Atomkraft… Nein Danke?

This may be one of these posts where I show real ignorance, but let’s hope it generates discussion. I have the feeling that the arguments around nuclear energy are highly polemic, and not really that well founded. There seems to be a knee-jerk reaction against nuclear power, and my generation has heard since childhood that it is bad for us, and that only bad people support it. Even the anti-nuke logos and stickers seem to have been designed by an advertising agency on Sesame Street.

I guess the biggest argument is that “something terrible could happen, and lot’s of people could get sick or die.” This is true, but it seems a little irrational. There are tens of thousands of aircraft that take off and land safely every day, and the track record improves every year. Why can’t we apply that same skill and discipline in monitoring world-wide energy generation?

Our primary energy source right now is oil and coal. If you factor in illnesses such as cancers and other diseases, it is hard to argue that these are leaving humans unscathed. Add the various wars we have to fight in order to protect resources – the death and injuries, the collateral damage to human life and property – it could be argued that our current energy policy hurts and kills more humans than any reactor accident. I include the long-term effects… just as a reactor accident would contaminate a site for years, it takes generations for a country to recover from a war, and most societies never come back from the brain drain and destruction.

What about waste products? Storing spent nuclear fuel is no more dangerous than our current strategy, which stores spent carbon fuel in our atmosphere. It may be out of sight and out of mind, but it is in our lungs and depleting our ozone layer. The waste issue is what makes alternative energy sources so attractive.

It seems that the human mind can focus on a single helpless disaster more than a series of small incidents. People are horrified by plane crashes, yet many MANY more people die in traffic every day. But somehow that is less visible. The deaths of soldiers and civilians in the war for resources happens “over there” to other people, and seems less prominent. Sure, there are some well-intentioned people protesting foreign wars – often the same people who oppose nuclear power, by the way – but most people just ignore the topic entirely.

Alternative energy sources provide hope, but it doesn’t seem like any version can keep up with growing demand. Sun and wind require a lot of space, and aren’t yielding sufficient energy to serve the current need. Unfortunately, power generation has never been as big a problem as power transportation. You can capture wind energy in the great plains of the United States, but getting it to the coast is a different problem. Simply put, we will need to improve every link of the value chain, from generation through transportation all the way to consumption. We will not simply find a new source that we can plug into the top end of the power grid which will solve our energy problems.

Any government seeking to carve out a niche of expertise should be supporting research, both through tax cuts and direct funding. The same minds that develop computers and software could achieve great things in a short time. But we are not having honest conversations about energy technology. There are a lot of powerful voices seeking to protect existing business, and on the other side are people who dream of a future when alternative energy will make everything better somehow. That is utopian, because it ignores what we need now, what we will need in the future, and what sources are available to us at this time. We need to seek out new energy sources, and we need to develop technologies that make energy use more efficient. But we should be making nuclear energy part of any real future model, and should invest a lot of effort and skills into improving its yield as well as safety.