Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Environmental activists have spent decades shutting down as many hydroelectric dams as possible, par-
ticularly large hydroelectric dams, despite hydro's proven track record as a cheap, reliable source of CO
2
-
free power, in the name of protecting species of fish, free-flowing rivers, and other justifications that focus
on nonhuman nature.
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The Sierra Club on its list of accomplishments on its Web site lists dams it has
prevented or shut down.
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If the standard is improving human life, those who believe that catastrophic climate change is coming
unless we reduce CO
2
emissions should favor damming every possible river to generate reliable CO
2
-free
power. And for those who don't believe CO
2
's climate impact is a major problem, there's still a huge bur-
den of proof on anyone to justify depriving people of a cheap, plentiful, reliable source of energy.
NUCLEAR TECHNOLOGY: RELIABLE, SCALABLE . . . CHEAP?
With hydroelectric, we saw that a
naturally concentrated, stored source
of energy was a big benefit. This
is the reason why the potential of nuclear power has enchanted many in the energy world, this author in-
cluded.
If natural concentration is a benefit, there is no more naturally concentrated energy source than the
uranium or other radioactive metals used to generate nuclear power. Oil is an amazingly concentrated
source of energy, which is why it is the transportation fuel of choice. Well, the concentration of energy in
uranium is more than a
million
times that of oil and 2 million times that of coal—although given current
technology, in practice it “only” delivers
thousands
of times more energy per unit of input.
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Nuclear's presence in generating energy around the world is slowly growing. There are two factors,
which can be hard to separate, that hold back nuclear's progress: the difficulty of doing it cheaply and the
perceived difficulty of doing it safely.
While many feel that the focus in the nuclear process should be on safety, I think the evidence shows
that the real controversy should be on
price.
Recall that to produce cheap, plentiful, and reliable energy, every element of the energy production
process has to be cheap, plentiful, and reliable. Nuclear power uses uranium, which exists in enormous
quantities around the world, and can also use thorium, an even more abundant material. Even using current
technology, we are talking about time horizons upwards of thousands of years. The trickier part of the pro-
cess is transforming that material into energy, which is much more complex than, say, burning natural gas
to generate electricity. It involves producing energy by releasing the immense forces within a radioactive
atom. Absent proper safety technology, human exposure to large amounts of radioactivity can lead to radi-
ation poisoning or, in the longer term, cancers. At the same time, below a certain threshold, radioactivity is
not harmful; we ourselves are radioactive and emit radioactivity. Unfortunately, radioactivity is commonly
viewed as deadly
as such,
so critics of nuclear power can cite amounts of radiation coming from, for ex-
ample, the Fukushima accident, and it sounds scary—even though the amount is not enough for anyone to
die now (of radiation poisoning) or in the future (from cancer).
The issue of nuclear safety is full of so much rhetoric and emotion that it can be hard to sort through.
But as a starting point, let's ask: How do we know how safe it is? I think the most reliable indication of a
technology's safety is how many deaths it has caused per unit of energy produced. In the free world, nuc-
lear power in its entire commercial history has not led to a single death—including from much-publicized
failures at Three Mile Island and Fukushima.
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