I spent most of the last four decades working against nuclear power. As an engineer, I had and have grave concerns about the risk of catastrophic failure and about our inability to deal with the hazardous waste these plants produce.

Today, I have come to the conclusion that while these concerns remain real and valid, the immediate threat posed by global warming trumps these concerns. The immediate and measurable harm wrought by continued construction and operation of fossil-fueled plants FAR outweighs the risk of catastrohpic failure. The long-term hazards of handling radioactive waste don't matter if human civilization has no long-term future.

I therefore think that we should be immediately moving aggressively to shift our energy supplies from fossil fuels to nuclear.

I think that wind and solar generating facilities belong in areas where wind and solar power are most plentiful -- deserts and oceans. It is FAR more efficient to build these facilities where the raw materials are plentiful, convert the energy to hydrogen (either liquid or gas) for short-term storage, and then ship the hydrogen to populated areas for use as fuel. I think that windmills on Pennsylvania mountaintops are a TERRIBLE and even laughable "solution" -- 33 turbines for 50MW? That's a joke.

A hydrogen-fueled economy, on the other hand, is NOT a joke. Hydrogen is no more difficult to handle than gasoline. Both are highly volatile, explosive, and difficult to handle. These problems yield directly to just the kind of technology Americans are good at providing.

Hydrogen burns cleanly and produces potable water as a waste-product. Various technologies already exist for storing and transporting small quantities of hydrogen (liquid or gas) for use in vehicles and homes. Raw hydrogen is the most abundant element in our immediate environment -- it is about 75% of the mass of the universe, in fact. While electrolysis is relatively inefficient, if the electricity to drive it is abundant (such as from nuclear generation) then that inefficiency is far less problemmatic.

Most importantly, hydrogen is immediately renewable. When we burn it, we produce water and energy. The water then reenters the cycle, where (with the addition of more energy) it can be again split into hydrogen and oxygen.

This simple, balanced cycle -- store energy in hydrogen (producing oxygen along the way!), then burn that hydrogen to get water and recapture the stored energy -- is why fuelcells were chosen for the Apollo missions to the moon.

Let me cast this as a provocative political question -- given several hundred billions dollars to invest, which of the following alternatives uses that investment more wisely:

1. Launch and prosecute an extended foreign war in order to protect and acquire access to finite and shrinking sources of non-renewable energy, or

2. Launch and prosecute an aggressive national effort to shift to a hydrogen-based energy economy in a decade.

In your blog entitled "Wind, is it the Answer?" you state "but it seems clear that we also need to be looking more closely again at the potential for nuclear power to meet our ever-growing energy demands."
In my humble opinion, a close look at the projections of the net energy available from nuclear plant operation reveals a hugely negative sum. The energy cost of construction, including mining, manufacturing and transportation of materials, is enough to offset any positive net energy results from many years of operation. The energy cost of decommissioning is seldom considered, and the cost of sequestering nuclear waste for what we may as well consider "forever," in human terms, has never been calculated.
For example, if we assume that after the passing of only ten half-lives the radioactivity of plutonium will be negligible, nuclear waste will have to be guarded for 240,000 years. If one human being were paid merely ten dollars per hour to perform guard duty over this length of time, salary costs would amount to $2,102,400,000.00 (that's two BILLION...and the original salary assumption is absurdly low). This monetary cost would be borne, of course, not by the nuclear industry, but by the taxpayer. Any "accidents" would be extra. And the actual energy costs can not be evaluated in terms of dollars.
Nuclear power is not a viable answer to our energy problems.

Laura,

Using wind turbines is a far better way to produce electricity than nuclear power. You are always talking about grennhouse gases and thheir effct on climate. Why not take the time to research what the industrial age is doing to the inhabitants of earth and their offspring. Chemical companies, car exhaust, nuclear plants, etc. are far more devastating to people and animals than to the planet itself. Cancers, allergies, genetic mutations and the like are byproducts of the crap that is dumped into our food and water supply on a daily basis. If you have the audacity to suggest nuclear power, as unstable and unsafe as it truly is, would be preferrable to farming wind for power, you shouldn't even speak about enviromental effects of any kind.

We have wind turbines in California too. Wind power was discussed a lot during the energy crisis in the 70s. I heard somewhere at that time that the amount of energy required to build a wind turbine was greater than what it produced in its lifetime. Do you know if that is still true? I would guess that we would not still be talking about wind if that were still true, but it is one of the important questions to ask about any alternative energy.

