Thanks Tom, here's an article related I think you will enjoy reading.
Nuclear Power Poised for a Revival
Phil Brennan
newsmax.com
Saturday, June 2, 2001
The truth is spreading about France's highly successful use of nuclear power, holding great promise for America's energy woes - but the liberal media are spinning a different story.
A lead story on "CBS Evening News" this week came on the heels of an in-depth eCompany magazine article, "The France Syndrome," by David Freedman. The TV piece was obviously inspired by Freedman’s article, which showed how safe and profitable France’s nuclear industry has proven to be.
But CBS News neglected to credit Freedman and eCompany. Moreover, its handling of the story fit into the anti-nuclear mold, giving a disheveled French anti-nuclear activist an opportunity to attack his nation’s thriving nuclear power industry.
The CBS piece ended by pointing out what Freedman had stated (without crediting Freedman): that disposal of nuclear waste is not fully resolved in France. It ignored Freedman’s statement that America is well on the way to solving the disposal problem.
The network’s thinly disguised effort to counter the Freedman report is understandable: using the wildly successful French nuclear industry as an example, he makes the point that it makes a lot of sense for the U.S. to get back on the nuclear power bandwagon, not an idea the left-leaning network cherishes.
And nuclear power is staging a comeback here despite the displeasure of leftists. The Bush administration's energy plans call for a renewed emphasis on nuclear power.
The French agree that nukes are in our future.
"People in the United States can say nuclear power is dead, but forget it," Dominique Vignon, CEO of France’s huge nuclear power conglomerate Framatome, told Freedman.
"The long-term view is that there is going to be a nuclear renaissance. Coal has made little progress in 200 years, but nuclear power is only 40 years old, and it benefits from the progress made by all high-tech industries."
The most ironic aspect of U.S. environmentalists' opposition to following France's success in nuclear power is that the American left routinely calls for aping Europe's socialist policies on health care, high taxation, gun control and a host of other issues. Most Americans agree that this time, France is right.
Turnaround in Public Opinion
As Freedman reports, recent polls show that 75 percent of Americans want nuclear plants built. That’s a huge increase over the 42 percent just two years ago.
Freedman explains why nuclear power has gained such popularity in France, and why it can be matched by public support in an America suddenly reeling in the midst of an energy crisis. Nuclear power, he writes, is the "cleanest [and cheapest] major form of electrical generation.”
Nuclear power generates three-fourths of France's electricity, Freedman reports. "Framatome is thriving. It is one of the largest nuclear plant construction companies on the planet, and has built 92 reactors worldwide.”
The company made profits of $275 million on revenues of $4.5 billion, in the last fiscal year, he notes, adding that the company "recently completed the second of two $2 billion nuclear plants in Civeaux, in the south of France. The French tend to think of nuclear plants as high-tech enterprises in the same vein as telecommunications firms …”
In the U.S., though plant construction all but shut down in the wake of the media hysteria over the vastly exaggerated Three Mile Island incident, Freedman reports that 20 percent of our electricity still comes from America’s 103 nuclear power plants.
Moreover, he adds that the output of those plants has jumped by 15 percent over the past 10 years. "In fact, U.S. nuclear plants generate more electricity than the plants of France and Japan combined. And it's a good bet that more U.S. nuke plants are coming.”
Safety Issues
As for safety, Freedman explains that in the 40-year history of nuclear power, there have been only a handful of significant accidents.
At Three Mile Island, a series of mishaps led to the melting of part of the core, but experts say there was never any danger of a core meltdown.
"Despite the severity of the damage, no injuries due to radiation occurred,” according to materials the the University of Pennsylvania Engineering Library. "The defense in depth approach worked resulting in containment of the radioactivity in the containment building and enabling the operators to eventually cool the damaged core and regain control of the system.”
The only exposure to the people living nearby was the release of radioactive gas that amounted to between one and two mrems a person - about what you’d get from drinking a cup of coffee. This was the worst nuclear plant accident in the U.S., and the hysteria fanned by the media and anti-nuclear radicals all but killed an industry that showed so much promise.
Chernobyl
Freeman notes that the world’s worst nuclear accident was the one at the Chernobyl plant in the Ukraine, which blew up, killing hundreds and poisoning vast swaths of the Ukraine and Russia - and, to a lesser degree, much of Europe, including France.
That accident however, "served to point out how well-protected against such events the rest of the world's nuclear power plants are.”
