Horrible reality of nuclear power

While I empathize with the fears and reservations expressed in this commentary, the reality is that there are more opinions here and very few facts. The fears that these sorts of articles elicit are unfortunately the result of uninformed views and lack of technical knowledge. Nowhere in this article, or in industry statistics, is there any evidence that “nuclear power plants should [n]ever have been built.” As someone concerned with both the environment and the local central coast community, I’ve researched nuclear power thoroughly and noticed a few things that stand out in this article that I’d like to address.

Nuclear power provides safe, clean, low-cost and emissions-free energy with a minimal amount of land requirements and therefore a relatively minimal effect on the environment. These are easily verifiable facts, the details of which are readily available to the public through the NRC and the various plants’ Safety Analysis Reports, though it certainly helps to have a technical background to understand some of them. As a side note, the amount of land required by solar panels to generate the same amount of power as Diablo Canyon (and only during the day…) would be more than 100 times greater.. which is clearly an impact on the environment.

The Diablo Canyon site, while indeed located near fault lines, has been subject of some of the most exhaustive seismic studies in the US; it has accordingly been structurally designed by top civil engineers to withstand earthquakes of the highest magnitude. Meanwhile, the nuclear industry shares operating experience among all plants throughout the country. This means that a technical item that affects one plant, however trivial – for example, a tendency for a motor oil reservoir to leak over time in a certain climate zone – is reviewed by all plants. Only the airline and maybe aerospace industries even come close to the widespread level of technical scrutiny that nuclear power plants go through.

Fears of radiological release or nuclear accidents, while they certainly sound terrifying, are tantamount to fears that the sky is falling. The extremely remote and improbable chances of such disasters can be attested by the excellent track record the 50+ year nuclear industry in the US has. Some people might cite 3-mile island as an example; to those people, I suggest reviewing the facts of the incident. The emergency systems functioned as they were intended, and in the 30 years since then the industry has been driven to significantly greater safety protocols. Plant staff is constantly postulating increasingly remote accident scenarios and making sure these situations can be mitigated. It would be like designing a car to be able to withstand a sniper attack and a bomb blast at the same time.

On the issue of nuclear waste, it’s pretty well known that spent fuel is loaded into dry casks and stored in very robustly designed locations. What is understated is that this waste is completely contained, and completely mobile. Compare that to anything that uses fossil fuels – gaseous emissions are completely the opposite: uncontained and uncontrollable. By contrast, the dry casks can be moved to other locations, they take a very small footprint, and there has been a lot of research in recent years for ways to utilize these for alternate means of power generation in the future.

I mentioned before that I can empathize with the fears of nuclear power, mainly because I have a similar fear of air travel. I prefer driving if I can… a far less safe way to travel. While it’s not totally unreasonable (there are accidents, after all), statistics show that flying is the safest way to travel, and the advancement of technology in the past several decades speaks for itself, as does the huge reduction in accidents. In reality, nuclear power is even safer than air travel, with a track record for safety that remains unparalleled for industrial facilities.