Nuclear Power Will Decouple the Economy from the Environment and Solve Global Climate Change

I.               Thesis

            There exists scientific consensus that increasing the nuclear energy generation capacities of developed industrialized first world nations such as the United States would have a quantifiably measureable impact on reduction of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse emissions. However, the consensus of scientific modeling of climatic changes has also concluded that, even were any and all such carbon dioxide emissions to cease immediately, the Earth’s climate would continue to change for centuries to come. In this respect, while increased nuclear electrical capabilities can be considered of quantifiable benefit to the current climatic crisis, it cannot reasonably be considered to be a solution to it.

            Furthermore, the events at Fukushima, Japan in 2011 demonstrate that “decoupling” any energy generating technology entirely from the Earth’s environmental ecosystem is, to put it mildly, an unrealistic fantasy.

II.             Nuclear Reactors and Greenhouse Emissions

            In a March 2013 paper for the American Chemical Society, Columbia University Earth Institute Adjunct Professor James Hansen and National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Space Flight Center Institute for Space Studies Associate Research Scientist Pushker Karecha write:

“Using historical production data, we calculate that global nuclear power has prevented an average of 1.84 million air-pollution-related deaths and 64 gigatonnes [64 billion metric tons] of CO2-equivalent [GtCO2-eq] greenhouse gas [GHG] emissions that would have resulted from fossil fuel burning. On the basis of global projection data that take into account the effects of the Fukushima accident, we find that nuclear power could additionally prevent an average of 420,000-7.04 million deaths and 8-240 GTCO2-eq emissions due to fossil fuels by midcentury, depending on which fuel it replaces”.[1]

“If we can stay [at 20 percent of the country’s energy];” Said Christine Whitman, Chairwoman of the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, an advocacy group backed by the Nuclear energy Institute, in September 2015; “We will be in the best place we can hope to be.”[2] But even just maintaining the current twenty percent will require 13.2 Gigawatts of new nuclear capacity, in addition to the 5 nuclear plants currently under construction, by 2025, 22 Gigawatts by 2030 and 55 Gigawatts by 2035.[3] According to University of Texas—Austin Cockrell School of Engineering Reese Endowed Professor of Mechanical Engineering Dale Klein, former Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, this translates to fifty new power plants in the next decade or so.[4]

For the percentage of American energy requirements supplied by nuclear power of one fifth to increase to one quarter would require the construction of a thousand new reactors.[5]

According to Institute for Energy and Environmental Research President Arjun Makhijani in 2002, producing a noticeable reduction in global CO2 emissions would require constructing twice that many nuclear reactors.[6] The International Atomic Energy Agency and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Nuclear Energy Agency estimated in 2004 that this many new reactors would reduce the world’s supply of uranium to just fifty years worth, as opposed to seventy years worth with current levels.[7]

The average age of a nuclear reactor in the United States is 36 years[8], and David Fleming writes “nuclear reactors at present have a lifetime of about 30-40 years, but produce electricity at full power for no more than 24 years”.[9] However, 84 of 99 operating reactors have received 20-year renewals on their initial 40-year licenses and 51 of the 104 currently operating have received clearance from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to extend their lives by 20 years or more.[10] According to the Environmental Protection Agency, if all existing operating reactors are retired at 60 years, increasing American nuclear capacity by 150% will necessitate the construction of 181 new nuclear power plants by 2050.[11]

The International Energy Agency and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development concluded in 2009 that just stabilizing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations at 450 parts per million would require nearly doubling nuclear capacity by 2030.[12]

However, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, “even if greenhouse gas concentrations stabilized today, the planet would continue to warm by about 0.6 degrees over the next century”.[13]  “An addition warming of about 0.6 degrees C is “in the pipeline” due to the thermal inertia of the world’s oceans;” Writes University of Washington Associate Professor of Earth and Space Sciences Gerard Roe in a January 2011 paper for the American Geophysical Union; “Committing us to future climate change that approaches “dangerous” levels”.[14] He cites a 2005 paper by Hansen for the American Association for the Advancement of Science in which Hansen writes that “additional warming of 0.84 X 0.67 ~ 0.6 degrees C is “in the pipeline” and will occur in the future even if atmospheric composition and other climate forcings remain fixed at today’s values”.[15]  Earth Institute Director Jeffrey Sachs adds that 450 parts per million is “a level that in itself may be inadequate”.[16] Indeed, the fossil fuel power plants being built today have minimum lifetimes of forty to sixty years, and Earth’s atmosphere is anticipated to reach 450 parts per million carbon dioxide concentrations within 20 years.

The National Commission on Energy Policy estimates that in order to produce a noticeable reduction in global CO2 emission, nuclear reactors in the United States would need to more than double or triple over the next 30-50 years.[17]

However, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2014, even if all carbon dioxide emissions were to cease immediately, “surface temperatures will remain approximately constant at elevated levels for many centuries after a complete cessation of anthropogenic CO2 emissions”.[18] This proves the impossibility of ever “solving” climate change, as the climate will continue to change inexorably regardless of anthropogenic action, or even our inaction.

III.           Nuclear Reactor Susceptibility

Nuclear power plants are built with the goal of reducing serious accidents to less than one in more than 100,000 years.[19] This was the probability estimated by the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 1990.[20] In 1975, the selfsame Nuclear Regulatory Commission had previously estimated that same probability at 1 in 20,000 per year per reactor.[21] Then there was a core damage event in the United States nuclear industry—the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant near Middletown, Pennsylvania—“So we’ve already blown the goal.” Said Rick DeVercelly of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The Japanese Government Committee tasked with assessment of the risks of nuclear accidents following the Fukushima accident concluded the probability of an accident to be once every 500 years of operation of one nuclear reactor. Prior to the Fukushima accident, there were fifty reactors in operation in Japan, implying one major accident every ten years.[22]

In a May 2012 paper for the European Geosciences Union, Max Planck Institute for Chemistry Director Jos Lelieveld and Daniel Kunkel of the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz found that four nuclear reactor meltdowns, one at Chernobyl and three at Fukushima, in the 14,500 operational reactor years since the first nuclear station in Kaluga Oblast in what today the Russian Federation in 1954, equates to one major accident ever 3,625 reactor years, 275 time larger than in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s 1990 assessment.[23] That is equivalent to once every ten to twenty years, with the risk of human exposure to dangerous radiation, more than forty kilobecquerels of caesium-137 per square meter, where the density of reactors is particularly high, in the Eastern United States, virtually all of Western Europe and East Asia, being higher than once every fifty years.[24]

Considering the fact that the Fukushima accident, comprising 3/4ths of the nuclear reactor meltdowns since 1954, was the result of an earthquake causing a tsunami, such a high frequency of such serious accidents is indicative of the impossibility of “decoupling” completely any energy generation, even nuclear, in its entirely from the environment. Fukushima proved that the continued stability of nuclear reactors is contingent upon cooperative ecological, and specifically in the case of Japan geological, circumstances. 

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[1] Hansen, James and Karecha, Pushker. “Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power”. Environmental Science and Technology. March 15, 2013: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1021/es3051197

[2] Neuhauser, Alan. “The 20 Percenters: Nuclear Energy Faces Reality—And Its Likely Decline”. U.S. News and World Report. September 28, 2015: https://www.usnews.com/news/special-reports/the-manhattan-project/articles/2015/09/28/the-20-percenters-nuclear-energy-faces-reality-and-its-likely-decline

[3] “Nuclear Power in the USA”. World Nuclear Association. May 2017: http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-t-z/usa-nuclear-power.aspx

[4] Biello. David. “Reactivating Nuclear Reactors for the Fight Against Climate Change”. Scientific American. January 27, 2009: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reactivating-nuclear-reactors-to-fight-climate-change/

[5] Boiello, David. “How Nuclear Power Can Stop Global Warming”. Scientific American. December 12, 2013: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-nuclear-power-can-stop-global-warming/

[6] Makhijani, Arjun. “Nuclear Power: No Answer to Global Climate Change”. Nukewatch Pathfinder, Autumn 2002. Page 6.

