The costs and perils of nuclear power are too high to risk.

By Mitchell Beer

Anyone who has watched the nuclear industry with even a slightly critical eye has known somewhere, sooner or later, a calamitous accident would come to define a technology that is too dangerous for humanity to control.

With the Fukushima Dai-ichi disaster unfolding day by day, that accident has a name and its victims have hundreds, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of faces.

The full extent of the damage may not be known for some time. But in this crisis, we can already see the deeply fatal flaws that make nuclear energy an option that no country should accept.

• More than 65 years after Japan’s first painful experience with nuclear technology, there is still no reliable way to deal with the waste civilian reactors produce. That may be why the spent fuel rods now beginning to melt at Fukushima Reactor No. 4 were stored on the site. Longer-term disposal is bound to be a headache when the radioactive substances in the inventory remain deadly for up to 240,000 years.

• The high cost of nuclear generation should have been enough to kill this technology and kill it dead. The loan guarantees required to get U.S. utilities to consider nuclear development would make any self-respecting solar or wind developer blush. And in the last week, there’s been speculation cost containment, more than radiation containment, has driven the development of safety procedures at aging nuclear plants in the U.S., 24 of them based on the same design as the Fukushima plant. Could this be why California’s Diablo Canyon facility, located less than a mile from an offshore fault line, had no earthquake plan when it was licensed 25 years ago?

• No amount of advance planning will ever be enough to prevent chains of events no one can reasonably predict. Even if we eventually learn nobody was negligent in designing emergency procedures for the Fukushima facility, that finding will be a small consolation to the victims or the survivors.

Beyond the immediate news from Japan, no international treaty is persuasive enough to prevent a country that is determined to divert spent reactor fuel to build a nuclear weapon. In May 1974, India exploded its first “peaceful” nuclear “device,” using plutonium it recovered from a research reactor Canada supplied in 1956. More recently, Sen. John McCain and others have urged the U.S. to “bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran” to stop another civilian nuclear program from taking on a military dimension.

In the last several years, the nuclear industry has acquired friends in unexpected places, with some proponents of aggressive action on climate change accepting uranium as a low-carbon option. The trade-off is a Faustian bargain that won’t pay off. Nuclear fails virtually every other test of sustainability, and even as a response to climate change is much less effective and much more expensive than the alternatives. “Nuclear draws precious financial, managerial and technological resources away from the sustainable options,” says energy analyst Ralph Torrie, “but delivers relatively little greenhouse gas reduction in return.”

In May 1976, the Worldwatch Institute published Nuclear Power: The Fifth Horseman, a working paper in which Earth Day coordinator Denis Hayes observed nuclear fission:

…cannot brook natural disasters or serious mechanical failures, human mistakes or wilful malevolence. It demands an unprecedented vigilance of our social institutions and demands it for a quarter-million years. At the same time, the use of commercial nuclear power dramatically increases the fragility of human civilization…amounts to acceptance of the inevitable spread of nuclear weapons from nation to nation, and the near-certainty that some nuclear bombs will end up in terrorist hands.

If we knew that 35 years ago, how have we managed to forget it since?

On Ottawa’s local public radio station last week, a business commentator declared the occasional nuclear disaster an acceptable price for a society that wants to avoid the “self-sacrifice” of safer, cleaner technologies. People in Japan today might disagree. But it’s also hard to see the sacrifice in eco-efficiency measures that make industry more profitable, or the wider economy more energy-efficient. In a year that has seen massive disasters at nuclear, coal and offshore oil developments, what more reason could we possibly need to finally, fully embrace a more efficient energy economy based on renewable sources?

About Mitchell Beer

Mitchell Beer, CMM, is president of The Conference Publishers Inc. in Ottawa, Canada, one of the world’s leading specialists in capturing and repackaging conference content. He tweets as @mitchellbeer. Beer worked as a reporter and editor at Canadian Renewable Energy News from 1977 to 1981.

Talkback Readers: Weigh in on nuclear! Do we need it? Can we risk it? Share your opinion on Talkback.

Business and government need to make sure alternatives to fossil fuels do not add to human and environmental health hazards.

Part Two of a three-part series from CSRwire.

By CSRwire Talkback Managing Editor Francesca Rheannon

My last post in these pages, written a week ago, tackled seven top health hazards of climate change. I promised readers my next post would explore remedies governments, businesses and individuals can use to protect human health from the “the biggest global health threat of the 21st Century.”