Laura, while wind may not be the sole answer to our energy question, I believe that its usage has merit in many places around the world. Wind resource maps indicate a wide variety of locales around the United States where persistent winds offer a potent source of energy.

You made several arguments against the utilization of wind power. First, that they are sometimes loud enough to keep people awake at night. This is an intensely superficial issue in my mind. What seems to be missing is how often the turbines are so loud, what type of sound they are emitting, and whether the sound really is a nuisance. I find that I might lose more sleep living next to a Nuclear Power Plant than a benevolent Wind Turbine.

Second, you mentioned the ecological issue of disrupting the migration patterns of certain species of birds. While this is a valid concern, there are ways to circumvent it. Perhaps the most logical one is to move away from the "Wind Farm" paradigm towards a more individualistic one. Farmers in our home state of Minnesota are experimenting with this very system now, building one or two turbines on their property, using the energy produced and selling the excess. This idea evokes the more romantic image of windmills on the family farm of old.

The third criticism you raised focused on the disparity between power output from wind turbines as compared to the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant. While quite convincing at face value, there are a plethora of ancillary issues to be considered here. There are currently 104 power-producing reactors in the United States. This number has not changed much over the past ten years, nor is it expected to within the foreseeable future. It takes years for nuclear licenses to be approved and even longer for the plants to be built. They require a much more substantial capital investment and are expensive to operate. While I agree with you that some sort of expansion could and should take place, your implicit argument that nuclear power is the answer falls far short of convincing. France may have switched to primarily nuclear, but their energy consumption is eight times less than ours. An inspection of our relative energy statistics (USA vs. France) reveals that the United States outproduces France in nuclear energy. Asking the United States to expand its nuclear program to the level of France would necessitate increasing the current production levels five-fold. It seems outlandish to imagine 400 some nuclear reactors being built in the next ten to twenty years and even quixotic when safety concerns are accounted for.

I'll add a caveat of wind energy myself. Since wind is variable, the output of energy from wind farms is also variable. Our power grid in the United States is designed to carry a constant load. Thus, when there are sudden spikes or lulls in wind energy output, the grid gets unhappy, in some instances shutting down altogether (as in Germany during a windstorm on January 8, 2005). This illustrates how, under the current grid configuration, wind energy can never supply all our power. Estimates on the order of 10 - 20% have been given for the maximum fraction of total energy production that wind may comprise. This should soothe the fears of those who worry that wind turbines may become ubiquitous around the country anytime in the near future.

In closing, I want to make it clear that I agree with you. Wind energy alone is not the answer. Furthermore, Nuclear energy alone is not the answer. The optimal solution would likely employ a variety of energy sources, both conventional and renewable, to meet the increasing energy demands of Americans. Though the idea has become somewhat cliche in academic circles, this diverse approach has been repeatedly applied to energy issues (maybe best so in a paper by Pacala and Socolow that appeared in the journal Science in 2004. (PDF here). While your entry is effective at raising concerns and offering a possible solution, it seems to stop one or two paragraphs short. No, wind is not THE answer, but it is part of the answer. If we are to meet the energy needs of the future head on, we are going to need to use every reasonable means of doing so.

I would agree. I travel to Canada several times a year to visit with customers. In southwestern Ontario, where they are, the hydro company is putting in a large number of windmills to catch the wind coming off Lake Huron. There have been complaints about having dozens of these windmills on the horizon, the noise if you live next to one and the potential damage to migratory flocks.

It does provide a steady source of wind power in this particular location, but it takes so MANY to generate an equal amount of electricity that, say, a nuclear unit can produce (like you mentioned). Interestingly enough, my friends up there are telling me that there are quite a few US engineers in and out lately assisting the Hydro company in restarting their nuclear reactors that have been idle.

Laura,

True, wind is not the total answer, but I don't think many people seriously suggest this. Wind power will form a very important part of any future portfolio of energy sources. So will nuclear power, so will solar power and so, for the forseeable future, will various forms of fossil fuel power.

There are numerous advantages to adopting a more diverse, less centralized pattern of electrical power generation and wind power is ideally suited to this. Moreover, even a modest contribution from wind power has the potential to create significant reductions in total greenhouse gas emissions from the energy sector.

