Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Unfortunately, activists use inaccurate characterizations to make it extremely time consuming and ex-
pensive to build new plants. Nuclear power is radioactive, they say—not mentioning that so is the sun and
that taking a walk, let alone an airplane ride, exposes you to far more radioactivity than does living next
to a nuclear power plant.
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A nuclear plant could be bombed by terrorists and bring about some sort of
Hiroshima 2, they say—not mentioning that the type of uranium used in a nuclear plant literally can't ex-
plode.
All of these fears are plausible because we have been taught to think of changing our environment
in new ways as inherently dangerous. Nuclear power, in addition to requiring large industrial structures,
deals in “unnatural” high-energy, radioactive materials and processes. Thus there is an
expectation
that it
is uniquely dangerous, even though it is uniquely safe.
The opposition has led nuclear power to be considered far more dangerous than other sources, un-
justifiably. And it means that the nuclear industry has become an essentially government-controlled in-
dustry—which, like many a government-controlled industry, has higher prices than others. Thus we don't
really know what nuclear would cost without the pseudoscientific opposition. What we do know is that,
besides fossil fuel energy, it is by far the most
scalable
form of energy in the world.
Inthe best-case scenario, though,nuclear is still decades away fromscaling tobecoming aleading glob-
al source of electricity, let alone somehow providing transportation solutions at the level oil can. Thus
there is no prospect of nuclear “replacing” fossil fuels anytime soon.
