sixteen the unthinkable
here there be dragons

At the eastern edge of Death Valley, where the barren desert crosses from California and into Nevada, lies a testament to the current state of nuclear power in the United States and much of the world. A twenty-five-foot-wide tunnel gapes into the sun, a train track emerging from its mouth. The tunnel bores in a U-shape 5 miles into the heart of Yucca Mountain. Here, until recently, the United States planned to store the radioactive waste produced by its 104 operating nuclear reactors. It now seems likely that day will never come. After years of construction, widespread opposition in Nevada led President Obama to shut down the project in 2009.

Six thousand miles west of Yucca Mountain lies the symbolic other half of the story: the devastated Fukushima Daiichi plant in northern Japan, the site where the Tohoku tsunami set off the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, flooding television stations and websites around the world with images of blown off roofs, twisted pipes, devastated buildings, and radioactive steam being released into the air.

One of the technologies environmentalists and the general public fear most is nuclear energy. While in 2010 there was talk of a “nuclear renaissance,” the disaster at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant brought much of that talk to a halt. Within months, the governments around the world announced plans to halt the construction of new nuclear power plants, or to decommission existing ones.

The response was understandable. Nuclear catastrophes strike fear deep into our hearts. Watching the steam rising from the reactors at Fukushima; tuning into the news each day to hear of more explosions, radioactive leaks, and increased contamination of the already devastated countryside; contemplating the potential sacrifice the “Fukushima Fifty,” the workers struggling to get the reactors back under control, were making—all of this made a deep emotional impression on viewers, including me.

Given those challenges, it’d be tempting to rule nuclear power out. But doing so would be turning our back on a tremendously powerful energy source. There’s enough uranium in known deposits to provide all of humanity’s electrical needs for centuries. And unlike wind power and solar power, nuclear power can be delivered 24/7, with no regard for whether the sun is shining or the wind is blowing.

We might not need nuclear power. Innovation in other areas might eventually make it completely unnecessary. If energy storage technology moves forward quickly enough, providing cheap high-capacity storage for wind and solar, we’d have a way to provide zero carbon energy overnight. But it’s never safe to bet on just one option. No investor puts all his or her money down on a single stock, or even a single industry. The more options we have for the future, the better.

Nuclear power, if it could be made safe and kept affordable, would be a huge asset for humanity. Today nuclear reactors supply 20 percent of the electricity used in the United States and 14 percent of the electricity used in the world. The world’s on-land uranium reserves could fuel those reactors for at least another 200 years, and possibly as much as 500 years with small improvements to how the uranium is processed. Yet conventional nuclear reactors use only a small fraction of the energy in uranium. Breeder reactors, which consume most of the fuel rather than leaving it as waste, could match today’s nuclear output using known uranium supplies for an estimated 30,000 years.

The on-land supplies of uranium, though, are dwarfed by the amount dissolved in sea water. The world’s oceans contain more than 100 times as much uranium as the deposits known to exist on land. Harvesting uranium from the seas would allow breeder reactors to provide the current level of electricity for millions of years, and to supply 100 percent of humanity’s present electricity needs for at least hundreds of thousands of years.¹

Aside from the power of the sun, and the as-yet-unrealized dream of practical nuclear fusion, there is no energy source that we have access to that amounts to even 1 percent of the total energy of nuclear fission.

And all the electricity produced by nuclear power is very nearly free of carbon emissions. The only carbon dioxide released by nuclear energy is that involved in the construction of nuclear power plants, an amount that is less than a tenth of that released by the operation of coal-burning power plants.

Nuclear energy is a natural complement to wind and solar. It can provide “baseload” electricity that is “always on,” while wind and solar add to that energy while they’re available. Eventually, as grid storage becomes available and drops in price, nuclear may become completely irrelevant. Looking at the trend in battery technologies and prices, I believe that will happen. But if we take the current green energy and energy storage cost trend lines and project them out, the point at which solar or wind becomes cost competitive with current nuclear plants in providing electricity twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week is around 2030. That’s a nearly twenty-year gap within which nuclear power could uniquely provide nearly carbon-free electricity 24/7. The only other energy technology that can do this on a large scale is hydro power, and the best spots for dams are already occupied in the United States and, to an only slightly lesser degree, worldwide. Hydro power growth can’t replace coal and natural gas. Solar and wind can only if our pace of innovation continues in energy storage technologies, and even then, only in around 2030. Nuclear, if it is made safe enough, could make a significant dent today.

