The National Research Council has a new report that tries to estimate the cost in dollars of energy production and consumption in the U.S. Mostly their focus is on hydrocarbons, air pollution, and global warming, but they do spend some time looking at nuclear energy, mostly in the chapter called Energy for Electricity. Here’s a paragraph from their summary:
The life-cycle damages of wind power, which produces just over 1 percent of U.S. electricity but has large growth potential, are small compared with those from coal and natural gas. So are the damages associated with normal operation of the nation's 104 nuclear reactors, which provide almost 20 percent of the country’s electricity. But the life cycle of nuclear power does pose some risks; if uranium mining activities contaminate ground or surface water, for example, people could potentially be exposed to radon or other radionuclides; this risk is borne mostly by other nations, the report says, because the U.S. mines only 5 percent of the world’s uranium. The potential risks from a proposed long-term facility for storing high-level radioactive waste need further evaluation before they can be quantified. Life-cycle CO2 emissions from nuclear, wind, biomass, and solar power appear to be negligible when compared with fossil fuels. [italics mine]
That’s seems fair. One would like to know, for instance, if, when, and where we’re going to bury the nasties before we go estimating the immediate cost, much less the “hidden” one. I was struck by the implied assumption that there would be a long-term facility and that’s all they would need to worry about. What are the risks and hidden costs of storing the waste indefinitely on-site? Of reprocessing, if we want to consider it more? Of transporting the waste to the long-term storage? This topic could use its own report.
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Hey Nuclea-ette,
ReplyDeleteGreat blog! We focus on the nuclear waste issue specifically at Hanford, but it's exciting to see that you're blogging.
And YES, the one aspect of nuclear power that politicians & the public don't like to talk about is the nasty, nasty waste. Thanks for high-lighting that here. Who knows how many years it will be until the feds identify another deep underground geologic repository, though? They spent over 20 years on Yucca Mt!
Reprocessing is a nasty option, as well, though, because it only creates more highly toxic wastes. Much of the waste that is currently sitting in leaky underground tanks at Hanford (or in the groundwater, for that matter) was created by reprocessing - melting down the fuel rods in acids to extract minute amounts of plutonium. Then you have to deal with all of the toxic substances that you used to reprocess & all of the waste that is generated through further use of the extracted materials.
Give us a shout! We'll be reading your blog!