How decades of misleading facts have made us fear a safe and reliable energy source

The future of nuclear energy can be bright if we allow our fears of the past to catch up to a modern understanding of this incredible technology

Imagine living in the 1960s. There was a lot of hope in the air. The era had moon landings, the passing of the civil rights act, and the promise of a clean energy future. While today our media focuses on wind and solar, the 1960s was when the nuclear power industry began its rapid growth.

Almost since its inception, nuclear power has been controversial. At the center of the debate are conversations about its safety and the risks to our health and environment. At the heart of the anti-nuclear movement, we hear about radioactive waste, a byproduct of nuclear energy production that creates risk to our planet for hundreds of thousands of years. We also hear about fears of nuclear meltdowns caused by failed reactors, leaking radioactive waste into the environment, leading to horrific death and sickness. For those in favor, we hear a different story. A story of a cost-effective, carbon-free, and virtually limitless supply of energy that is the key to our clean energy future.

Today’s post is about why decades of misleading facts have led to an irrational fear of the most safe and reliable clean energy future that we should be investing in.

What should we do about all the nuclear waste?

First, let’s dive into nuclear waste. The U.S. generates about 2000 pounds of nuclear waste every year. Much of the debate about this waste has been how to properly store it and the fear of waste leaking into the earth and water table. But what if I told you the 240,000 year estimate for nuclear waste to decay doesn’t take into consideration recycling technology that was invented over 60 years ago?

In 1962, Argonne National Laboratories built a nuclear reactor that could create electricity out of nuclear waste. And not by a small amount either. 96% of the nuclear waste can be recycled, and that recycling process can be repeated over and over again. The waste that remains no longer takes hundreds of thousands of years to decay. It’s only a couple hundred. And in the U.S., we already have enough nuclear waste to power the entire country for the next 100 years.

However, this recycling process requires a special type of nuclear reactor, and they’re almost nowhere to be found. And it’s all because of the Cold War. In 1977, then-President Jimmy Carter announced new policies to limit the risk of nuclear war. The recycling process requires the separation of materials in nuclear waste. One of these materials is plutonium, a material seen as high risk to furthering nuclear proliferation. As a result, Carter’s administration ended the development of nuclear reactors that could handle recycled nuclear waste. “A viable and economical nuclear power program can be sustained without such reprocessing and recycling,” said Carter’s administration. But the Cold War is over, so why haven’t we invested in reactors that can handle the waste? It mostly comes down to money and a negative attitude about nuclear’s future as a clean energy source. The average life of the 92 nuclear power plants currently operating in the U.S. is about 40 years, and with only one new plant built since the 1990s, there hasn’t been enough investment in new nuclear plants to make a switch possible. The good news is places like Argonne National Laboratories continue to move the science of nuclear energy forward. The bad news is that unless the national narrative changes about expanding the use nuclear energy, this clean energy future will have a hard time escaping the lab.

If we can’t recycle it, what do we do about the nuclear waste already produced and will be produced in the future? If you’re envisioning barrels full of oozing, glowing green liquid, you’re stuck in a cartoon world. In fact, spent nuclear fuel looks nothing like this, and can and is being stored safely. According to the World Nuclear Association, “the waste is stored in engineered casks… in stable vitrified form.” The casks are placed deep in the ground and are designed to prevent any movement of radioactivity for thousands of years. Even in the event of natural disasters like earthquakes, the underground storage will keep the radioactivity below ground. No leaking involved. If you’re worried about the amount of nuclear waste, all of the waste ever produced in the United States can fit on one football field stacked less than 70 feet high.

Photo by Lukáš Lehotský on Unsplash

But you think Nuclear Plants aren’t safe?

Next, let’s dig into safety. The safety argument primarily comes from a point of view that a disaster at a nuclear power plant far outweighs the risk from other sources. And the examples that are used are Three Mile Island (1979), Chernobyl (1986), and Fukushima (2011). As of May 2022 there are 439 nuclear reactors in operating in around 30 countries, and over 700 decommissioned. With that many nuclear reactors, you might be wondering why these are the only three disasters we can point to. We’ll get back to that in a bit.

Opponents argue that the negative risks from nuclear energy are too high. The risk of death and to our health is too great. Power sources like solar and wind offer a far safer future, so they say. However, this just isn’t the case. Worldwide, 1.4 million people die in car accidents. 4.2 million people die annually from air pollution. The number of deaths directly linked to nuclear power accidents? Under 200. Not annually, but throughout the entire history of the nuclear power industry.

Maybe I’m not giving enough weight to the safety argument, so let’s get back to the three primary examples for nuclear’s safety risks. After that, we’ll compare the risks of nuclear power to other sources.

First, the Three Mile Island disaster in Pennsylvania. Death count… Zero. Detectable health consequences… None according to most studies. The amount of radiation released at Three Mile was no more than people receive getting a chest x-ray. After the event, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission addressed Congress about the meltdown, admitting “We goofed. There was no danger of any hydrogen explosion.”