Can nuclear be made safe enough to substantially reduce the burning of coal and natural gas? I would argue that it already is.

Real and Perceived Risk

Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter seldom speaks about the day he was exposed to nuclear radiation. It happened at a place called Chalk River Laboratories. Chalk River is a sleepy Canadian town of 800 people, 110 miles northwest of Ottawa. There’s not much to the town—one Catholic school, two restaurants, a gas station, a public library. And the laboratories, just two miles out of town.

Chalk River Laboratories grew out of the World War II effort to build an atomic bomb. The lab opened in 1944. In September of 1945, it became the site of the first nuclear reactor outside of the United States, the NRX. In 1952, a series of human errors led to an explosion that shot the concrete dome above the reactor four feet into the air and resulted in a partial meltdown at the site.

Carter at the time was a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, working in Schenectady, New York, under Admiral Hyman Rickover on the nuclear propulsion system for the USS Seawolf, the world’s second nuclear-powered submarine. He was slated to be her engineering officer when the Seawolf went to sea, though the death of his father would lead him to resign his commission instead. When the NRX meltdown occurred, the future president and his men were ordered to rush to Chalk River, 200 miles away, to assist in stabilizing the reactor. Carter and the twenty-three men under his command drilled on a mock-up of the reactor, then put their lives on the line, rushing into the radioactive core, armed with wrenches to remove critical plates necessary to stop the release of radioactive steam and water. Later estimates reveal that the men that went into the building were exposed, in a matter of hours, to 200 millisieverts of radiation, around fifty times the amount of radiation the average American is exposed to in a year.

Despite this, Jimmy Carter is still alive as of this writing. None of the workers involved in the emergency response or cleanup of the NRX reactor have died in a manner attributable to radiation from the incident. And the amount of radiation that workers stabilizing the Fukushima power plant were exposed to is roughly equivalent to the amount Jimmy Carter was exposed to.

Radiation kills. Radiation causes cancer. Radiation can cause sterility and birth defects. All of these things are true. But how much? How many deaths? Nothing in this world is perfectly safe. Oil kills. Coal kills. Is nuclear more dangerous, or less? Is it safe enough? Would its widespread deployment be safer than climate change? Would it be safer, even, than other side effects of burning coal?

As the world sat transfixed, watching the evolving disaster at Fukushima, it was easy to lose perspective. Yet while Fukushima made for excellent television, coal-burning power plants around the world continued to pump fly ash, carbon monoxide, mercury, and other pollutants into the air. Those pollutants, in the United States alone, are estimated by the Clean Air Task Force to result in the death of more than 13,000 Americans each year.² Worldwide, particularly in the developing world, where power plant emissions are less controlled by environmental regulation, the burden is far higher. Some estimates place the number of annual deaths from coal-produced pollution as high as 170,000 people worldwide each year.³ Is that because there are more coal plants than nuclear? No. Even looked at on a per-energy basis, coal kills more. Per terawatt hour of energy produced, coal kills an estimated 161 people worldwide. Nuclear, even after adding up all the potential future deaths attributed to every nuclear accident that has ever occurred, comes in at less than one-tenth of a death per terawatt hour.

By contrast to the massive death toll of coal, not a single person died at Fukushima. Estimates of the health impact of the radiation released are that no one will die as a result of the accident. Nearly 20,000 people died in a matter of hours as a result of the massive earthquake and tsunami that rocked Japan, mind you. But no lives were lost as a result of the accident at the reactor.⁴ Yet the nuclear accident commanded far more news attention, in the long run, than the far more deadly tsunami that caused it.

We’re wired to focus on such spectacles. The threat of radiation seems so alien, so powerful. When it appears in the form of a crisis at a nuclear reactor, it’s a potent, concentrated drama. By contrast, thinly spread deaths from respiratory disease and heart attacks caused by coal-created pollution are mundane. The deaths caused by coal are so diffuse that they’re hard for us to detect or attach to. Was this heart attack caused by exposure to air pollution from a coal-fired electrical plant? What about this one? There’s nothing as obvious or as spectacular as the spectacle of a nuclear meltdown.

