Why nuclear power plants are good

However, there are disadvantages of nuclear energy to keep in mind when considering if this power source is the best form of environmentally friendly energy for our future. Here are some of the main cons of nuclear energy. Despite being relatively inexpensive to operate, nuclear power plants are incredibly expensive to build—and the cost keeps rising.

In addition to the expense of building a power plant, nuclear plants must also allocate funds to protect the waste they produce and keep it in cooled structures with security procedures in place. All of these costs make nuclear power quite expensive. One of the first things most people think of when they hear nuclear power plant is the disaster at Chernobyl. The Fukushima power plant crisis in showed that no matter how safe nuclear power plants are designed to be, accidents can and do happen.

While radiation might sound scary, we are constantly exposed to small amounts of radioactivity from cosmic rays or radon in the air we breathe. Storage of radioactive waste is a major challenge facing nuclear power plants. As technology improves, we will hopefully find better ways of storing radioactive waste in the future. Nuclear power plants have a greater impact on the environment than just the waste they produce.

The mining and enrichment of uranium are not environmentally friendly processes. Open-pit mining for uranium is safe for miners but leaves behind radioactive particles, causes erosion, and even pollutes nearby sources of water.

Nuclear power presents a unique threat to our national security because it is powered by nuclear energy. Terrorists might target nuclear power plants with the intention of creating a disaster, and the uranium used to produce the power can be turned into nuclear weapons if they end up in the wrong hands. For these reasons, security surrounding nuclear materials and nuclear power plants is extremely important.

There might be some important pros and cons of nuclear energy, but one of the most important considerations to keep in mind is that nuclear energy is dependent on uranium and thorium to produce energy. Ultimately, nuclear power is only a temporary solution with a very high price tag. What Is Nuclear Energy? Low Cost of Operation After the initial cost of construction, nuclear energy has the advantage of being one of the most cost-effective energy solutions available.

Reliable Source of Energy While some energy sources are dependent upon weather conditions, like solar and wind power, nuclear energy has no such constraints.

Sufficient Fuel Availability Like fossil fuels, the uranium used to supply nuclear power plants is in limited supply. It Has High Energy Density On our list of the pros and cons of nuclear energy, this pro is quite astounding.

Expensive to Build Despite being relatively inexpensive to operate, nuclear power plants are incredibly expensive to build—and the cost keeps rising. Accidents One of the first things most people think of when they hear nuclear power plant is the disaster at Chernobyl. This context should give us pause. Even if scaling up nuclear power did create many good, middle-class, high-skilled unionized jobs, there is no reason to believe it would not continue to depend on exploiting poor and marginalized populations whose jobs are neither practically unionizable nor well-paid, and whose workers suffer the brunt of the dangers of mining and waste.

There is currently a uranium rush in countries like Namibia and Australia with weak regulatory frameworks for ensuring public and environmental safety, and—given that many years can pass before symptoms of radiation poisoning become apparent—the companies taking advantage of those weak regulations are rarely held accountable for the damage they inflict.

A vast expansion of nuclear energy would almost certainly entail more exploitation of vulnerable people and ecologies. These are very serious objections, and ultimately they must be weighed against what is politically, technologically, and socially possible, especially in the short term.

We undoubtedly face stark tradeoffs in thinking about how to transform societies that demand massive amounts of energy to function. Even granting many of the high-tech, high-reliability arguments in favor of nuclear energy, there is a final major risk we must face head on. Operating nuclear power plants—and maintaining radioactive waste storage infrastructure—requires high levels of stability: geopolitical stability, climate and geological stability, civilizational stability, and so on.

This stability must be maintained indefinitely due to the high radiation potency of operational plants and the long-term toxicity of radioactive waste, which can remain deadly for hundreds of thousands of years, even a quarter of a million years at the higher end.

And yet, the spokesman for the U. Complex states have only existed for around 5, years. Nuclear power plants have only been around for about seventy years , a minuscule patch of time when compared with the consequences it produces. Transitioning from fossil fuels to nuclear energy is supposed to protect future generations of humans and other species from catastrophic climate impacts, but if the long-term safety of radioactive waste cannot be guaranteed, nuclear energy looks less like a solution for the future and more like a stop-gap that benefits those in the present at the expense of those future beings.