Next, Chernobyl. After 30 years, the official death toll recognized by the international community is 31, with the UN saying it could be as high as 50. Tragic, yes. For an event that occurred due to a poorly designed experiment and inadequately trained personnel in the failing Soviet Union (according to the World Nuclear Association and International Atomic Energy Agency), it seems foolish that we hold up this example. The scientific advancements made in nuclear energy since this disaster should give us reason to believe a 37 year old example is not representative of how nuclear reactors would be built and operated today.

Lastly, Fukushima. Natural disasters are outside of our control, and we must take into consideration the possibility for earthquakes, tsunamis, and more, when building nuclear reactors. Even though radiation did leak due to the Fukushima event, no people died because of it. The affected water gets treated to remove most radioactive material before it is released. After the water is released, Japan states the dilution level will be at a level that is 1/40th of the government’s standard for releasing water into the environment. Needless to say, the concerns about the long-term negative impacts Fukushima appear overstated.

Construction for the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Began in 1967, and the technology used to build it would never be used in a modern generation reactor. A Harvard Study also found that “newer generations of nuclear reactors, particularly what are called pebble-bed reactors, are designed so that the nuclear chain reaction cannot run away and cause a meltdown-even in the event of complete failure of the reactor’s machinery, with the advent of modern reactors such as the pebble-bed reactor and careful selection of plant sites, nuclear accidents like the one in Fukushima are actually not possible.” With all of the modern changes in technology, especially to nuclear power plants, in the future, there will be very low risk of nuclear meltdowns, even lower than the slim margin today.

Before we move on to comparing nuclear power to other power sources, let’s take a look at the risks associated with working at the 99% of plants we haven’t talked about yet. Working in a nuclear power plant is safe. If you were to compare the negative health affects of working in a big city office to working at a nuclear power plant, one might assume the nuclear power plant is worse. But, according to The World Health Organization (WHO), the big city office is far worse due to air pollination. Another study found “Air pollution in major cities may be more damaging to health than the radiation exposure suffered by survivors of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster,” according to The Guardian, which reported on the study. When it comes to the highest risks to our health from energy production, it’s time to start looking at other sources of energy.

Photo by Frédéric Paulussen on Unsplash

While not the primary purpose of this post, I felt it helpful to compare nuclear energy to other clean energy sources. I’ll save my nuclear versus other clean energy sources argument for a future post, but here are a few highlights:

• Nuclear is better for job creation. For every 500 jobs nuclear creates, wind creates 90 and solar 60. (Source: US Department of Energy).

• Nuclear produces four times less carbon pollution than solar farms (Source: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)

• Wind takes up 360 times the land area, and solar 75 times, compared to nuclear (Source: Nuclear Energy Institute)

• Nuclear reactors requires significantly less materials compared to wind and solar (Source: US Dept. of Energy)

• Wind and solar are intermittent (wind doesn’t always blow, the sun doesn’t always shine), but nuclear is always on. (Source: 🙄)

• Wind, Solar, and Nuclear have a nearly identical death rate (Source: Our World Data)

In summary, nuclear isn’t perfect, it’s just better.

One more thing…

In researching this post, I came across one more interesting piece of nuclear technology that is often ignored. For background, the reactors we have today are uranium fission reactors, which use the element Uranium to produce the heat. There is an alternative uranium, and research suggests its even better. Today, only about 0.5% of the fuel is extracted from uranium before it is thrown away. Throium, on the other hand, allows us to extract 18% of the fuel. In turn, this would lead to even less nuclear waste.

Even more surprising is that this isn’t new knowledge. Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, said in the 1950s that abandoning thorium was a mistake. It was abandoned because it didn’t have the potential to produce nuclear weapons. In Teller’s estimate, running a nuclear reactor running on thorium instead of uranium will give us energy for thousands of years. Along with being more efficient, thorium is also cheaper than uranium. For instance, Thorium’s LCOE (Leveled Cost of Electricity) for a thorium molten salt reactor is $53.51 per MWh (Megawatt Hour.) Uranium’s LCOE is $63.08 per MWh for a conventional uranium reactor.

Thorium has also been proven to be a success in the past. From 1965-1969, the U.S. was testing thorium as an alternative fuel source to uranium because of fears that global uranium supplies would run out within decades. The Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment, as it was named, was called a success by Glenn Seaborg who was the chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission at the time.

So where do we go from here?

The future of nuclear energy can be bright if we allow our fears of the past to catch up to a modern understanding of this incredible technology.

With nuclear waste being dealt with through recycling, nuclear energy being proven to be safe time and time again, and new fuel sources such as thorium, nuclear energy is a great energy source. It is also far better for the environment, at a lower absolute cost than alternative ‘clean’ energy sources like wind and solar. If we choose to focus our clean energy investments in this amazing energy source, our current energy issues can become a thing of the past in about 20 years.

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