One question - what do you do with the nuclear waste? Do you want it in your back yard? Wind, solar, tidal and geo-thermal can relieve much of the countries demand. But, if every person would demand energy efficient housing, buy energy efficient appliances and replace those 1900 era style light bulbs with compact florescent bulbs we would save enough energy to keep this nation from having to build new energy plants for many years to come. I currently have solar on my house, I generate 30% of my energy needs directly from the sun! When I get done with everything, I plan on producing 100% of my energy needs. I started with energy efficient appliances and extra insulation, this alone save me 18-22% on my electric bill. It's amazing that people will just throw money away because something is a little cheaper up front. They pay for that "Cheapness" every single month that they own that appliance with higher utility bills!

Using wind power for energy may have another unforeseen side effect. It may lower average wind
speeds, resulting in higher ground temperatures & lower moisture levels. This has been demonstrated at the local level. A tree farm in Pennsylvania is suing to prevent a wind farm construction next door, for those reasons, not just the usual noise and sight pollution reasons.

If the mass use of windfarms globally lower the earth's average wind speeds this could result in less vigorous storm systems worldwide. This could result in less air mixing(more temperature extremes) & less precipitation.

All energy producing methods have unwanted side effects. There is no free lunch! I agree that nuclear should not be dismissed out of hand. If disasters are prevented & nuclear waste disposed of properly, nuclear does not have that many side effects.

Food for thought, if solar energy was extensively used globally, might it not offset the global warming mechanisms as solar energy used never directly heats the ground or the air?

One of the things we engineers like to do is reframe problems into terms that we understand. The problem of how to store nuclear waste safely until it is no longer hazardous is theoretically not possible, at least today. Not technically impossible, but theoretically impossible. This because the current state of our theory of materials does not allow us to predict what happens to ANYTHING after even 10,000 years of exposure to high levels of radiation. As several contributors to this thread have observed, nuclear plant waste is hazardous for at least an order of magnitude longer than that. We have NO basis on which to test our predictions of what glass, steel, concrete, or any other human-made material will do after lengthy exposure, because we have no 10,000 year old samples to analyze. As stated, this problem is therefore essentially unsolvable.

I'd like to offer a possible alternative that IS solvable. The total mass of waste material that we're discussing is small enough that it COULD be packaged into containers and shot into deep space.

The background radiation of deep-space is many orders of magnitude greater than anything this material will emit. The class of problems that such a program creates are each VERY solvable with current technology and theory: design a launch vehicle, protect against failure, track the location of failed payloads, calculate trajectories, etc., etc., etc. None of these, individually or together, is more difficult than problems we've already solved decades ago in getting to the moon and back.

I'm not advocating against any of the various solar technologies being discussed here, I'm observing that the nuclear option is one that I think we should consider. For all of its risks, costs, and disadvantages, it is still FAR more effective than continuing to operate the fossil-fueled alternatives.

I think we will all benefit from some very hard-nosed dollar-for-dollar cost/benefit analysis comparing each dollar spent on conventional energy production -- especially when the proposals are to "clean up" such plants -- in comparison to nuclear alternatives.

Tom! Do you and I agree on something?!?

I'm kidding. I came across something you might find interesting. There is recent work being done to accelerate radioactive decay. If this can be accomplished, then there may be a viable answer to the nuclear waste issue. Some of the details may be found here:

http://www.iop.org/Media/Press%20Releases/press_6762.html

One of the interesting quotes is

The technique involves embedding the nuclear waste in a metal and cooling it to ultra-low temperatures. This speeds up the rate of decay of the radioactive materials potentially cutting their half lives by a factor of 100 or more.

Professor Rolfs added "We are currently investigating radium-226, a hazardous component of spent nuclear fuel with a half-life of 1600 years. I calculate that using this technique could reduce the half-life to 100 years. At best, I have calculated that it could be reduced to as little as two years. This would avoid the need to bury nuclear waste in deep repositories - a hugely expensive and difficult process."

You can also find another article at www.newscientist.com, but you have to subscribe to get the whole article.

You make some good not-in-my-backyard arguments. Hopefully this debate will be resolved by legislators rather than corporate powers.

In any case, I'm tired of the save-the-birds story. So-called sympathizers have never had to step across the sooty bodies of birds on their way through the city. The canary dies mid-flight in the city every day, yet we go on breathing that coal dust. Sure, nuclear energy won't pollute the air, but as for wind we need to weigh our options more carefully.

The French generate 80% of their power needs using nuclear power plants. Looking at their experience and the costs they encountered would be a good starting point for cranking up more nuclear power in the US. However, we should also be building more modern coal burning plants because we have a huge amount of coal reserves here.

