David A. Kraft writes deprecatingly about nuclear power in Illinois (“Nuclear power,” Voice of the people, Feb. 3).
I would like to rebut some of his outlandish statements.
First, the cost of nuclear power is almost entirely due to governmental regulations, paperwork and the hugely inflated costs of dealing with nuclear wastes.
If the industry had been allowed by the feds to develop solutions to these problems, rather than having to use rules laid down by bureaucrats, the costs would be much lower.
Nuclear power produces no CO2. None. Fossil fuel plants, particularly coal and oil-fired plants, produce thousands of tons of fly ash and other wastes every day. All the nuclear plants on this continent produce hundreds of pounds of nuclear waste, most of which can be reprocessed into fresh fuel using existing technology.
Removing CO2 emissions by “conservation” is just doublespeak for trying to return our civilization to a point before widespread use of electricity existed. California is a case in point–it got rid of its nukes and its “dirty” coal plants, and switched to “clean” natural gas.
The price of gas has skyrocketed, and electric demand has risen as the population has grown, despite quantum leaps in appliance and computer energy efficiency.
To “conserve” will require a drop in the standard of living of millions of people.
Nuclear power is favored by intelligent planners because it produces so little in the way of pollution compared to traditional sources of power, requires much less in the way of fuel transport and is altogether much cleaner.
Compare the hundreds of hundred-car coal trains that travel to a typical coal-fired plant to the one or two trucks filled with safe, contained and–due to regulations–highly guarded nuclear fuel. Just the diesel fuel required to move the trains will produce more pollution than all the nukes we have.
Renewable energy requires huge government subsidies to be cost-effective. Translation? Huge tax increases, and another drop in living standard for millions.
Money wasted by an admittedly inept Commonwealth Edison hardly condemns an entire industry, no more than the actions of one person condemn an entire race or nationality.
As far as “threatening the entire planet” with nuclear wastes, coal plants continuously spew thousands of pounds of radium, uranium, mercury and other toxins found in the native rock inevitably dug up and burned with the coal.
When President Clinton took office eight years ago, one of the first things his administration did was to destroy the Argonne Lab’s IFR research program.
This program was within reaching distance of demonstrating a commercial nuclear reactor system that would be intrinsically safe–no possibility of a meltdown, ever–and would also be completely sealed on commissioning.
The plant would breed new fuel internally, process the fuel internally and, most importantly, destroy its own high level nuclear wastes on site. The reactor’s useful life of 30 years would end with the sealing of the reactor chamber at decommissioning. No wastes would ever be transported from the site.
To solve our current energy woes requires forceful action and leadership.
We need to restart the Argonne IFR program and re-examine federal laws on nuclear power to remove the senseless roadblocks to building clean, efficient power plants, so we can shut down the horribly wasteful fossil plants still running and increase research into the ultimate clean energy sources–fusion and solar power from orbiting power plants beamed to Earth.
The uninformed environmentalists have led us to the present debacle. If we don’t do something in Illinois to plan for the future, we will see the same kinds of problems that California is suffering here in the next few years.
