Recently I had some time at home alone. My wife had gone up to the mountains with family and I stayed behind for a few days to work before I went up to join them. It had been quite a while since I had had so much time just to myself, so what did I do? I looked through the Netflix catalog of documentaries. One that I came across was Meltdown: Three Mile Island.
The documentary tells the story of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant disaster, where reactor 2 melted down and released radiation into the surrounding populated area. The documentary was very interesting and entertaining (if that’s even the right word to describe a disaster documentary, but we all know disaster documentaries have a sort of morbid entertainment value, or we wouldn’t watch them), but after watching I just came away thinking, “wow, the creators of this show really want me to think that nuclear power is unsafe and terrible.” Now, to be fair to the show, I think they did try to give the pro-nuclear side a fair shake. The issue is that they would show a clip from a pro-nuclear character, and then immediately after cut to a clip from a character that had been better established as “correct” on the issue and that we were more emotionally connected to refuting the pro-nuclear side. So the creators’ biases were rather blatant.
All this got me thinking, are nuclear power plants inherently unsafe? And should we be investing more into nuclear power or not? This is really my first foray into researching nuclear power to try and establish whether or not nuclear power is a safe and viable option for our energy needs.
When people think of the advent of the nuclear age they tend to think of the Manhattan Project and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the wake of these events scientists and policy makers alike began to look for peaceful uses of nuclear fission (the process which enabled nuclear weapons). The first nuclear power plants were brought online in the 1950’s. The construction of more and more plants continued unabated until roughly the 1980’s when in the wake of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl especially plans for many plants were canceled and the construction of nuclear power plants in the United States slowed dramatically. Today there are 92 nuclear power plants in operation in the United States with construction approved for two more. These 92 plants account for roughly 9% of all energy needs in the US and about 20% of all electric power.
Nuclear power has always had a PR problem to say the least and understandably so. The processes involved are incredibly complicated and when things go wrong the consequences can last thousands of years. And that’s not to mention that it is the same process (roughly speaking) by which nuclear bombs function. These factors, along with others, have resulted in a very strong anti-nuclear movement.
One of the things that surprised me most during my research was my inability to find a YouTube video or podcast against nuclear power. The closest that I came was this video in which two people debate nuclear power but the anti-position begins his statement by saying he didn’t even want to be there, so that decreased my faith in him. The only places I could find credible anti-nuclear power arguments was on activist websites like Green America or Greenpeace.
Considering I couldn’t find solid anti-arguments where many people find educational content I reached out to Greenpeace for a statement regarding their position on nuclear power. I did this in the interest of including a competent anti-nuclear argument. I wanted to avoid strawmanning the side that disagrees with me. Greenpeace did respond (which I’ll be honest was really cool) with a page of thoughts. I’ll include pieces of that statement, the whole thing would just be too long:
Nuclear is […] expensive in comparison to solar and wind. The World Nuclear Industry Status Report showed the cost of generating solar power ranges from $36 to $44 per megawatt-hour (MWh) while onshore wind power comes in at $29–$56 per MWh. Nuclear energy costs between $112 and $189 per MWh.
Nuclear is not clean. Some of this nuclear waste is highly radioactive and will remain so for several thousand years. Nuclear waste is a real scourge for our environment and for future generations, who will still have the responsibility of managing it in several centuries.
[…]
There are security risks with nuclear power. Nuclear power plants are some of the most complex and sensitive industrial installations, which require a very complex set of resources in a ready state at all times to keep them operational. This cannot be guaranteed in a war, and makes nuclear power stations also vulnerable to terrorist attack or sabotage.
So we have three main points here to address (there were others that I excluded); expenses, security risks, and nuclear waste.
My issue with Greenpeace’s claim regarding the pricing of nuclear power is that I have no idea where they are getting their numbers. Statista claims that nuclear energy cost $29.13 per megawatt-hour in 2021 (for an interesting discussion of the economics behind nuclear power watch this video). Even if nuclear power were more expensive than solar and wind power it has a major advantage over the others, consistency. The achilles heel of solar and wind power is that they are only available on sunny or windy days. There are places in the world that simply do not have those weather conditions frequently enough to be able to supply their grids. And on the days that there is sun or wind, there is frequently too much power created and there is no good way to store that power. Battery technology simply isn’t there (although hydrogen storage seems like an interesting solution, even though it presents its own problems). I do agree with greenpeace that we should probably get to a place where those true renewables are the main source of power, but it isn’t possible for those to be the only source of power. There will always have to be a supplement of some kind.
A warning example of nuclear power’s vulnerability to war is the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine. The last reactor at the plant was shut down September 12th and now the plant is in cold shutdown. There are still reactions occurring within the reactors and water must be continually pumped in. The risks here are obvious and I think this is where Greenpeace has a strong point. I think there are ways to address these issues such as international treaties to the effect of the Geneva Accords. Security in time of war is a difficult issue, but during peacetime obviously isn’t an issue.
The problem of nuclear waste is a difficult one. In my research I had a hard time establishing if we have the issue of nuclear waste well under control or if it is a catastrophe that we cannot handle. Here is an interesting discussion that explores both extremes. I do believe that we have a better handle on nuclear waste than organizations such as Greenpeace claim. It is expensive to store nuclear waste, but we do have safe methods to do so. There is a fascinating museum in the Netherlands in which they store all of their nuclear waste. Not only is it safe, it is so safe that the general public can come and admire it.
Fascinatingly, nuclear is actually a very green energy because while the waste does have to be dealt with, nuclear is also an incredibly low carbon source of energy. If you look at the lifecycle analysis (a study of the entire process from mining to building to manufacturing) of nuclear power, it actually releases lower amounts of carbon than solar and wind power throughout their life cycles.
An issue that nuclear power runs into is that when people think of it, the first things that come to mind are major accidents and media depictions. These combine to create an assumption that nuclear power is an incredibly unsafe source of power. The reality simply doesn’t support this view. Why in the world isn’t it headline news every day that 8.7 million people die prematurely per year because of fossil fuels? The estimates of how many people have died total (this is including projections into the future as cancers take time to manifest, past accidents can have increasing death counts) from nuclear power range anywhere from 4,000, according to the WHO, to 60,000, according to the European Green Party (See here for a more in depth analysis of why those numbers are so wildly different). Even using the most pessimistic estimates, 145x more people die per year due to fossil fuels than have died from nuclear power over its entire history (the most optimistic estimate would put that figure at 2,175x)! So every time a nuclear reactor is shut down and replaced by fossil fuels (as it inevitably is) more people will die than would have otherwise. Why isn’t this headline news? One explanation is what is known in psychology as the availability heuristic.
The availability heuristic describes how we tend to use information that readily comes to mind when trying to determine the likelihood of something or how we should act. The classic example that is used to demonstrate this is people’s fear of sharks. Shark attacks are incredibly rare, but we’ve all seen movies that depict them, so those memories are readily accessible. Because of this we often think that shark attacks are much more common than they actually are. I believe that people run into the same issue with the dangers of nuclear power plants. The statistics related above seem to suggest that nuclear power isn’t nearly as dangerous as people tend to believe.
Nuclear power has been a divisive issue since its inception. I do believe that it has the potential to be the supplement to renewables that we need. Renewables cannot do it on their own, they have too many limitations. Nuclear power is safe enough to at least help us transition towards net zero emissions. Hopefully policy makers and the public will be able to approve more nuclear plants and move us away from non renewables.
This substack about nuclear energy has been really eye opening for me: https://jackdevanney.substack.com/