I read these articles and comments daily and I've come to the conclusion that the guys who post here are either a bunch off eggheads or at least girls. Does anyone have an original thought here, or are you a bunch of mindless statisticians that keep spewing the same rhetoric phrased differently on a daily basis. Tell us, (those who read these posts for the entertainment value), what you truly feel, not what you've read in some article somewhere. THe only one here that doesn't sound like a girl appears to be a girl by the name. Way to go Stacy, like the passion.

Laura,

I'm not sure that I understand your stance on using nuclear power since you live so close to Harrisburg and Three Mile Island plant in which one of the reactors partially melted down years ago. As you and others should know that was a catastrophic accident which thankfully was caught before it could cause any more damage. In fact it was so bad that either the Cardinal or Bishop of the area gave blanket absolution to all Catholics, something that is almost NEVER done.
Frankly, I don't know if we will ever permit nuclear energy to ever have as much of a foothold in our country again and I'm not even considering the horrendous Chernobyl accident.

I believe that wind energy should be used but only where it is the windiest. There will be some environmental fights that environmentalists may have to lose for the good of all. Bats & Birds and other creatures usually have a way of realizing that they need to leave an area. Take for example squirels...many get run over but many stop,observe that a car is coming and turn 180 degrees and run back across the road. Mother Nature does indeed give them enough innate intelligence to survive.

But there is one part of the enviroment that can not get up and run away, one part of the environment that we lose...

The Night Sky

Ever wonder why you can't see many stars at night?

Just take a look at this photo of North America at Night, courtesy of NPR & NASA:

http://www.npr.org/templates/common/image_enlargement.php?imageResId=6655693

What you are seeing here is light, generated by man, that is going straight up into the night sky and out into space.

Where it is not needed.

The good folks at the International Dark Sky Association (IDA) tell us that this costs American Billion of dollars each year.

We call this problem Light Pollution and it's the easiest pollution to curb because all you have to do is to direct the light down to the ground where it is needed.

Amateur Astronomers, like myself, have been battling this problem for years which usually follows urban sprawl, as we have been forced from our backyards to locations farther and farther from our homes usually to state parks to watch the skies.

And here is where I have a problem with Wind Energy because, here in Pennsylvania, it directly impacts not only myself but everyone else too.

I'm talking here about Cherry Springs State Park in Potter County, the nation's first Dark Sky Preserve:

http://www.dcnr.state.pa.us/stateparks/Parks/cherrysprings_darkskies.aspx

http://www.upstateastro.org/stars/cssp.html

Now there is a Virginia based Electric Company,
AES Corp. that wants to build a "Wind Farm" about 10 miles north of Cherry Springs. These wind turbines will be about 275-285 feet above the ground and of course will be lit up by strobe lights which will not only destroy Cherry Springs' Dark Skies but will open up the area for more development...more urban sprawl which will obliterate the Dark Skies further.

Looking back at the photograph above, you will see that there really aren't too many places left on the east coast where you can go to see the stars. And the only other place is Spruce Knob, West Virginia which also is a target for a Wind Farm.

And there is one more problem with siting this Wind Farm in Potter County:

It's not really that windy!:(

J.D. - Are you 14? Everyone is an egghead or a girl? Are those supposed to be insults? If so, they're pretty weak. Almost.... girlish.

Edward,

I'm not a proponent of nuclear power, but I think that it should at least be considered. I've been trying to do some research on coal, I've done research on various biofuels and renewables. I think that the ultimate solution lies with a blend of these technologies. I agree that wind power should be used where it is windiest, and I agree that Pennsylvania doesn't seem to be the best fit for wind farms. I like the second comment from Brian (a different Brian than the first) above - stating that some farmers are putting 1-2 turbines on their farms for their own use and selling the excess power. Solar can be used in a similar fashion.

As for the night sky - I know what you mean. We used to live in Mifflin County (rural central Pennsylvania) and the night sky there was just incredible. I miss being able to see the stars here.

Greg, good catch on Rolf's research, it will be interesting to see how that plays out. I hadn't seen it before and it looks like something to watch. Of course, so did cold fusion -- but that's what makes science fun.

Thanks,
Tom

I also have serious concerns about nuclear power, specifically whether a "business mentality" understands the discipline and adherance to procedure required to operate safely. While the US Navy has operated nuclear plants for decades, the incident at Tokaimura, Japan a few years ago illustrates what can happen in a commercial environ