry about could be fed into a breeder reactor and used to make useful fuel… Until the only waste left wasn’t radioactive enough to worry about.
Instead, we keep giving lip service to “green energy” and things like that… While powering our entire economy off of various fossil fuels – most of which are purchased from countries that really don’t like us much. And all of which belch tons (literally) of pollution into the atmosphere, and will eventually run out.
But those very real threats are too distant and abstract… Not like all that scary radiation heading for the west coast.
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