Nuclear Power Not the Answer to Climate Change
Posted on: Friday, 27 January 2006, 18:00 CST
By Mary Lampert, Duxbury
Proponents of nuclear power incorrectly argue that since the nuclear fission process emits no carbon dioxide, increasing nuclear power production can help address global warming problems Not so. It's the cars, stupid. Fossil-fueled vehicles, not electricity, are the chief culprit in greenhouse gas emissions. Also, nuclear power is far from emission free. The entire fuel cycle uses huge quantities of fossil fuels - uranium mining, enrichment, transport and construction. Even worse, nuclear reactors produce toxic radioactive waste that will remain toxic for thousands of years. And do not forget that nuclear reactors release radiation into the environment on a daily basis. No amount is safe and it bio- accumulates. You do not solve the energy problem by creating a worse radiation problem. Reactors take too long to build; seven to 10 years each. And we need 1,500 worldwide and 300 in the U.S. just to make a dent in greenhouse emissions. Construction costs are prohibitive - more than $4 billion a reactor. Hence, adding enough nuclear power to make a meaningful reduction in greenhouse gas emissions would cost trillions of dollars. Even if it were a good idea to build more reactors and possible to do so, which it is not, we'd need a new Yucca-style nuclear waste dump every four years to hold and safeguard the tons of radioactive poisonous waste from 1,500 new reactors for the requisite hundreds of thousands of years. Funding nuclear energy is counterproductive and drains resources from real climate change solutions like renewable energy and conservation. This isn't even mentioning that new plants would just add to the potential terrorist threat. Adding more reactors just increases the number of targets and the amount of weapons grade plutonium in the world.
MARY LAMPERT
Duxbury
Source: Patriot Ledger, The; Quincy, Mass.
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