What a difference a week makes. A devastating earthquake in Japan set off a tsunami that has likely claimed tens of thousands of lives and is also threatening a full-scale nuclear catastrophe.

With three reactors in “partial meltdown,” another with its spent fuel rods on fire and radiation levels spiking as I write these words, the unfolding nuclear emergency at Fukushima will end up — in the best case scenario — having caused acute injury or death to some plant workers and almost certainly an eventual rise in cancer in those living near the plant (especially children), or — worst case scenario — spewing radioactive clouds that will circle the globe for months, potentially causing many cancers and birth defects for a long time to come.

So, rather than continue on my promised path, I decided to take a short detour into a now more pressing question. After Fukushima, do we face a Hobbesian choice between illness, death and environmental disaster from fossil fuels — or illness, death and environmental disaster from the technologies we hope to replace them?

Nuclear energy was supposed to help get us off our fossil fuel addiction — it was supposed to be “clean” and provide a bridge to less mature technologies like wind and solar. Proponents of nuclear, including one of my heroes, climatologist Jim Hansen, have said that without a renaissance in nuclear energy, the world will not be able to get off coal in time to avert catastrophic climate change. As of March 11, however, the nuclear renaissance is in doubt, both in the US and abroad.

In fact there have been doubts all along. Critics have charged nuclear is anything but “clean:” nuclear waste is (practically) forever, transporting it to far-flung permanent waste storage facilities (that have yet to exist and probably never will) puts communities at risk of contaminating accidents, nuclear plants are terrorist magnets, and they are prodigious water hogs in a world that climate change is making water-poor. (The hotter and drier the earth gets, the more water nuclear power plants will commandeer to supply the increased demand by people running more air conditioners more often.) Moreover, nuclear plants carry a heavy carbon footprint from construction; mining, processing and transporting uranium; storing waste and decommissioning.

Claims of the safety of present nukes are Panglossian at best and disingenuous at worse: the Japanese have the highest nuclear plant safety standards in the world, yet they built their reactors to withstand earthquakes, not tsunamis — despite the fact the two go together, as any Japanese kindergartner can tell you. And don’t believe claims that low levels of radiation pose no danger. They do: there is no safe exposure level to ionizing radiation (although the risk does go up with more exposure).

If you think nuclear operators on American soil are any better than the Japanese on safety, I’ve got a nuclear plant in Vermont I can sell you. Vermont Yankee is the same design as the failed reactors at Fukushima and it has been leaking for years. Thanks to a courageous governor — probably encouraged by a long-battling group of activists — that plant will be shut down, in spite of the NRC’s approval extending the plant’s license for another 12 years. But he is the exception among politicians, not the rule. Perhaps nuclear plants can be made safer, but we’d have to have a different political climate — one not beholden to corporate interests — to insure that.

How about other energy alternatives to fossil fuels? As we’ve learned from the case of biofuels, the cure may be no better than the disease. Consider this:

• Corn ethanol uses more energy from fossil fuels than it supplies, leads to carbon-emitting deforestation and causes hunger to rise world-wide;
• Biomass also cuts down forests (that protect from climate change) and emits highly toxic particulates (especially when burning construction waste) — and it also may well use more energy from fossil fuels than it supplies;
• Geothermal causes earthquakes — something you might not want to happen near a nuclear power plant (or anywhere else);
• Hydrofracking for natural gas is contaminating aquifers with toxic chemicals;
• “Clean coal” is an oxymoron and enormously expensive to boot.

Even wind and solar — certainly our best bets for clean electric power — come with some environmental concerns, from rare earth mining to harm to migratory birds.

So, what’s a climate hawk to do? We need to consider a sobering truth: there is no “free” energy. We are going to have to put responsible innovation at the core of our search for clean, renewable energy; we are going to have to put efficiency first; and we are all — consumers, producers and investors alike — going to have to learn to live better with less.

How we can do that will be the subject of my third and final post in this series. Stay tuned.

About Francesca Rheannon

Francesca is CSRwire’s Talkback Managing Editor. An award-winning journalist, Francesca is co-founder of Sea Change Media. She produces the Sea Change Radio’s series, Back to The Future, and co-produces the Interfaith Center of Corporate Responsibility’s podcast, The Arc of Change. Francesca’s work has appeared at SocialFunds.com, The CRO and E Magazine, and she is a contributing writer for CSRwire. Francesca hosts the nationally syndicated radio show, Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon.

Talkback Readers: What is a climate hawk to do? Which alternative energies pose minimal health risks? Tell us on Talkback!