STL717
CL-215 Lake James, NC
- Joined
- Jun 3, 2003
- Posts
- 251
The Energy Challenge
Late last week (to be precise, late Thursday night), the Senate passed what the Washington Post hailed as “a sweeping energy legislation package.” (In truth, with its commitment to bio-fuels and higher fuel-economy standards, the bill is heavily focused on the demand side of America’s energy challenges.) Earlier that same day, President George W. Bush devoted some time to speaking about energy issues. The venue for Bush’s speech—a nuclear power plant in Alabama, where the TVA is revving up the first new reactor to come online in more than a decade—was a not-so-subtle reminder that if Americans want to make real strides toward energy independence, it’s time to exploit the nation’s vast energy assets. And nuclear energy is just one of many such assets.
As the Senate quibbled over new MPG standards for SUVs, Bush laid out the good news and bad news about America’s nuclear energy industry: It already provides 20 percent of the nation’s electrical power; it’s clean, preventing the release of 700 million additional tons of carbon dioxide into the air every year; and it can help break America’s unnecessary addiction to foreign oil.
“In 1985, about 27 percent of our oil came from other countries,” Bush observed. “Today, about 60 percent does.” This forces the American people not just to countenance thuggish regimes from afar, but to go to war for them (as in the Gulf War) or against them (as in the Iraq War), or at least to protect them and prop them up (as in the interregnum between those two wars).
One contributing factor in America’s apparent foreign-oil dependence (we will discuss the oil realities below) is the diminutive size of the US nuclear power industry, which remains too small for a country with the energy needs and appetite of the United States. Bush says that energy experts believe the US needs to build three new nuclear plants per year starting in 2015, just to keep pace with the country’s nuclear energy needs.
Yet the US has not ordered a new nuclear power plant since the 1970s. In fact, there were 112 reactors operating in the US in 1990; today, there are just 104. Bush wants to change that, forecasting construction of dozens of new nuclear plants by the end of this decade. In fact, as Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) observed during the Senate floor debate, thanks to the Energy Policy Act of 2004, “over 30 nuclear power plants are in the works…We went more than two decades without a single one applying, and we have now over 30.” Hailing America’s “nuclear renaissance,” he notes that once operational, “these plants will provide enough electricity for nearly 30 million American homes.”
In March, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved a site in Illinois for the first of these plants. As USAToday has reported, if built, it will be the first new nuclear plant to be constructed since 1979.
The three-decade delay was caused by three little letters: TMI. The failure of the feed-water pumps and consequent partial-core meltdown at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island in March 1979 virtually nuked the US nuclear industry. After the near-disaster, which caused precisely zero deaths and zero injuries, orders for new reactors fell from a high of 41 in 1973 to zero. The fact that the two million residents of the area were exposed to one-sixth the amount of radiation absorbed in a typical chest x-ray was irrelevant. The damage had been done, and more was yet to come.[1]
Seven years after TMI, a fire at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Soviet Union released huge amounts of radiation. More than two dozen workers died within months of the disaster, and thyroid cancer spiked among children.
To be sure, the deaths and lingering effects at Chernobyl are tragic. But the disaster should have forced Americans to redouble their efforts to build the safest nuclear plants on the planet. Instead, we did something uncharacteristic of Americans: We stopped building, stopped inventing, stopped pushing the frontiers of technology.
What if we had reacted in the same manner in April 1947, when a port explosion in Texas City, Texas, triggered a massive fire at an oil refinery and killed 500 people? Should we have stopped drilling, pumping, exploring and transporting oil; should we have reverted to windmills; should we have turned back to firewood?
Together, TMI and Chernobyl staggered and ultimately stunted the nuclear power industry in America. Thus, nuclear power accounts for just 20 percent of America’s electrical energy, while it supplies almost 80 percent of France’s electricity needs; 79.9 percent of Lithuania’s; 55 percent of Belgium’s; and 50 percent of Sweden’s. Energy-hungry China has built nine new reactors since 1991, with plans to accelerate its nuclear power program. And fully half of Ukraine’s energy comes from the atom. That’s right: even the place that bears the scars of Chernobyl recognizes the benefits of nuclear power.[2] (The ironies don’t end there: Recall how an energy-independent Iran—with enough oil and natural gas to meet its current energy demands for 256 years—is going nuclear, albeit for different reasons.)
