Written by William F. Pickard   

The worst thing about nuclear energy is not that that it is dangerous (Which it is.), or that it is expensive (Which it may well be.), or that it generates toxic waste that we don’t know what to do with (Which it does.), or even that it is not sustainable (Yet another defect of which it is guilty.), but that it distracts us from solar energy (Which is notably free of the above defects.).

Nuclear is dangerous. Nuclear energy may or may not be inherently dangerous; but that matters less than the experimental reality that, in the hands of fallible men, it has resulted in Chernobyls and Fukushimas. One could argue that Generation III reactors will be safer. Unfortunately, so few have actually been built that no one can be sure. Meanwhile, the first such generating station to come on line, the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant, has experienced inordinate down time due to seismic issues. Further into the future, Generation IV reactors could be safer still, but they are not expected to be ready for production before 2030: that is, they are at present hypothetical.

Nuclear may be expensive. Nuclear power was not initially expected to be expected to be expensive: quite the contrary! However, for the nuclear plants constructed in the United States during the period 1966-1977, the average cost overrun was about 200%. And the poster child for cost overrun is the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant on Long Island, New York, which began with an expectation of costing less than approximately $75 million and ended up absorbing roughly $6 billion by the time it was completed in 1984.

Nuclear generates toxic waste. Everybody agrees to this. The problem is that, despite 65 some years of public debate and expenditures in the billions, the United States has yet to complete and successfully test a viable facility for permanently and safely storing civilian nuclear waste. As matters now stand, the responsibility for unsecured civilian waste arising from our parents’ use of nuclear power is, in essence, being dumped upon our grandchildren. This is in flagrant disregard of the standards established by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Furthermore, by itself, the annual DOE budget for cleaning up America’s past nuclear messiness exceeds that for advancing clean renewable solar. Worse still, given the present level of governmental gridlock in the United States, it seems as if the electorate has no recourse but to accept indefinitely these “unacceptable” impositions.

Nuclear is not sustainable. Its proponents may well object vociferously to this assertion, probably pointing out that the highly abundant fertile nuclei uranium-238 and thorium-232 can, by neutron bombardment, be “bred” into fissile plutonium-239 and uranium-233. That is the dream. The reality may be rather more complex because reprocessing can lead to much greater volumes of radioactive waste to dispose of. Furthermore, the breeding process itself has not as yet been spectacularly successful, with many countries closing down their programs. It is probably accurate to say that nuclear energy might, with determined development efforts in breeding and reprocessing, turn out to be viable for many thousands of years. But mankind is expected to run low on fossil fuel in the latter half of this century, and it would be well advised to bet on a cleaner and more reliably commercializable source of energy.

Solar is lacking in all of these defects. Solar neither goes critical nor fails by emitting clouds of toxic waste. Solar is not characterized by fantastic cost overruns during construction; nor does it promise major end of life disposal issues. Solar generates no embarrassing toxic waste during operation. And solar is the paradigm of a renewable energy source. To be sure, nothing lasts forever; but fortunately, over a future time span on the order of that which characterizes anthropoid evolution (~50 My), the output of the Sun is expected to be fairly steady.

Solar energy’s glaring imperfection is its Intermittency, its variation with time of day and with weather. It is simply not dispatchable on demand without many score jumbo-scale-energy-storage projects (each 50,000 megawatt hours and up) to buffer generation against consumption; and such massive storage does not, at the present time, exist. Surprisingly, this is not a killer defect in choosing between solar with nuclear, because nuclear electricity (in its present incarnations) is output-sluggish and so would also have to be stored massively in order to meet the ups and downs of changing demand. The technical know-how for such massive storage is alleged (believed, hoped, ...) to exist but somehow has never been tested at anything like the scale that would be needed. Fifty billion dollars of research, development, and demonstration funding could provide a lot of answers, as well as priming our economic pump. But fifty billion euros would be even better!