Breakthrough

Written by Helen Aki, Breakthrough Generation Fellow.

There are a lot of good justifications for fossil fuel independence. It will divorce us from politically unstable oil suppliers, it will liberate us from high energy costs, it will lead us into the glorious possibility of the twenty-first century. But let's be honest with ourselves: if we're pursuing fossil fuel independence because we want to stop carbon dioxide emissions and avert catastrophic climate change (and we are), we will need more than solar panels, wind turbines, and cars that go "whizz!". We have in reserve a proven technology that is ready for mass deployment. It currently supplies 372GW of energy world wide, and if scaled up three to sixfold, it could account for 2/7ths of greenhouse gas emission stabilization. It is close enough to cost-competitive with coal-fired electricity that a modest carbon tax would make it cheaper than coal. But it is politically unpopular and characterized as dirty, evil, and dangerous.

If we want to "solve the climate crisis," or at least make significant steps towards transitioning towards a carbon-neutral, clean energy economy, we need to face one inconvenient truth: We have to go nuclear.

Jeffery Sachs has said, "It's hard to see how we are going to get to enough energy with low carbon emissions without nuclear playing a significant role in the world." Yet there is a lot of fear-based resistance to nuclear power plants. The 1973 oil crisis spawned a short nuclear craze, but subsequent oil exploration lowered fossil-fuel prices, and the 1979 Three Mile Island disaster brought nuclear deployment to a sudden halt. Accidents, radiation, virtually immortal waste and the possibility of proliferation were too much for the burgeoning industry. The last commercial reactor in the U.S. went online in 1996. Since reactors have a lifespan of 30-40 years, we will either be due for an upgrade by 2020 or 2030--or have phased out nuclear entirely.

Before we dismiss nuclear as a dangerous toy of the past, it is important to remember that technology has improved since the 1980s. Modern-day reactors are safer, more cost effective, and generate less waste than ever. They have improved "passive safety" measures (automatic shutdown in the case of an emergency) and safety mechanisms which take minutes to shut down the entire reactor, but hours to restart. This preempts future meltdowns and reduces vulnerability to terrorist attacks.

Fuel-efficient breeder reactors have been demonstrated to create fissionable byproducts during the fission reaction, producing fissionable plutonium out of the non-fissionable isotope of uranium.

And while the U.S. has dragged its feet when it comes to nuclear, vowing to phase it out rather than make it better, other countries have leaped forward in improving the traditional pressurized-water reactors. For example, South Africa and China have been experimenting with pebble-bed reactors, which are fueled by tiny uranium oxide & graphite mini-reactors. These beds require no elaborate pipes to collect the heat. Instead an inert gas (such as helium) passed over the "pebbles" can easily collect heat energy.

Nuclear reactor technology still has its drawbacks, of course.

1. It's expensive to build. "Electricity too cheap to meter" was the promise of the atom age, but initial capital costs continue to be prohibitively high. As it is, nuclear power costs around 6.5 cents a kwh, slightly more expensive than coal-powered electricity.
2. We still don't know what to do about waste. Our best solution for the waste products of nuclear power is, for the time being, to bury it somewhere until technology catches up. But as the Economist special report on energy (June 2008) reminds us, "that is largely a political problem, not a technical one." At least nuclear waste can't be used to make bombs.
3. We remain nervous about proliferation. Plutonium and uranium make us uncomfortable outside of reactors and in the hands of unstable dictators.

Nuclear power isn't the perfect solution. However, it is the best (and perhaps only) hope for tiding America and the world over until they have completed their transition to a clean energy society. Modern-day reactors are great improvements over their 1980s counterparts, and it makes sense to deploy a new generation of nuclear energy now. If we manufacture enough nuclear reactors now to wean us off coal and oil for the next few decades, their lifespan will give us a workable time frame in which to solve the problem of nuclear waste, deploy technologies in adolescent phases of development, and come up with a thorough, complex and dynamic energy solution.