The laws on the conservation of energy are difficult no doubt... that's exactly why the lone consumer should not be the deciding force. Speaking of byproducts & processes: motherjones.com
Nuking the Atmosphere President Bush and the nuclear energy industry want you to believe that nuclear power doesn't produce a whiff of greenhouse gases. Too bad it's not true.
by Mark Francis Cohen May 23, 2001
Nuclear power plants like this one in Limerick, Pa., aren't so atmospherically friendly.
"Many Americans may not realize that nuclear power already provides one-fifth of this nation's electricity, safely and without air pollution," President George W. Bush declared to a raft of business leaders in St. Paul, Minn. last week as he introduced the administration's new energy program. "By renewing and expanding existing nuclear facilities, we can generate tens of thousands of megawatts of electricity at a reasonable cost without pumping a gram of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere."
Of course, Bush isn't the only one trumpeting nuclear power as the atmospherically-friendly energy source. The nuclear power industry itself has blanketed dozens of magazines and newspapers, including the Washington Post and The New York Times, with ads touting its product as greenhouse-gas free. Electricity that doesn't cause global warming? Sounds great! Unfortunately, it's not true.
The argument that nuclear power plants don't produce greenhouse gasses is one of the theories upon which the National Energy Policy -- a 163-page report designed by Vice President Cheney and his task force -- rests. True, the reactors themselves don't emit greenhouse gases, and so strictly speaking they don't contribute to global warming. But creating nuclear energy is a five-step process, the last of which is generating electricity from the reactor. At every other step in the process, pollution is emitted -- including substantial amounts of greenhouse gases.
Uranium, the fuel base of nuclear power, must be mined, milled, converted, enriched, packaged, sent to reactors and split to produce the heat and steam that generate electricity. The uranium enrichment process in particular, in which the radioactive material is made more radioactive, generates greenhouse gases galore. "It requires a tremendous amount of electricity," explains Elizabeth Stuckle, a spokeswoman at the US Enrichment Corporation, the company in charge of altering the uranium for the reactors. To get that electricity, she says, "we are having to rely on fossil fuels."
In fact, the enrichment process is so electricity-intensive that when nuclear power plants were being built in this country in the 1950s, new coal-burning plants were also constructed for the sole purpose of powering the nuclear enrichment stations. For example, the Clifty Creek coal-burning plant in southeastern Indiana was erected to power an enrichment facility in Portsmouth, Ohio. The Clifty Creek plant emits more than 9 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. (The Portsmouth facility stopped enriching uranium this month.) The nearby enrichment facility in Paducah, Ky. -- the only other such facility currently operating in the US -- until recently also got much of its power from a coal-burning plant. Since September, it has largely switched over to the Tennessee Valley Authority grid, which gets about 60 percent of its electricity from coal.
That's why in 1998 the Council of Better Business Bureaus and, later, the Federal Trade Commission found that the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's trade association, was misleading consumers by advertising nuclear plants as an "energy source that produces no greenhouse gas emissions, so they help protect the environment." "You can't just tell a part of the story when a critical piece of information contradicts it," says Andrea Levine, director of the CBBB's advertising division. "We were concerned about the uranium enrichment process, which relies on coal energy and which does produce greenhouse gas."
Undeterred, the NEI recently launched a slightly more ambiguous ad campaign. One features a spikey-haired teen-ager in a Walkman headset surrounded by white cottony clouds, under the banner "Clean Air Is So 21st Century." Scott Denman, the executive director of the Safe Energy Communication Council, says his public interest group is considering filing a complaint over the new ads. (The CBBB has yet to look at these ads, says Levine.)
Aside from greenhouse gases, nuclear power pollutes the environment in several other ways. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, uranium mining results in groundwater pollution because of the heavy metals and radioactive materials present in mine waste. The group notes that "half of the people employed by the uranium mining industry work on cleaning up the mines after use." Many nuclear facilities also suck up millions of gallons of water every day to cool their reactors. That heated water is dumped back into surrounding waterways, killing sea life and disturbing the environment.
There's also the industry's most famous emission -- radioactive waste, something no country has yet figured out what to do with. Not to mention other safety hazards; the accidents at Three-Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Japan's Tokaimura nuclear facility proved disasters can, and do, happen.
Nuclear is also not necessarily as affordable as Bush would like the public to believe. Jerry Taylor, the director of natural resource studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, notes: "Were it not for government subsidies, there wouldn't be one nuclear power plant in this country. The nuclear story tells you that no matter how many subsidies you throw at an industry, it won't make it economically competitive." Nor will all the spin make it greenhouse-gas free. |
