2008 Woodie Awards
Guest:At our fingertips
Matthew Graves
Issue date: 2/29/08 Section: Opinion
Ali Adler's column from Feb. 26 ("Hairy sustainability") makes the argument for clean energy fairly well, but contains critical flaws.
The first flaw has to do with science; nuclear fission is cleaner, cheaper and safer than any renewable energy foreseeable now.
Ali rightly points out that nuclear plants have no carbon emissions - their only noteworthy emission is heated water. Nuclear plants use water for cooling (and immediately return it from whence it came, several degrees hotter), which can have minor local environmental effects. But compared to the environmental effects of solar panels (look into their construction) and hydrothermal dams, those concerns are inconsequential. Conspicuously absent here is radioactivity - fission plants emit levels of radiation comparable to background radiation and far below what is considered unsafe. They actually emit far less radiation than coal plants, because while fission plants carefully monitor the amount of radioactivity that they release into the surrounding atmosphere, coal plants do not, and burnt coal contains a large amount of radioactive radon.
Nuclear power already works and is economical - it already generates 20 percent of our electricity and 80 percent of the electricity generated in France. A fission plant will pay for itself in roughly 10 years and has a lifespan of roughly 30 years. Ironically enough, the largest impediment to building more cheap, clean plants is environmentalists who claim to want cheap, clean plants.
Ali claims that "the costs of a potential meltdown are immeasurable," but that's entirely false. First, a meltdown is all but impossible - Chernobyl was the result of Soviet safety engineering. The reactor requires a moderator to keep the reaction occurring and a coolant to keep a meltdown from occurring; the Soviet engineers had different moderators and coolants, so when the coolant boiled away in Chernobyl, the moderator kept the reaction going, with disastrous results. In Western reactors, the moderator and the coolant are the same - if the coolant disappears, the reaction dies. But we know the costs of Chernobyl, and can predict what the costs would be for a meltdown in the future. If we pretend Chernobyl was normal, nuclear fission as a whole kills fewer people per terawatt-hour than wind turbines have. If we restrict ourselves to examining plants designed with Western safety engineering, we discover that the worst operating accident ever killed somewhere between zero and one person, despite hundreds of plants in operation for decades.
The second flaw has to do with economics; just because an investment will make money (and a penny saved is a penny earned) in the future does not mean it is the best option. It has to be compared with other options - if you were buying a car, you would not just look at one car and decide if it is the right car for you; you would look at all cars out there and pick which one is the best fit.
To extend her beauty analogy, if you are plagued by body hair, zits, dorky glasses, lame clothes and yellow teeth, you don't make your decision to opt for a laser hair removal in a vacuum. You have to weigh all the demands on your resources against each other and your finite income. If permanently solving the hair problem means going without other beauty products for months, that solution is probably suboptimal.
What does this mean with regard to the energy problem? Often, diverting production toward new renewable energy actually leaves us poorer both environmentally and materially than pursuing some other goal. Should we clean up the environment (and is the best way to do that investing in new energy?), or feed the hungry or cure the sick or create more machines to produce more in the future?
We don't need to research new energy sources. We already have one that's as close to perfect as humanly possible - we just need to lose our irrational fear of it.
Matthew Graves is a sophomore economics and physics major. He can be reached at vaniver@umd.edu.
The first flaw has to do with science; nuclear fission is cleaner, cheaper and safer than any renewable energy foreseeable now.
Ali rightly points out that nuclear plants have no carbon emissions - their only noteworthy emission is heated water. Nuclear plants use water for cooling (and immediately return it from whence it came, several degrees hotter), which can have minor local environmental effects. But compared to the environmental effects of solar panels (look into their construction) and hydrothermal dams, those concerns are inconsequential. Conspicuously absent here is radioactivity - fission plants emit levels of radiation comparable to background radiation and far below what is considered unsafe. They actually emit far less radiation than coal plants, because while fission plants carefully monitor the amount of radioactivity that they release into the surrounding atmosphere, coal plants do not, and burnt coal contains a large amount of radioactive radon.
Nuclear power already works and is economical - it already generates 20 percent of our electricity and 80 percent of the electricity generated in France. A fission plant will pay for itself in roughly 10 years and has a lifespan of roughly 30 years. Ironically enough, the largest impediment to building more cheap, clean plants is environmentalists who claim to want cheap, clean plants.
Ali claims that "the costs of a potential meltdown are immeasurable," but that's entirely false. First, a meltdown is all but impossible - Chernobyl was the result of Soviet safety engineering. The reactor requires a moderator to keep the reaction occurring and a coolant to keep a meltdown from occurring; the Soviet engineers had different moderators and coolants, so when the coolant boiled away in Chernobyl, the moderator kept the reaction going, with disastrous results. In Western reactors, the moderator and the coolant are the same - if the coolant disappears, the reaction dies. But we know the costs of Chernobyl, and can predict what the costs would be for a meltdown in the future. If we pretend Chernobyl was normal, nuclear fission as a whole kills fewer people per terawatt-hour than wind turbines have. If we restrict ourselves to examining plants designed with Western safety engineering, we discover that the worst operating accident ever killed somewhere between zero and one person, despite hundreds of plants in operation for decades.
The second flaw has to do with economics; just because an investment will make money (and a penny saved is a penny earned) in the future does not mean it is the best option. It has to be compared with other options - if you were buying a car, you would not just look at one car and decide if it is the right car for you; you would look at all cars out there and pick which one is the best fit.
To extend her beauty analogy, if you are plagued by body hair, zits, dorky glasses, lame clothes and yellow teeth, you don't make your decision to opt for a laser hair removal in a vacuum. You have to weigh all the demands on your resources against each other and your finite income. If permanently solving the hair problem means going without other beauty products for months, that solution is probably suboptimal.
What does this mean with regard to the energy problem? Often, diverting production toward new renewable energy actually leaves us poorer both environmentally and materially than pursuing some other goal. Should we clean up the environment (and is the best way to do that investing in new energy?), or feed the hungry or cure the sick or create more machines to produce more in the future?
We don't need to research new energy sources. We already have one that's as close to perfect as humanly possible - we just need to lose our irrational fear of it.
Matthew Graves is a sophomore economics and physics major. He can be reached at vaniver@umd.edu.
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