WASHINGTON, Oct. 6 (UPI) -- Nuclear power is promoted as a safer, more reliable source of energy as the push to build more plants grows in the United States, but its billing as a nonpolluting alternative to fossil fuels is garnering more support.
And though safety, proliferation and waste issues hamper an immediate move to increase the number of nuclear plants, the threat of climate change caused mostly by sources such as oil and coal is increasing the chances it could happen.
Slowing and possibly halting negative climate change by increasing nuclear's share of U.S. energy supply while displacing polluting energy sources was the sentiment mostly shared by the nuclear industry, scientists and environmentalists Friday at a nuclear energy summit.
If that isn't strange enough bedfellows, the summit took place at the ardently free-market American Enterprise Institute.
"Nuclear energy is back on the table," said Jon Entine, adjunct fellow at AEI, because climate change is a "fact and potential threat."
Currently, 103 reactors operate in the United States and no nuclear plants have been approved since 1978 or come online since 1996. That isn't only blamed on public sentiment after the accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and the deadly disaster at Chernobyl.
It has been undercut by relatively inexpensive coal, natural gas and oil -- though the latter two are neither inexpensive nor price stable now.
Panelists generally agreed that instituting a cap and/or a charging system on greenhouse gas polluters would level the energy playing field, creating a disincentive for more polluting sources and an incentive nuclear and other types of energy.
"It is clearer and clearer that climate change is a real and serious problem," said Judi Greenwald, director of innovative solutions at the nonprofit, non-partisan Pew Center for Global Climate Change. Nuclear energy "potentially offers a greenhouse gas-free source of baseload electric power."
She, like many others at the AEI summit, said addressing climate change by reducing energy pollution requires a broad approach of conservation, efficiency and alternative fuels.
"There are a lot of options" and nuclear power is included, Greenwald said. She's not sure on how much the environmental community will embrace it, "but rethinking is going on."
"There's no law of physics that says we need nuclear power to address this," said Ernest Moniz, co-director of the Laboratory for Energy and the Environment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But he said other non-polluters can't do it alone.
Neither can nuclear energy. Dale Klein, chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and keynote speaker at the AEI summit, said he expects more than 30 applications for new reactors. Even if all of those were to come online, overcoming legal challenges by those who may oppose nuclear energy, and especially with the eventual closing of the current reactors within the next few decades, nuclear energy wouldn't serve the growing U.S. energy demand.
U.S. nuclear plants delivered nearly 789 billion kilowatt hours of electricity in 2004 -- the fifth record set since 1998 -- but only 20 percent of U.S. energy demand.
While criticizing nuclear energy, saying renewable and efficiency were better ways, Christopher Paine, senior nuclear researcher at the National Resources Defense Council, said he agreed that letting companies pollute with little or no payment for the environmental cost needs to end.
"The agreement across the political spectrum is the right thing to is level the playing field" by some sort of pollution cap or charging system, he said.
Specific designs for any potential new nuclear plants are considered safer than those now in operation though many say not safe enough.
The Union of Concerned Scientists is also worried about the security of the plants against possible terrorist attacks.
"If nuclear power is to play a greater role in the future, the safety and security of nuclear plants must be significantly increased," said Edwin Lyman, senior staff scientist of UCS' Global Security Program, though he applauded improvement since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
He said a security problem would be the "worst nightmare for resurgent nuclear industry," and could reverse the growing backing it has received of late.
And while climate change could be leading the push toward more nuclear power -- along with various tax incentives -- nuclear waste is stopping it. Currently 54,000 tons of highly radioactive waste sits at the sites of the nuclear plants that produced it -- at a rate of 2,000 tons a year, the NRC estimates.
The government was supposed to take control by 1998 and the nuclear industry says without any plan to dispose of it, it's too much of a liability to create new plants.
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