From the Los Angeles Times
Say no to nuclear power
The governor sees atomic power as a response to global warming. We need
to look at the big picture.
March 25, 2008
Californians might have thought the subject of nuclear power was laid to
rest in 1976, when the state banned construction of new plants. But 32 years
is a long time, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger can now be counted among a
rising number of people who think that the threat of global warming provides
a good reason to reconsider our distaste for radioactive waste.
If he's sending up this idea as a trial balloon, we'd like to borrow
Schwarzenegger's Harrier jet from "True Lies" to blow it out of the sky.
In a recent speech in Santa Barbara, Schwarzenegger decried
environmentalists who use scare tactics to "frighten everyone that we're
going to have another blowup and all of those things." He was referring to
the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island disasters, which thoroughly soured
Americans on the concept of nuclear power. It's true that Chernobyl was an
ill-maintained monstrosity, and nuclear safety has improved since the 1979
Three Mile Island meltdown. It's flatly wrong to conclude that this means
nuclear plants are safe.
Nuclear waste remains highly toxic not for a few years but for millenniums;
if the ancient Egyptians who built the Great Pyramid had also built nuclear
plants, the waste would still be deadly. This material is being stored
on-site at nuclear plants, including the two in California (San Onofre and
Diablo Canyon) because Congress has been unable to agree on the location for
a national repository. As these plants age, the chance of a system failure
increases.
"There's no greenhouse gas emissions" with nuclear plants, Schwarzenegger
told the
Sacramento Bee. This is a constant refrain of the nuclear power
industry, but it isn't true. Nuclear plants are fueled by uranium, which is
becoming harder to find; uranium mining generates a good deal of carbon,
which increases as we dig deeper for the radioactive material. Although
nuclear power is considerably cleaner from a greenhouse-gas standpoint than
alternatives such as coal-generated power, those mining emissions are
nonetheless significant.
More compellingly, given the cost and time frame for building nuclear
plants, it would be
impossible to build them quickly enough to make an impact on global
warming. There are safer, quicker, cheaper and cleaner alternatives, such as
solar and wind power, greater efficiency measures and decentralized power
generators that produce electricity and heat water at the same time. Let's
exhaust them before even considering the nuclear option.