He explains that the Chernobyl plant was "poorly designed and shoddily constructed, even by woeful Soviet-era standards. The plant was built without a "containment vessel" - thick shielding that would protect the outside world from radiation in the event of a rupture in the reactor core.
Moreover, the plant was being run by engineers "who had no nuclear training and who ordered workers to exceed all of the plant's safety specifications so they could run certain tests.
"No Chernobyl-style plants are in operation today. Comparing Chernobyl with a U.S. or European nuclear power plant is like comparing a 30-year-old, Russian-built Lada with a new Volvo with multiple air bags and antilock brakes.”
Freedman adds that "non-Soviet nuclear power plants have run up a fairly spotless safety record in the past 20 years, and that record continues to improve. According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the number of 'significant events' (i.e., anything out of the ordinary) at U.S. nuclear plants has dropped from an annual average of 2.38 per plant in 1985 to 0.04 in 1998, and the employee injury rate has fallen below that of gas-fired plants.”
"By virtually any measure, nuclear power is the cleanest major form of electrical generation. (Hydropower is cleaner, but it has pretty much maxed out in the United States at 11 percent of the country's energy needs.)”
(Hydropower, of course, is also opposed environmentalists, who object to dams and have been campaigning to reduce their numbers.)
Freedman surveys several of the other methods of power production;
Like nuclear power, solar panels and wind turbines are emissions-free too, but obtaining the electricity supplied by a typical 2,000-megawatt electrical generation plant would require 70,000 acres of solar panels or 300,000 acres of wind turbines.)
Coal, which accounts for about half of U.S. electricity production, releases 5 pounds each of sulfur dioxides and nitrogen dioxides, as well as about 1,000 pounds of ozone-eating carbon dioxide, just to keep a 100-watt bulb lit for a year.
Not only that, but coal-burning plants actually release more radioactivity than nuclear plants. It turns out that coal, like many ordinary substances, including coffee, contains traces of radioactive elements, and power plants that burn coal don't take the measures nuclear plants do to seal off the energy-production process from the outside world.
What to Do With the Waste
France has made strides in coping with the nuclear waste disposal problem. Freedman described its present method: All French nuclear power plants, as well as those of five other European countries, send their spent fuel to a plant at La Hague, run by French nuclear-fuel giant Cogema.
"At La Hague, the spent fuel is dissolved by acid, then separated into uranium and plutonium, both of which can be reused in plants as fuel, with about 3 percent of the original fuel remaining as unusable radioactive waste. That waste is converted into a glasslike substance and stored.”
The storage is the problem, but the U.S. has gone a long way to solving it, Freedman writes, noting that the U.S. "is one of the few nations that is within sight of a permanent solution to this quandary."
"The government has tentatively designated Yucca Mountain in Nevada to house a massive repository for highly radioactive, long-term nuclear waste. When a load of nuclear fuel is spent, it would be placed in a radiation-proof container, trucked to Yucca Mountain, and entombed deep underground. When a power plant reaches the end of its life, its radioactive parts would be buried there too.”
The rebirth of the nuclear power industry in the U.S. is obvious in the fact that plant operators are "shelving plans to shut down old reactors and applying en masse to have their 40-year operating licenses extended to 60 years.
"The industry is even talking about the possibility of ordering new nuclear plants, which would have been unimaginable three years ago,” Freedman wrote. In fact, for nuclear power to merely maintain its current 20 percent contribution to total U.S. electrical generation, 15 new plants will need to be added during the next 20 years to keep up with growth in demand and make up for plants that reach the end of their licensed lives.
It’s instructive to look at the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Station, which has been bedeviled by state and national government. In 1979, responding to fears of a possible earthquake arising out of a long-inactive fault nearby, the plant was redesigned to withstand a quake of a magnitude of 7.2 on the Richter scale, a quake larger than the one that hit San Francisco in 1989.
Pacific Gas and Electric, the plant's owner, stood steadfast in getting and keeping the plant online.
"It was a nightmare to build, but it’s been a dream to operate,” PG&E spokesman Jeff Lewis told American Spectator’s William Tucker.
"Purring along at close to 95 percent capacity and completely immune to oil or gas prices, Diablo Canyon now produces 2,160 megawatts, enough to power 2,16 million homes and a rock bottom $30 per megawatt hour,” Tucker wrote.
A symbol of past problems, Diablo Canyon is now a symbol of an industry on the go, and not a minute too soon in energy-starved America - whether CBS likes it or not. |
