Carbon v. Nuclear

The conventional wisdom surrounding nuclear power is that it is a prohibitively dangerous and environmentally destructive process for producing electricity. But anyone who strongly agrees with that hypothesis should consider these two stories, each from the last week. The first tells of a refinery explosion in Anacortes, WA, that killed four workers and critically injured three more. The Los Angeles times quotes Daniel Horowitz of the US Chemical Safety Board:

"Our agency investigates only the most serious oil and chemical accidents across the country. We have 18 open cases, including this one, and nearly half of them are at oil refineries."

The second story, from this morning, details the early hours of a possibly disastrous oil spill near the Great Barrier Reef. Removing oil from water is hard enough - mitigating the effects of an oil spill on one of the most ecologically important sites in the world is much, much harder. From a story on coral reefs I posted last week:

Coral reefs are part of the foundation of the ocean food chain. Nearly half the fish the world eats make their homes around them. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide - by some estimate, 1 billion across Asia alone - depend on them for their food and their livelihood.

Now, some of you might know that I am not among the most staunchly opposed to recent plans to expand US offshore drilling. But I cite these two stories to challenge those who staunchly oppose nuclear power: Besides Chernobyl (not an incidental event, but a historically isolated one), can you name a disaster caused by nuclear power the likes of which match the environmental and human devastation caused by oil spills, refinery explosions, and climate change*? Before you utter the words "Three Mile Island," consider the words of former Greenpeace director Patrick Moore, who tells us that "Three Mile Island was in fact a success story: the concrete containment structure did just what it was designed to do - prevent radiation from escaping into the environment."

So let's keep these stories and others in mind as we move forward with a healthy and contentious national debate on our energy strategy. Obviously we would love an American infrastructure powered entirely by renewables (and nuclear power is NOT renewable). But in a future that holds sustained $175/bbl oil prices and China as a technological and economic overlord to the US, we need to wean ourselves off our addiction to oil (and other fossil fuels) as quickly and responsibly as possible.

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*The comparison is not perfect, as nuclear power is used to produce electricity and petrol, by and large, is not. But coal is even dirtier than oil, by nature of both its carbon emissions per unit energy produced and its mercury, lead, sulfur and arsenic contamination. The comparison is between a carbon culture and a clean one, and I think these stories put nuclear into perspective on the clean side.