[7] “Uranium 2003: Resources, Production and Demand”. Atomic Energy Agency. 2004: https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2004/5291-uranium-2003.pdf

[8] Nehauser, Alan. “Nuclear Power, Once Cheap, Squeezed By Mounting Costs”. U.S. News and World Report. March 30, 2016: https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-03-30/nuclear-power-once-cheap-squeezed-by-mounting-costs 

[9] Fleming, David. “The Lean Guide to Nuclear Energy: A Life Cycle in Trouble”. Fleming Policy Center. November 2007: http://www.theleaneconomyconnection.net/nuclear/Nuclear.pdf

[10] “Nuclear Costs in Context”. Nuclear Energy Institute. April 2017: https://www.nei.org/www.nei.org/files/fe/fed92b11-8ea6-40df-bb0c-29018864a668.pdf

[11] “EPA Analysis of the Kerry-Lieberman American Power Act of 2010”. United States Environmental Protection Agency Office of Atmospheric Programs. June 30, 2010: https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2016-07/documents/epa_apa_analysis_6-14-10.pdf

[12] “World Energy Outlook—2009 Edition”. International Energy Agency. 2009: http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/media/weowebsite/2009/WEO2009.pdf

[13] “How Much More Will Earth Warm?” National Aeronautics and Space Administration Earth Observatory: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarming/page5.php

[14] Roe, Gerard and Armour, K. “Climate Commitment in an Uncertain World”. Geophysical Research Letters. Volume 38, Issue 1. January 16, 2011: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2010GL045850/epdf

[15] Hansen, James, et al. “Earth’s Energy Imbalance: Confirmation and Implications”. Science, Volume 308, Issue 5727. June 3, 2005. Pages 1431-1435: http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2005/Imbalance_20050415.pdf

[16] Harvey, Fiona. “Nuclear Power is Only Solution to Climate Change, Says Jeffrey Sachs”. The Guardian. Thursday May 3, 2012: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/may/03/nuclear-power-solution-climate-change

[17] “Ending the Energy Stalemate: A Bipartisan Strategy to Meet America’s energy Needs”. National Commission on Energy Policy. December 2004: http://www.astro.umd.edu/~hamilton/HONR268A/Energy.pdf 

[18] Stocker, T.F., et al., eds. “Summary for Policymakers”. In C.B. Field, et al., eds. Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability; Contribution of Working Group II to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge University Press. 2014. Pages 1-32. 

[19] Biello, David. “Atomic Weight: Balancing the Risks and Rewards of a Power Source”. Scientific American. January 29, 2009: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-power-plant-safety/

[20] “Severe Accident Risks: An Assessment for Five U.S. Nuclear Power Plants”. United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research. December 1990: https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/nuregs/staff/sr1150/

[21] “Reactor Safety Study: An Assessment of Accident Risks in U.S. Commercial Nuclear Power Plants”. United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission. October 1975.

[22] Barrett, Brendan. “Is Nuclear Power the Answer to Climate Change?” United Nations University. February 13, 2014: https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/is-nuclear-power-the-answer-to-climate-change

[23] Kunkel, Daniel; Lelieveld, Jos and Lawrence, M. “Global Risk of Radioactive Fallout After Major Nuclear Reactor Accidents”. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, Volume 12, Issue 9. May 12, 2012. Pages 4245-4258: http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/12/4245/2012/acp-12-4245-2012.pdf

[24] Robock, Alan. “Nuclear Energy Is Not a Solution for Global Warming”. Huffington Post. July 12, 2014: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-robock/nuclear-energy-is-not-a-solution_b_5305594.html