Power Surge

The Washington Post has an article today about resurgent interest in nuclear power around the world. Despite the fact that even the New York Times has recently noticed the reality that wind power is not a cure-all, the Post quotes a number of nuclear opponents who continue to push that pie in the sky. They also keep flogging all the hackneyed objections to nuclear power while offing no alternatives that can actually be used to solve the growing demand for electricity.

Globally, 29 nuclear power plants are being built. Well over 100 more have been written into the development plans of governments for the next three decades. India and China each are rushing to build dozens of reactors. The United States and the countries of Western Europe, led by new nuclear champions, are reconsidering their cooled romance with atomic power. International agencies have come on board; even the Persian Gulf oil states have announced plans for nuclear generators.

"Energy and climate changes can't remain tied to carbon or hydrocarbon," the European Union's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, said in October. "They are polluting, and we'll have to find substitute energies, including nuclear energy." It creates heat through nuclear reactions rather than combustion, giving off no carbon dioxide, the most important of the so-called greenhouse gases that trap heat in the Earth's atmosphere.

Utilities are dusting off plans for nuclear plants even though most of the problems that shelved those projects remain. Critics say governments have forgotten the crises of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. The costs and time to build the concrete-encased plants far exceed those of conventional plants. There still is no safe permanent storage for the used fuel that will remain radioactive for a million years. Added to these problems are the newly realistic worry of a terrorist attack on a nuclear plant.

If you are interested in energy, I'd urge you to read the whole thing. The opponents keep bringing up Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. They know full well that the Chernobyl-style RBMK reactor was a bad - and obsolete - design that has nothing to do with current reactors. They also should know that TMI was not a disaster as such. It actually was a testament to the robustness of even that flawed Babcock and Wilcox reactor design. (Even though operators did darn near everything wrong, there was no breech of the reactor vessel.) But the opponents have no good, workable alternative, either. Keep that in mind as you read the article. In a world where there is a projected increased demand for electricity of over 30%, where is it all going to come from?