The state has rightly cited suspected radiation leaks and sloppy testimony by Entergy, the plant's owners, as the reason for their concern. I am not here to confirm or deny the facts surrounding this case, but I'm willing to stick my neck out and say that the basic philosophy motivating this decision goes deeper than simply the risk of tritium leaks and the lies of a few bumbling corporate representatives. This decision is, in microcosm, the basic struggle that we as a society face when it comes to nuclear energy. On the one hand, we have those who claim that nuclear is an inherently dangerous and expensive form of energy; on the other, there are those who hold out hope – as they have for decades – that nuclear will solve all of our energy woes by delivering cheap, near zero-emissions energy. It's a debate obviously all the more relevant in the face of globe-altering climate change.
I'm willing to bet that, when push comes to shove, the vast majority of Americans fall into the first camp, the NIMBY crowd. Nuclear is simply too emotional of a concept, even in our post-Cold War world. I basically have subscribed to this school too, but recently I've started questioning the stance mainly due to the added constraints of climate change. Now let me be clear, there are half a dozen strategies that society will need to pursue simultaneously to achieve carbon reduction goals. The top priorities should be on efficiency/conservation and renewables, clearly. But I have a difficult time believing that these strategies alone will suffice when the Department of Energy is anticipating load growth of about 25% by 2035. To me it seems that, if you're really serious about climate change, you need to at least be willing to consider nuclear as an option.
The interesting thing is that the anti-nuclear arguments I've found most compelling have nothing to do with tritium leaks or spent fuel rods. It goes back to dollars and cents (and sense).
Matter of fact, looking at the stats, I think you find pretty quickly that nuclear surpasses coal from an environmental standpoint. I think many people – enviros in particular – initially balk at this statement. After all, coal may release CO2 and SOx and NOx and particulates, but it isn't going to cause a Three Mile Island. Yes, you can't have a runaway thermal breakdown in a coal plant. But at the end of the day, coal still releases more radiation into the environment per year than all of our nuclear power plants. This is nothing new; we have known about this since the late 1970s. And although nuclear isn't truly carbon-free, it's as close to zero (< 1kg CO2 per kWh) as any renewable source out there. Even on safety, you simply can't make the case, based on nuclear's track record, that nuclear is more dangerous than most fossil fuel forms of energy. Only 30 people have died worldwide due to accidents at nuclear power stations over the past 50 years, and most of those at Chernobyl. Compare that to the scores of Chinese laborers that die in coal mines every year or those burnt or killed by natural gas explosions.
You might be able to make a strong policy case that nuclear is the best climate mitigation option following energy efficiency/conservation and renewable sources of energy. This is simplifying the issue, ignoring the very real environmental hazards posed by uranium mining, water use, and storage of spent fuel, not to mention the security risks associated with terrorism and proliferation. But even so, you could make nuclear look a hell of a lot more compelling than coal.
You might, that is, if it weren't for money. We would not have nuclear power today if it weren't for multi-billion dollar subsidies from the federal government to absorb some of the massive capital costs of these facilities. Amory Lovins and Imran Sheikh published an incredibly dense (I believe half of the space is taken up with footnotes), exhaustive white paper on the subject of nuclear's financial viability, "The Nuclear Illusion." Their charts tell the story of nuclear's competitive disadvantage, particularly in comparison to emerging energy resources, which include distributed generation, renewables, and efficiency/conservation (or as Amory loves to call it, negawatts). Even looking at some of the best cost estimates for new nuclear technologies like pebble bed reactors, you're still looking at prices in excess of 11 cents per delivered kWh, seen in the chart below.
Source: Lovins and Sheikh, 2008.
The Obama administration seems to be continuing nuclear-friendly policies of the Bush White House by providing massive loan guarantees to new plants (although, to be fair, they are also extending benefits to renewable plants as well). This is a plan distasteful to environmentalists and free-marketeers alike, receiving equal condemnation from the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Cato Institute. The one thing that these groups and, I think, taxpayers can agree on is that nuclear is simply too expensive to be a serious part of our climate change mitigation strategy. It's criminal when the billions of loan guarantees could instead be invested in efficiency or even renewables that might provide over double the amount of energy per dollar invested. Although we may have the cash, we don't have time to wait for radical new technologies like TerraPower's "traveling wave nuclear reactor" to reach maturity. We need to get started now and to make every dollar count.
Epilogue
My earlier post may have sounded like I was in favor of continued operation at Vermont Yankee. This is not the case, especially given the increasingly damning evidence that keeps coming out about the plants mismanagement. Plus the populace of the entire state seems to be against continuing operation. The main point here is that to produce the same amount of base load power today in Vermont would probably require half a dozen dirty coal-fired plants and a lot of CO2.
