Is Nuclear Power Dead?

With fears of radiation fanned by reports from the Fukushima events, that’s the energy question being asked around the world.

If Japan can’t run nuclear power safely – who can? And if countries want to stop using nuclear power – what then? What’s the alternative for our ever-more-crowded globe?

That’s the problem: we know of no source of electricity that doesn’t have a downside. To stop using nuclear power, we’re going to have to choose among other sources with different and very real risks.

Not least of those risks is electricity supply itself. Electricity is the defining energy of a modern society. Whether it comes from a solar panel or a coal plant, access to electricity is the difference between living, or not, in the modern world.

The globe’s population is surging toward 7 billion – a wholly unprecedented event. Before 1800, there were never more than 2 billion humans on the globe at any time. Today, an estimated 1.5 billion of our fellow humans don’t have access to electricity, and most of them want it.

Doing without electricity carries its own risks – look anywhere people live without it. No running water, primitive sanitation, the constant search for fuels for cooking and heating. Unhealthy fuels like animal dung are burned; forests are depleted for their wood. There’s nothing inherently good for the environment about people living without electricity.

So what are our alternatives for electricity? Look at the Energy Information Administration’s latest numbers for the US: in 2010, we consumed 4.12 billion megawatt-hours. That’s the most power since 2007 when a record of nearly 4.16 billion MWh was consumed. The average household uses just under 10 MWh a year – less in the north, more in the south where air-conditioning runs longer.

Where did that electricity come from? Forty-five percent, some 1.85 billion of those 4.12 billion MWh, came from coal. To put that in perspective: US coal generation alone was larger than the total electricity consumed by any other single country except China (which has a fifth of the world’s population; the US has a twentieth).

Nuclear contributed 19.6% of US power, some 807 million MWh. Besides China, only Japan and Russia consume more electricity than that, from all sources annually.

For the rest of US power, 23.8% came from natural gas, some 982 million MWh, and oil produced just 0.9%, the latter concentrated in Florida, Alaska and Hawaii.

Adding the 0.3% contribution from fossil fuel byproducts, the EIA says the US got 89.6% of its electricity from fossil fuels and nuclear power.

Of the remaining 10.1%, 6.2% came from hydropower, and 1.4% from wood and waste burning. Wind contributed 2.3%, solar 0.03%, and geothermal 0.4%.

What are the risks of non-nuclear power?

Coal involves mining, which averages 30 fatalities a year in the US. Coal emissions are implicated in a range of public health ills involving respiratory diseases, as well as ecosystem problems like lake acidification. Even with stack controls, coal plants still emit some level of pollutants, and climate-change causing carbon is still unregulated. Coal presents, not a risk of pollution, but an ongoing certainty that some level of pollution is being released. Worried about radiation? Coal plants routinely release radioactive elements that are in coal. The amounts are very small, but they’re unregulated and more than nuclear plants are allowed to emit.

Natural gas has been viewed as a better alternative because, when used in highly efficient combined cycle plants, it has half the carbon emissions and few of the other emissions of coal. But it has to be handled carefully – last year’s explosion in San Bruno, CA, which killed 8 and destroyed a neighborhood, was a stark reminder of gas risks. Natural gas leaks are themselves potent greenhouse gases, and now environmentalists are questioning whether the means of tapping gas, hydraulic fracturing, harms water supplies. The answer to that is still murky.

Oil – Deepwater Horizon. The Texas City refinery explosion. Carbon and other pollutants are released in refining and burning. Radiation? Radium naturally occurs at the bottom of oil wells, so the older a well, the more radiation to workers. Like coal, since it’s “natural,” this radiation is not regulated.

Hydro – Dams don’t collapse often, but when they do, they have a long record of killing people downstream. No emissions – but not zero risk.

Why doesn’t the US have more generation from wind and solar, the best known renewables? Because they require large amounts of land in the right places weather-wise, they remain costly – no projects are built without government subsidies – and their power output varies with conditions, requiring grid operators to keep balancing power on standby to cover the moment-to-moment variations. Standby power costs, too. In some areas, this standby power comes from hydro, but much of it comes from natural gas.

So a nuclear power accident may feed lurid headlines that stoke public panic, but the technology’s actual record – radioactive releases sufficient to cause concern off a plant site three times in 41 years of commercial operation worldwide – stacks up well. Only at one site, Chernobyl, did the releases cause off-site fatalities.

Could we 308 million inhabitants of the US use less electricity? Undoubtedly – and building more efficient buildings and appliances were key provisions of last Congress’ climate change bills. But more efficient buildings are more expensive up front; in the current economy more expensive houses aren’t a government priority. And efficiency depends on turnover of housing and appliance stocks. It’s an answer for coming decades but not for next year.

Individual countries like France, Sweden, Japan and South Korea get more of their power from nuclear than the US does, but overall the globe is more heavily dependent on fossil fuels than the US. Only about 16% of global power comes from nuclear.

These numbers are why even advocates for renewables have been split over nuclear power. If climate change demands that we lower our fossil fuel use, particularly coal, we’re already talking about replacing up to two-thirds of US power use, some 2.88 billion MWh, which is about what the entire European Union uses in a year.

Take out nuclear as well, and … you see the problem.

That’s why, post-Fukushima, we hear world leaders talking about how nuclear can and must be run more safely. That’s why China, Russia, and even US leaders are not advocating immediate shutdowns, only immediate attention. With the vast power demands of the growing global population, the choice is between some risks and no electricity. We’ve chosen to base our society on electricity. The only remaining issue is the nature of the risks.

That’s why nuclear isn’t dead. To kill it off, we need a large-scale, baseloadable substitute that isn’t fossil fueled and that isn’t riskier than nuclear. We haven’t found it yet.