Posted: Wednesday, December 19, 2007 12:00 am
Back in 1979, Hollywood generated a frisson of fear with "The China Syndrome," a film about a fictional nuclear disaster that threatened to wipe out a city. Just days after that blockbuster's opening, a reactor core meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania sent a very real shiver of anxiety through the American psyche that for decades has darkened the public's perceptions about nuclear energy.
Since then, not a single new nuclear power plant has been ordered up anywhere in the United States. Nuclear technology fell so out of favor that in the 1990s the University of Washington, long a leader in the field, disbanded its nuclear engineering department for lack of student interest.
But along with the times, our fears have changed - and so too have the perceptions of many about nuclear energy. Today, global warming is seen as the greatest threat to our planet's future and even some of the most strident anti-nuclear activists of the past are rethinking their stance, wondering whether nuclear power just might be the energy source most capable of preventing another kind of meltdown.
Temperatures around the world are rising and polar icecaps and mountain glaciers are receding. The scientific consensus is that the root cause of climate change is our heavy use of fossil fuels in generating energy. Emissions from gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles and from coal-fired electrical plants are pumping the Earth's atmosphere full of greenhouse gases.
What can be done? Perhaps we could all drastically reduce our energy consumption. But that seems unlikely, especially given the rapid rise of industrial economies in China and elsewhere. Or perhaps we could hope for some sort of technological breakthrough that would make solar or wind power more than a boutique source of energy. But the truth is the world has an immediate and growing demand for workhorse power plants capable of consistent, cost-efficient, big-capacity energy output.
Where does nuclear power fit into this picture? Patrick Moore, a founder of Greenpeace and one of the leaders of the original anti-nuke movement, offered his newfound view on the matter in an op-ed piece for the Washington Post. "Nuclear energy," Moore wrote, "is the only large-scale, cost-efficient energy source that can reduce emissions while continuing to satisfy a growing demand for power."
There is good reason that environmentalists such as Moore are jumping on the nuclear energy bandwagon. Nearly 60 percent of our country's electricity comes from the more than 600 coal-fired power plants now operating in the U.S. Along with all that energy, according to the Clean Air Council, those coal-burning plants also generate 36 percent of our CO2 emissions, 64 percent of our sulfur dioxide emissions and 33 percent of our mercury emissions. By comparison, the 103 nuclear power plants operating in the U.S. produce about 20 percent of our country's electricity with no such emissions.
Fears that nuclear energy is unsafe, stirred back in the late 1970s by the fiction of "The China Syndrome" and the facts of Three Mile Island, should be eased by a look at the real record. The fact is that the Three Mile Island incident was the only serious accident in the history of the U.S. nuclear power industry. And although the reactor itself was crippled, the plant's built-in safety structure and systems worked. There was no release of radiation into the environment. Plant workers and nearby residents suffered no injuries or deaths.
If we want to wean ourselves now from the polluting power plants that are choking the Earth's atmosphere, it's time to take a serious look at restarting the nuclear energy industry in this country.