The sun, the wind and nuclear power?

BOULDER, Colo., Nov. 21 (UPI) -- The suggestion that nuclear power might be the best available option for easing greenhouse gas emissions sends conservationists into tortured simile.

The Sierra Club's Brendan Bell told United Press International, "Switching to nuclear power from coal-fired power to help the environment is like running to McDonald's to lose weight."

Likewise, Paul Gunter, director of the reactor watchdog project for the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, told UPI it would be like prescribing heroin to help someone quit smoking.

At a certain level of examination, however, nuclear power can make a pretty strong environmental argument.

Bernard L. Cohen, in his 1990 book, "The Nuclear Energy Option," estimated deaths from the entire nuclear fuel cycle were about 0.3 per gigawatt of energy produced per year. Whereas, Cohen continued, a single, 1,000-megawatt coal-fired power plant causes 25 fatalities, 60,000 cases of respiratory disease, $12 million in property damage and nitrogen oxides emissions equivalent to driving 20,000 cars each year.

Cohen, a professor emeritus of Physics and of Environmental and Occupational Health at the University of Pittsburgh, said he concluded that nuclear power is more than 1000 times better than coal burning, based on the number of deaths caused. Even solar power is ten times worse than nukes, he said, based on the coal burning required to produce the materials.

The problem with nuclear is twofold: "Waste and transportation are the biggest issues," said Bell, a conservation assistant in the club's global warming program.

The Yucca Mountain waste repository in Nevada is scheduled to go on line in 2010 and begin taking in the spent reactor fuel now being stored at temporary sites around the country. That waste will have to be isolated from the environment for about 20,000 years -- much longer than human civilization has lasted up to now -- a challenge even usually confident engineers and administrators admit is daunting.

Early in its history -- back in the 1950s, when it was advertised as producing electricity "too cheap to meter" -- many environmental groups endorsed nuclear power. But they got over it, and at the moment none show any indication of reviving their enthusiasm.

"We advocate clean energy, like wind and solar power," Bell said. "The Department of Energy has found that we can produce 20 percent of our energy requirements from those sources by 2020, which will also lessen demands on natural gas and reduce the price ... By making our air conditioners alone 30 percent more efficient, we could save the need for 204 power plants, saving 61,400 megawatts of power -- about as much power as went out during the blackout this summer."

The Bush administration has other ideas. Its energy bill, which currently is stuck in Congress, puts a priority on nuclear power. It contains a subsidy of 1.8 cents per kilowatt hour for nukes, 20 percent higher than the 1.5 cents per KWh for alternative energy.

The nuclear subsidy "represents one of the largest industry giveaways in the entire bill, and would cost each family in America on the order of $600," said Daniel Hirsch, president of the Committee to Bridge the Gap, a nuclear policy group in Los Angeles.

"Exchanging one set of environmental consequences for another is not a real solution," said Gunter of the coal-vs.-nuclear question. "The long-term impacts of nuclear waste represent a daunting environmental problem. Long after the last watt of electricity is produced, succeeding generations will receive all of the environmental liability."

Moreover, he said, nuclear energy is not really free of carbon dioxide emissions. Just as solar component manufacturing causes greenhouse gas emissions, so does processing uranium fuels.

A study by Dr. Nigel Mortimer for Friends of the Earth in England, which is widely cited by nuclear opponents, found that a nuclear plant, through its fuel cycle, emits as much CO2 as an equivalent coal plant. The industry contests this conclusion, however, finding CO2 emissions are somewhere between 0.5 percent to 4 percent of the emissions from equivalent coal-fired generating capacity.

Len Ackland, who wrote the book, "Making a Real Killing," about the U.S. nuclear weapons facility at Rocky Flats, Colo., and a former editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, said there is much more to nuclear power than CO2 emissions.

"Nuclear power needs to be looked at in totality, and not in little slivers," Ackland, who also is co-director of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado in Boulder, told UPI.

Both the environmental community and the industry "are looking at a snapshot rather than the whole film," he continued. In addition to traditional environmental concerns, such as clean air and CO2 emissions, there are at least two other, major worries.

"One is operating risk," he said. "Chernobyl is the example of operating risk. You have to put that in the equation."

The other is the connection between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Though this is not necessarily a safety concern within U.S. borders, it persists as a threat in other nations.

"The case of Iran is right on point," Ackland said.

For years, the United States has been exporting research reactors all over the world under the Atoms for Peace program instituted by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. "Every nuclear plant creates plutonium," he said. "Is that plutonium separated from the spent fuel? That's what North Korea did. That's where the plutonium for their bombs came from -- by reprocessing the used fuel."

The weapons material argument may be strongest against nuclear power in the age of terrorism, and the reason why environmentalists may find support among non-believers in opposing it. It is much harder to make a weapon of mass destruction out of coal than out of spent nuclear fuel. Harder still to make one from the wind or the sun.

--

Dan Whipple covers environmental issues for UPI Science News. E-mail sciencemail@upi.com