Experts Debate Nuclear Power's Role in Combatting Climate Change

March 28, 1979 and April 26, 1986 mark two incidents in American and world history that have greatly affected American public opinion about the safety of nuclear energy.

The first date marks the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Middletown, Penn. – a partial meltdown that, luckily, did not injure a single worker or resident of the community. The second date, which marks the Chernobyl disaster, lacked the same serendipity – 56 direct deaths and an estimated 4,000 additional fatalities from cancer have been attributed to that meltdown in the Ukraine.

Now several decades later those dates continue to serve as a rally cry for both opponents and proponents of nuclear power. The anti-nuclear crowd looks back and sees what could recur, while the industry and its supporters see a bygone-era that must be put behind us. Especially, those supporters say, now that the issue of climate change has taken center stage.

“Any serious effort toward dealing with climate change has to include major contributions from nuclear power,” Mitchell Singer, a spokesperson for the Nuclear Energy Institute, said in a telephone interview. He noted that once the process of building a plant has been completed, nuclear energy is virtually greenhouse gas emission free.

Today nuclear accounts for about 20 percent of U.S. energy, about the same amount as natural gas and well under the 49 percent derived from coal, both of which emit greenhouse gases.

After 30 years of dormancy in the U.S. – not a single nuclear power building permit was requested between 1978 and September 2007, with more than 100 plans canceled during that period – Singer estimates that about six reactors will be built over the next 10-15 years.

This interest is also evident in the campaigns of some of the major candidates vying for the presidency this year. While Congress will always play a major role in developing the country's energy policy, there is no doubt that the nuclear perspective of the next president will have a significant influence on the future of nuclear power.

The major Republican candidates are all fairly supportive of at least exploring nuclear energy. John Edwards and Dennis Kucinich remain the only Democrats who have come out strongly against nuclear power, while Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have been vaguely in favor of “keeping the option on the table.”

However, regardless of the opinions of the next president, many experts say a “Nuclear Renaissance” is here, a result of both growing demand for electricity and concern over global warming, also a hot-button topic in the 2008 election. Many others, however, wouldn't go as far as to compare the leaders of the nuclear industry to Michelangelo or da Vinci.

Paul Gunter, a long-time nuclear power watchdog and representative from the Beyond Nuclear organization, said he falls into the latter category.

“To trade global warming for nuclear winter does not sound like a good solution,” Gunter said in a telephone interview.

He pointed to an MIT report from 2003, “The Future of Nuclear Power,” detailing the major obstacles still facing the nuclear industry. That report stated four caveats – cost, safety, waste and proliferation – as critical problems that must be overcome if nuclear power is to be seriously pursued as a solution to climate change.

Going down the line, Gunter argues that little progress has been made on any of those fronts. Costs have historically been much higher than initial industry estimates, plants remain vulnerable to terrorist attacks, and a lack of proper safety enforcement almost led to a major nuclear accident at the Davis-Besse plant in Ohio in 2002.

Meanwhile, there is still no long-term strategy for high-level radioactive waste disposal, and civilian nuclear technology undeniably provides the building blocks for nuclear weaponry. Even the Bush administration, a long-time supporter of the nuclear industry, has prioritized non-proliferation in its actions toward Iran.

With all these downsides, Gunter said investing more money in unproven nuclear power would be the wrong way to address global climate change.

“We will squander what precious little time we have on a demonstrated technological failure of the last century,” he said.

Jon Block, manager of the Nuclear Energy and Climate Change Project at the Union of Concerned Scientists, is also convinced that global warming can be tackled without nuclear energy.

“It is not insignificant in a warming world that nuclear plants use tremendous quantities of water and are not very efficient,” Block said via the telephone. “What kind of a choice do you make in terms of, for your dollar, what is going to give you fastest implementation? Begin with conservation, energy efficiency, and a variety of renewable energy sources.”

Singer carries a different tune: “As an industry, we believe we’re going to need contributions from all sources as well as conservation,” Singer said. “If you think we can do it just by conservation and renewables, you are not in touch with reality.”

Clearly, there is little bridging the gap between the opposing sides in this bitter but important debate.

“It is an incredibly emotional issue,” John Weingart, associate director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics and author of Waste is a Terrible Thing to Mind, said. “What I worry about is [that nuclear energy] will be eliminated as an option for reasons that are social science and not natural science.”

Judi Greenwald, director of Innovative Solutions at the non-partisan Pew Center on Global Climate Change, thinks we should at least see what happens with the next batch of nuclear plants in America before deciding how great a role nuclear should play in the fight against climate change.

“So the question is, can we figure out what to do about waste?” she said. “If we can’t, then nuclear can’t be part of the solution. If we can, then it can be part of the solution.”

Block insists that waste is only a single piece of the puzzle, especially with ominous projections about near-term global warming ramifications.

“When you look at how long it takes to put nuclear plants into operation versus others that can be implemented instantly,” Block said, “the way to go is the path that I described.”

Singer, on the other hand, suggests that newly streamlined licensing structures and better, more uniform plant designs will cut down on both cost and time, making nuclear a viable piece of the fight against climate change.

As for the rest of the world, the fact remains that the push towards nuclear power is growing. Russia, China and India are some of the larger countries with major nuclear planning and construction already in the works.

“Frankly, the best we can do is to present an example of affordable energy policy for the twenty-first century,” Gunter said.

And if the 2008 candidates are to arrive at firmer positions in support of nuclear energy, it will likely only come as a result of a renewed sense of public support. While the industry claims that public opinion polls show generally positive attitudes from U.S. citizens, both the MIT report and anti-nuclear advocacy groups cite conflicting studies.

Still, the NEI remains optimistic about their chances for political and industrial development.

“We do believe we will move ahead in this country,” Singer said. “We really believe that this will move ahead and it will be quite a positive thing.”

However, from a political perspective, Weingart thinks the deck is stacked against the nuclear industry. He sees public fears as too strong for politicians, especially the Democrats, to ignore. After all these years, the specters of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, he suggests, still haunt political rhetoric.

For that reason, he said, “it’s easier to say no than yes.”