Yet the deaths are just as real, and far more numerous.

The worst nuclear disaster of our time, the Chernobyl disaster, still rings in our memories. In 2003, the World Health Organization convened a panel of experts to assess the long-term human impact of Chernobyl. What the experts concluded was that Chernobyl had directly killed fifty-seven people. Twenty-eight of them were fire fighters and others who worked to put out the fire at the reactor and who died on the spot or in the months that followed. The rest were among the other workers who’d responded to the scene and assisted with the cleanup in some way.

The long-term impact of Chernobyl is much larger, of course. Radiation is a risk factor for cancer. Nearly 200,000 workers assisted in the cleanup of the site between 1987 and 1988, and 135,000 local residents were evacuated from a thirty-kilometer radius around the reactor. Another 7 million or so people lived within areas where they could have conceivably received a low dose of radiation from Chernobyl. Summing up all these individuals, the radiation they’ve received, and statistics about their death rates from cancer before, since, and in comparison to other areas, the World Health Organization estimates that the disaster will ultimately cause up to 9,000 deaths from cancer.⁵

Those 9,000 deaths are 9,000 separate tragedies. Yet that number means very little out of context. Cancer is the number two cause of death in the world. Of the 7 million people living in the areas surrounding Chernobyl, had the disaster never happened, WHO reports that they’d expect to see roughly 900,000 cancer deaths over their lifetimes. Those 9,000 additional deaths represent a 1 percent increase in the cancer death rate, spread out over thirty or forty years. Over those decades, at the current rate, coal-produced air pollution will kill millions of people worldwide.

Coal is by far the more deadly technology.

Other estimates have been made of the death toll, some of which are much higher. Greenpeace estimates that between 93,000 and 200,000 cancer deaths will ultimately occur due to Chernobyl. Their report depends upon the “no threshold” model of radiation, which holds that even extremely small amounts of radiation exposure increase cancer risk. The Greenpeace estimate is based on a projection of increased cancer risk based on that theoretical model. The WHO report is based on more concrete data—how many more cases of cancer have been seen. Even if the more speculative Greenpeace numbers are correct, however, the death toll from coal will still be far higher. Coal kills roughly as many people each year as Greenpeace estimates that Chernobyl, the worst nuclear accident is history, is likely to kill over half a century.

Nuclear accidents like Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island have economic costs, through the deaths they cause and the property they destroy. Even after we factor those in, coal is far worse. Nuclear disasters over the past thirty-five years have cost around $700 billion dollars—a huge sum. But over that time, nuclear power has generated around 70 trillion kilowatt hours of electricity. The cost of disasters totals around 1 cent per kilowatt hour of nuclear electricity. By comparison, a 2011 study from Harvard found that the externalized health costs of coal, even after ignoring CO₂ emissions and climate change, was anywhere from 9 to 27 cents per kwh.⁶

Not only does coal kill more people than nuclear energy, it also releases more radiation. The fly ash released from coal-burning power plants carries with it radiation. How much? Per megawatt of power produced, coal-burning plants release 100 times as much radiation as nuclear power plants.⁷

We fear nuclear power because the deaths it causes come in spectacular accidents, with our eyes glued to the television screen, anxiety pounding in our chests. We fear it because, like genetic modification technology, it seems in some way unnatural. It’s still new to us. The idea of radiation isn’t intuitive. We don’t understand it the way we understand burning wood or coal or even natural gas to produce heat.

But the cold hard facts don’t lie. Coal kills hundreds of times more people than nuclear energy. Nuclear energy kills when it fails. Coal kills when it runs perfectly smoothly.

Eternal Waste

What about the waste? Nuclear reactors produce radioactive waste that remains dangerous for millennia. The prospect of taking something toxic and storing it away safely for tens of thousands of years is a daunting one. We’ve only had agriculture for 10,000 years, writing for less than that. The light bulb for even shorter. How can we design a system that will store waste for longer than our civilization has existed? Storing that waste in the heart of a mountain, contained by miles of rock, had a certain primal appeal. It at least reduced the risk that the waste would leak out on its own, or that some future civilization would stumble into our toxic mess by accident. The end of the Yucca Mountain project means that the United States now has no plan.