Even in the nearer term, nuclear plants are vulnerable to the increasingly unstable weather of climate change and to the increasingly unstable political regimes meant to regulate these infrastructures. Given that many nuclear plants are placed near coasts, a recent study sought to calculate how many would be vulnerable to sea-level rise. Further, the ecological crises that get worse every day threaten to fracture political orders and make those regulatory frameworks—at state, sub-state, or intergovernmental levels—incapable of maintaining safe facilities.

Even if scaling up nuclear power did create many good jobs, there is no reason to believe it would not continue to depend on exploiting poor and marginalized populations. In Hanford, Washington, for example, million liters of radioactive waste have been sitting for nearly half a century, waiting to be processed. Moreover, the integrity of basic U. In short, resilience to climate impacts will only become more important as climate change worsens, but highly centralized nuclear power plants do little to improve grid resilience.

Even simply high ambient temperatures can be enough to shut down nuclear power plants. The heatwave in Europe, for instance, temporarily forced plants to shut down across the continent.

By contrast, distributed energy forms like wind and solar have higher potential to achieve resilience in the face of climate disruptions.

Some of these problems with nuclear power may not be inherent. Nuclear is a proven technology that has room for innovation, even if much of that innovation is still a ways out.

With reactors operating globally, and half a century of mostly safe operation, there is a wealth of knowledge about how to build and operate them. The situation is quite different with renewables, which have only quite recently started to match the power output of nuclear reactors.

Small modular reactors manufactured at scale could give nuclear dexterity comparable to rapidly deployed, decentralized renewables. Storing nuclear waste deep underground could be a potentially permanent solution to the dangers of radioactive materials lying around for millennia.

Nuclear energy advocates are keenly waiting for reactors that recycle nuclear waste back into a source of energy to become commercially viable, effectively doing away with the need for much nuclear waste storage. But, to reiterate, these innovations are far from guaranteed; even in the best cases they likely would not arrive for decades, a period of time in which continued technologically advancements cannot reasonably be presumed.

Where do all these considerations leave us? A study recently found that the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation AMOC , a component of the global oceanic conveyors like the Gulf Stream, has destabilized more thoroughly than previously believed. Although scientists cannot predict when or if it will collapse, this new evidence suggests that thresholds may have already been crossed that make collapse likely, even within the span of decades.

This collapse would make Europe colder and stormier, raise sea levels globally, and threaten food supplies across the Global South. The likelihood of this extremely high-impact event happening increases with every gram of CO 2 that we put into the atmosphere.

On one hand, the best case for nuclear energy is that it is vital we rapidly reduce every gram of greenhouse gases being emitted. If nuclear energy could be proven to substantially reduce carbon emissions, that alone may be enough reason to replace coal and gas electricity generation with nuclear as fast as possible, in as many places as it is reasonably safe. There are still open questions about whether this could be achieved faster than fully reforming grids to accommodate percent renewable electricity generation.

In some places, the former may be faster; in other places, the latter undoubtedly will be. There is no simple answer to this question. It is likely that in very particular places where conditions are ideal and relatively stable, opening new nuclear reactors could make good sense, while in most other places, new nuclear reactors do not make sense, and investing in solar, wind, and other renewables is the better option. We should remain wary of commentators making overly strident claims one way or the other.

Decisions we make about infrastructure today limit the possibilities for the sorts of civilizations we can build in the destabilized future. If thresholds like ocean conveyor collapse—or others like permafrost melt, forest diebacks, and polar glacier melt—have already been crossed or are likely to be crossed in the near future, then we need to be preparing for a world that is much less stable than the one nuclear energy, and indeed all of modern civilization, has taken for granted.

As such, we cannot assume that the technologies that have served us reliably in the latter twentieth century will still serve us reliably in the latter twenty-first century and beyond. Either way, this destabilization of civilizational order will open new possibilities—and close others—for how we are able to structure society, both its physical infrastructures and social ones.

Nuclear energy—with its dependence on heavily militarized and organized states—relies on one kind of civilization. Renewable energy—with its capacity to be owned and managed at local levels, cooperatively—opens the potential for radically different ones.

Neither course, nor both combined, doom society to particular paths, but they certainly narrow the range of possible options, especially in the short term. Confronting the many challenges of COVID—from the medical to the economic, the social to the political—demands all the moral and deliberative clarity we can muster. It also means that we rely on you, our readers, for support.

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