Going Nuclear

Much to Slate writer Timothy Noah's glee, the Obama administration has quietly made a move to shut down the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository program:

That, in effect, is what President Obama is saying in fulfilling his campaign promise to shut down Yucca Mountain. The program, Obama's new budget states, "will be scaled back to those costs necessary to answer inquiries from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission while the administration devises a new strategy toward nuclear waste disposal." That's bureaucratese for "Yucca Mountain is dead."
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In shuttering Yucca Mountain, Obama makes it extremely likely that nuclear power in the United States will continue its long, slow, and extremely welcome death.

Noah's problem with nuclear power is the fact that the waste, which degrades very slowly over tens of thousands of years, is dangerous and will probably outlast us. Everybody agrees that this is a problem. He then makes the same problem that many enviro-types do in not weighing that problem against the problems associated with other options for producing power. Sure it would be great if all our energy came from sunlight and wind, but that's just not feasible given existing or near-future technology (and neither is completely free of ecological problems). Nuclear power is available right now, and has zero carbon emissions.

Think of it this way- for every nuclear plant that is not built, the US will continue operating two normal-sized coal-fired plants. That's the trade-off we should think about, and in that analysis it's hard to see how a no-nukes policy makes any sense. Coal-mining is enormously damaging to the environment and dangerous to workers. According to Scientific American, the waste produced by coal plants is actually more radioactive than that generated by their nuclear counterparts. In fact, the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy.

The biggest fear about a nuclear plant or nuclear waste site is the worst-case-scenario of either a meltdown/giant leak, once you recognize that contrary to popular perception it would be extremely difficult for terrorists to steal and weaponize waste from a US nuclear facility. So given that the vast majority of nuclear plants and waste sites are fairly removed from major population centers, the worst case scenario would be a loss of some number of lives and the irradiation of the immediate area. Even a disastrous meltdown at Indian Point, 24 miles from New York City, might (in its worst estimate) cost 50,000 lives.

These are all, admittedly, terrible consequences. But put them against the worst-case-scenario for global warming- with millions dying or losing their homes from flooding, drought and severe weather, and they pale in comparison.