The best plan may be to turn nuclear waste into value, as we have with so many other waste products. The ‘spent’ fuel from conventional reactors still contains roughly 99 percent of its original energy. While we typically see that energy and the resulting radioactivity as a liability, it’s also a source of potential value.

Fast neutron reactors are reactors that can consume nuclear waste. In the 1950s and 1960s, nuclear physicists and engineers dreamed of using them to extract dramatically more energy than current nuclear reactors do from their fuel, and to burn up the vast majority of nuclear waste. Fast neutron reactors use up virtually all of the long-lasting radioactive materials in nuclear waste, leaving behind a smaller amount of waste that is radioactive for decades rather than millennia. Even that poses a challenge for storage, but far less of one than waste piles that remain radioactive for longer than our civilization has existed.

The problem with fast nuclear reactors, or breeder reactors, as they were originally conceived of, was that they required the separation of waste into actinides (one sort of waste product) and pure plutonium. And plutonium can be turned into nuclear weapons. Creating and transporting plutonium increases the risk that it could be stolen, lost, or hijacked, and eventually be turned into a weapon in the hands of terrorists or rogue nations.

Modern fast nuclear reactors, however, don’t require this. A technique called pyrometallurgic recycling keeps all the waste products together while reforming them into fuel rods that fast neutron reactors can burn. At no step along the process is any fuel created that is any closer to a nuclear weapon than the spent fuel stockpiles that already exist. And at the end of the process, the total amount of nuclear material remaining has been reduced a hundredfold, reducing the risk of it leaking out into the environment or being converted into weapons. Fast neutron reactors eat nuclear waste and spit out valuable, nearly zero-carbon electricity.⁸

Fast reactors can be used to turn fresh nuclear fuel into 100 times as much electricity as current reactors do, with 1 percent of the waste output of current reactors. Perhaps more importantly, they can be fueled by all the existing waste that fifty years of nuclear power has created. As with the contents of landfills, the phosphorous we emit from our bodies, and the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, our ability to innovate can extract the value from something we now consider waste, making us better off, and reducing damage to the environment. Today it is still cheaper to run a conventional reactor than a fast breeder reactor, but eventually the rising price of uranium ore may make breeder reactors more expensive. Or government policy could create economic incentives to reuse fuel in fast reactors rather than storing it indefinitely. That would be both far cheaper and far more useful than Yucca Mountain.

Until then, keeping waste in dry cask storage is fairly safe. Safer, at any rate, than the waste from coal burning power plants. The editors of Scientific American note that, “ounce for ounce, coal ash released from a power plant delivers more radiation than nuclear waste shielded via water or dry cask storage.”⁹

Other options exist as well. Seattle-based TerraPower, a company Bill Gates has invested in, is developing a “traveling wave” reactor that consumes almost all of its waste as it operates, leaving behind only short-lived and low-level nuclear waste with a small fraction of the radioactivity of traditional waste. Others advocate turning to thorium as a nuclear fuel instead of uranium, pointing out that the world has more thorium ore than uranium ore and that thorium waste is far less radioactive than uranium waste, and extremely difficult to weaponize. Both are options for the decades ahead. In short, waste is not the problem it appears at first blush.

Small, Safe, Fast, and Cheap

Economically, unfortunately, the nuclear industry has been going backward rather than forward. While solar, wind, and battery technologies have been dropping in cost, nuclear has actually been rising in cost.

A 2009 study from MIT on the future of nuclear power found that the average price of electricity delivered by building a new nuclear plant (as opposed to operating a current one) was 8.4 cents per kilowatt hour, up nearly 2 cents from the price estimated in 2003.¹⁰ Other analyses have gone further. A review by the Rocky Mountain Institute of published cost data concluded that electricity from new nuclear plants would cost twice what MIT projected.¹¹ A study by attorney Craig Severance, widely circulated in environmental circles, claimed that, based on rapidly rising construction costs and increasing delays, the cost of electricity from a new nuclear power plant in the United States would be even higher yet, at 25–30 cents per kilowatt hour.¹²

The highest end of price estimates put electricity from new nuclear plants at more costly than coal electricity, even after adding in a sizeable carbon tax. If future nuclear plants cost as much as their detractors say, the technology is dead in the water, economically.