Maybe the sky isn't falling.
Late last week (to be precise, late Thursday night), the Senate passed what the Washington Post hailed as “a sweeping energy legislation package.” (In truth, with its commitment to bio-fuels and higher fuel-economy standards, the bill is heavily focused on the demand side of America’s energy challenges.) Earlier that same day, President George W. Bush devoted some time to speaking about energy issues. The venue for Bush’s speech—a nuclear power plant in Alabama, where the TVA is revving up the first new reactor to come online in more than a decade—was a not-so-subtle reminder that if Americans want to make real strides toward energy independence, it’s time to exploit the nation’s vast energy assets. And nuclear energy is just one of many such assets.
As the Senate quibbled over new MPG standards for SUVs, Bush laid out the good news and bad news about America’s nuclear energy industry: It already provides 20 percent of the nation’s electrical power; it’s clean, preventing the release of 700 million additional tons of carbon dioxide into the air every year; and it can help break America’s unnecessary addiction to foreign oil.
“In 1985, about 27 percent of our oil came from other countries,” Bush observed. “Today, about 60 percent does.” This forces the American people not just to countenance thuggish regimes from afar, but to go to war for them (as in the Gulf War) or against them (as in the Iraq War), or at least to protect them and prop them up (as in the interregnum between those two wars).
One contributing factor in America’s apparent foreign-oil dependence (we will discuss the oil realities below) is the diminutive size of the US nuclear power industry, which remains too small for a country with the energy needs and appetite of the United States. Bush says that energy experts believe the US needs to build three new nuclear plants per year starting in 2015, just to keep pace with the country’s nuclear energy needs.
Yet the US has not ordered a new nuclear power plant since the 1970s. In fact, there were 112 reactors operating in the US in 1990; today, there are just 104. Bush wants to change that, forecasting construction of dozens of new nuclear plants by the end of this decade. In fact, as Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) observed during the Senate floor debate, thanks to the Energy Policy Act of 2004, “over 30 nuclear power plants are in the works…We went more than two decades without a single one applying, and we have now over 30.” Hailing America’s “nuclear renaissance,” he notes that once operational, “these plants will provide enough electricity for nearly 30 million American homes.”
In March, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved a site in Illinois for the first of these plants. As USAToday has reported, if built, it will be the first new nuclear plant to be constructed since 1979.
The three-decade delay was caused by three little letters: TMI. The failure of the feed-water pumps and consequent partial-core meltdown at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island in March 1979 virtually nuked the US nuclear industry. After the near-disaster, which caused precisely zero deaths and zero injuries, orders for new reactors fell from a high of 41 in 1973 to zero. The fact that the two million residents of the area were exposed to one-sixth the amount of radiation absorbed in a typical chest x-ray was irrelevant. The damage had been done, and more was yet to come.[1]
Seven years after TMI, a fire at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Soviet Union released huge amounts of radiation. More than two dozen workers died within months of the disaster, and thyroid cancer spiked among children.
To be sure, the deaths and lingering effects at Chernobyl are tragic. But the disaster should have forced Americans to redouble their efforts to build the safest nuclear plants on the planet. Instead, we did something uncharacteristic of Americans: We stopped building, stopped inventing, stopped pushing the frontiers of technology.
What if we had reacted in the same manner in April 1947, when a port explosion in Texas City, Texas, triggered a massive fire at an oil refinery and killed 500 people? Should we have stopped drilling, pumping, exploring and transporting oil; should we have reverted to windmills; should we have turned back to firewood?
Together, TMI and Chernobyl staggered and ultimately stunted the nuclear power industry in America. Thus, nuclear power accounts for just 20 percent of America’s electrical energy, while it supplies almost 80 percent of France’s electricity needs; 79.9 percent of Lithuania’s; 55 percent of Belgium’s; and 50 percent of Sweden’s. Energy-hungry China has built nine new reactors since 1991, with plans to accelerate its nuclear power program. And fully half of Ukraine’s energy comes from the atom. That’s right: even the place that bears the scars of Chernobyl recognizes the benefits of nuclear power.[2] (The ironies don’t end there: Recall how an energy-independent Iran—with enough oil and natural gas to meet its current energy demands for 256 years—is going nuclear, albeit for different reasons.)