Estimates of the cost of nuclear power seem, to me, to correlate with how pro- or anti-nuclear the source is. Pro-nuclear sources often point out that the operating costs for an already running nuclear plant are in the ballpark of 1 cent per kilowatt hour. Nuclear opponents tend to highlight the very highest estimates.

Yet there’s no denying that nuclear prices are rising rather than falling. The most neutral, balanced, apples-to-apples assessments, such as MIT’s 2009 study, all find that.

The price rise in nuclear has been driven by skyrocketing construction costs of nuclear plants. Once, nuclear plants cost an estimated $1,000 per kilowatt of capacity to build. Today some estimates are on the order of $8,000 per kilowatt.

In general, the more a manufacturer or industry makes of a product, the cheaper it gets. The learning curve—the steady accumulation of knowledge about how to build the product most efficiently—continually drops cost. Manufacturers learn how to build the same product in fewer steps. They find places to reduce the amount of energy, labor, and raw materials needed. They invest in innovation that simplifies their manufacturing process. It’s difficult, in most industries, to avoid the learning curve. It happens naturally, in everything from pocket knives to automobiles to solar cells. Certainly it happens much faster in some areas than others. In solar photovoltaics, innovation has proven more powerful in substituting for energy and raw materials than in wind power, for instance. In computing, innovation has had an even larger effect. In gene sequencing, even larger yet. But in all these areas, the learning curve exists. Not so in nuclear reactor construction.

The problem is that nearly every reactor is built from scratch, on site. There are no factories for nuclear reactors. There are no assembly lines. In the United States, most reactors don’t even conform to a widely used design—each is a bit different than its predecessors. Because a nuclear reactor can take a decade from proposal to approval by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the project managers who manage a nuclear reactor construction, the crews who work on one, and everyone else involved may work on only a few, or even just a single reactor in their entire careers, eliminating the opportunity for applying any lessons learned. Because of the mammoth size of reactors, there are only a handful of companies in the world who can build the steel pressure vessels that contain the reactor core. Only one company in the world, Japan Steel Works, can build the pressure vessels out of a single piece of metal with absolutely no welds—the safest way to ensure that radiation stays inside. As a result, Japan Steel Works has a three-year waiting list.

One of the best ways to drive down the cost of nuclear reactors, then, would be to mass produce them. Build them small, build them in factories, and ship them to their location. Tap into the learning curve so that each unit produced is cheaper than the last one. And that’s just what a handful of new reactor companies do.

Galena, Alaska, is one of the most remote towns in the United States. 300 miles northwest of Anchorage, Galena has no roads that connect it to the outside world. For three months of the year, barges can make their way up the Yukon River to deliver supplies. The other nine months of the year, the only way in or out is by plane. No power grid comes here. Electricity for the 600 or so residents is provided by gasoline-powered generators. Flying the fuel in makes that electricity fiendishly expensive—at times over 50 cents per kilowatt hour, or four times the national average. And so, in 2004, this tiny town did something radical—it accepted a proposal to build the world’s smallest commercial nuclear reactor.

The Toshiba 4S reactor stands for Super, Small, Safe, and Simple. It’s been called a nuclear battery. It’s a cylinder 60 feet long, 8 feet in diameter with almost no moving parts. Rather than being built on site, it’s assembled in a factory, and shipped by train, truck, or, in Galena’s case, barge. There it will be lowered into a 100-foot-deep concrete-lined cylindrical hole in the ground. The nuclear fuel for the reactor is loaded in at the factory where it’s assembled. That fuel will produce electricity for thirty years. When the fuel is depleted, a new reactor is installed in the old one’s place, and the old reactor is shipped back to the factory for refueling and refurbishing. It is, indeed, quite a bit like a nuclear battery.

The 4S is a tiny, puny sort of reactor. The reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant produced a combined total of 4,700 megawatts. By comparison, the 4S produces only 10 megawatts. And the 4S could be installed as soon as 2013.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has a pipeline full of design reviews for similar (though mostly slightly larger) mini-reactors. Nuclear startup Hyperion Power Generation is taking advanced orders for its Hyperion “Power Modules,” hot-tub-sized mini-reactors just five feet across and less than ten feet tall that produce twenty-five megawatts of power. Nu-Scale’s 45-megawatt reactor is fourteen feet wide and sixty-five feet long. The 125-megawatt Babcock and Wilcox mPower, the heavyweight of the bunch, is twelve feet wide and seventy feet tall. All of them can be shipped by train, boat, or heavy truck.

What all of these reactor designs have in common is that they leverage the learning curve. Instead of each reactor being a custom design, depending on one-of-a-kind parts built to order for the site, reactors would become mass-produced products.

There’s a rule of thumb in engineering that the larger a project is, and the more unique a project is, the later it will be. Today almost every nuclear reactor is a mega-project, with the mega-complexities, mega-problems, and costly mega-delays that brings. MIT’s cost analysis shows that, if construction delays didn’t occur, new nuclear plants would provide electricity at an estimated 6.6 cents per kilowatt hour, making it competitive with coal even before adding the cost of a fair carbon tax to coal. Mini-reactor manufacturers believe they can hit costs in the 6–9 cents per kilowatt hour range with their first generation products. Hyperion Power has already announced buyers for its first six power modules, at a cost substantially below that of megalithic nuclear reactors, even before the NRC finalized approval of the reactor design.

Standardizing reactor design also means greater safety. Designs can be thoroughly tested with problems worked out once, and solutions rolled out across an entire product line.

Indeed, if there’s one area the nuclear industry has learned quite a bit, it’s safety. Unfortunately, the lessons from that haven’t been rolled out to older reactors—and in many cases, the designs of old reactors make it impossible to do so.

Nuclear reactors work by generating heat, which is then used to create steam, which drives an electric turbine, generating electricity. Cooling fluid circulates through the reactor, picking up heat from the core, pushing the turbine, and then cooling and returning to the core. The circulation both creates electricity and drains heat away from the reactor core, keeping it from overheating and melting through its walls.

The tragedy in Fukushima came about because the pumps that normally circulate water through the core had their power sources knocked offline by the tsunami, which wiped out both the electrical grid connections and the backup generators. Without the pumps pushing in cold water, the reactor cores grew hotter and hotter. As the water in the reactor was turned to steam and evaporated, water levels dropped, exposing nuclear fuel rods to air. Their coatings, never meant to be exposed to air, reacted with air and steam to produce hydrogen gas. It was that hydrogen gas that eventually exploded in three reactors, tearing off their roofs and releasing radiation into the nearby area.

It’s deeply ironic that the Fukushima meltdown was caused by a lack of electricity, when the plant itself generated hundreds of thousands of times more energy than was necessary to run the pumps. That, however, is one of the risks of active safety measures. Older plants such as Fukushima require active steps to cool them and render them safe in the event of an emergency. If the plant must be shut down, and those active steps can’t be followed, the risk of a meltdown becomes real.

One of the most important innovations in nuclear reactor design in the past decade has been the creation of passive safety measures. Often called “walk away safe,” reactors with passive safety are designed to simply stop producing electricity and go into a dormant state if not kept actively running. Instead of pumps to circulate water, new reactor designs are built such that condensation and gravity work to continue to circulate water, even if all power fails. Virtually every new reactor design going through approval today uses passive safety.

Finally, if a mini-reactor does suffer an accident, the consequences are far smaller than with a massive reactor. Most mini-reactor designs have the reactor core deep inside a concrete well drilled into the ground that can be capped and sealed if necessary. When multiple mini-reactors are together at the same location, they’re each inside their own concrete hole deep underground. And the sheer scale of possible radiation release from a mini-reactor is dramatically smaller. A mishap of a Toshiba 4S (something less likely to happen than a mishap at a large, one-of-a-kind reactor) would release only about 2 percent of the radiation that Fukushima released.

There’s a saying that you can’t make things foolproof, because fools are so ingenious. That’s true in anything we humans build. We won’t ever build a totally failsafe nuclear reactor. We won’t ever build a totally failsafe anything. We can reduce the risk of accidents—and new reactor designs do so—but we should also be realistic that there will be accidents in the future. Just as plane crashes don’t mean we shouldn’t build new planes, nuclear accidents don’t mean that we shouldn’t build new nuclear plants. The issue isn’t whether an accident is possible or not—it’s the odds of an accident occurring, the damage done when one does occur, and the trade-off vs. the alternatives.

In this case, the alternative we’re concerned about is primarily coal. Coal mining kills thousands. Coal pollution kills more. Coal CO₂ emissions are the leading contributor to climate change. Coal will kill. And by all measures it kills more than current nuclear power, let alone newer, more standardized, more passively safe, smaller scale mini-reactors of the future.

Market Forces

Perhaps energy storage technology and solar and wind power will improve quickly enough to render the nuclear question moot. I hope so, though the current trends suggest that for the next twenty years or longer, nuclear—if construction costs can be kept down—will have an advantage in price.

Do we care about price? Yes, we do. The cheaper an alternative to coal is, the faster it will spread. Whether we’re dealing with deployment funded by private investors or deployment funded by governments, the cheaper a carbon-free energy technology is, the more of it our dollars will buy, and thus the more impact it will have on reducing carbon building up in the atmosphere.

We can also, if we’re smart, use market forces to increase nuclear safety. Nuclear power opponents have frequently pointed out that today, the U.S. government assumes the liability in the case of a major nuclear accident. Without this, nuclear opponents say, no nuclear reactors could ever be built because no one would be able to afford the insurance necessary to cover the possibility of an accident, or be willing to risk bankruptcy in the case of one.

The Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act protects nuclear reactor operators against ever paying more than $12 billion in damages in the case of an accident. All costs beyond that would be paid for by the federal government or passed on to the nuclear industry as a whole.

I’ve made the point throughout Part IV of this book that market forces affect the evolution of businesses, behaviors, and technologies. I’ve also made the point that externalities and tragedies of the commons disrupt that function of the market, and often cause the market to fail in ways that harm us all. The Price-Anderson Act creates a new externality. It lets a nuclear plant operator and manufacturer export the financial risk to the nation as a whole. And as a result, it reduces the effectiveness of the market in driving up safety for nuclear plants.

If nuclear power plant manufacturers and operators had to assume all the liability for their accidents, they would do so by relying more heavily than they do now on private insurers. (They do rely on private insurers now, but those insurers know that their liability is capped at $12 billion per accident.) To build a plant, they’d be required to find an insurer that they could convince of the inherent safety and low maximum danger level of their reactor. Insurers might well refuse to cover reactor designs they considered insufficiently safe, keeping those reactors off the market. Even the premiums insurers charge would likely vary by reactor design, with the safest reactors getting the lowest insurance prices. That would create a market incentive toward safety and would help drive the entire industry toward safer designs.

Hard Choices

I realize that for many readers, the notion of supporting nuclear technology will be a difficult one. We have a long association with nuclear technology as inherently dangerous. It’s hard to separate nuclear energy from nuclear weapons, which are surely the largest threat humanity ever created to its own existence and the health of the planet. Yet if we step back, and try to measure the risks with our heads rather than our hearts, things look different. Nuclear has risks, yes. But those risks are smaller than the certain damage we’re creating with coal. Until solar and wind are paired with future storage technologies to provide 24/7 energy, nuclear is our best hope for reducing the amount of carbon we emit.

Greenpeace International, on the homepage for their campaign to eliminate nuclear energy, has a prominent quote from one of their founders, Patrick Moore. “Nuclear power plants are, next to nuclear warheads themselves, the most dangerous devices that man has ever created.”

Actually, it turns out, that mantle should be given to coal plants, the devices that already kill far more people than nuclear power ever has, which contribute more than any other devices to climate change, and which newer, safer, cheaper reactors could displace.

Ironically, Patrick Moore himself has come to realize that. After campaigning for years against nuclear power, the challenges of climate and coal have changed his mind. These days he campaigns for increased nuclear power as a way to save our planet. “Nuclear energy,” the Greenpeace founder told me, “is the best technology we have today to replace fossil fuels and reduce greenhouse gases.”