Nuke rebuke

With a radiation crisis still ongoing in Japan, the response from nuclear-energy advocates has been, essentially, to point a finger elsewhere and ask us if we want to remain dependent on coal and oil. Nobody, other than those whose livelihoods depend on these industries, seems to like coal or oil, so they make a pretty safe scapegoat as climate-change villains.

This strategy helps avoid looking at the intractable problem of safely disposing of nuclear waste, the potential for individuals' errors to compromise nuclear-plant safety, and the fact that "Nearly 30% of U.S. nuclear power plants fail to report equipment defects that can present 'substantial' safety risks." This last is from an NRC report just out today which you can read about at the Wall Street Journal under the headline, "US Nuclear Plants Not Reporting Equipment Deficits."

All the whistling past the radioactive graveyard can't disguise the fact that nuclear energy worldwide is up for a major referendum.  Businessweek is reporting that Germany may be "set to abandon nuclear power for good," And perhaps not coincidentally, Grist says that Germany's solar panels produce more power than Japan's entire Fukushima complex. Now, obviously, all of Germany is larger than a single complex of reactors. But the comparisonis still thought-provoking, since nuke cheerleaders love to say how solar just isn't productive enough to compete on a large scale.

The most salient observation on the whole controversy - one that's backed up with numbers - may be from Greenpeace, and I'll quote that post here:

Nuclear power is used only to generate electricity. It doesn't run our cars, our planes, our trucks or our container ships. Electricity itself only accounts for around one third of greenhouse gases created by mankind. Nuclear energy today produces less than 6% of global energy consumption.

The International Energy Agency has looked into future energy scenarios and concluded that if existing world nuclear power capacity could be quadrupled by 2050 its share of world energy consumption would still be below 10%. This would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by less than 4%. (Source: Energy Technology Perspectives 2010, IEA/OECD, June 2010)

Still. Every percentage shaved off of our ambitious CO2 reduction targets is a big thing, right? So let's say we set a target of quadrupling nuclear power capacity.

We'd best get started soon - to reach this target would mean building a new reactor every 10 days from now until 2050.

So the contribution to fighting climate change that nuclear energy is set to make is, in the grand scheme, somewhere close to negligible, while the risk factor, compared to other industries, varies from moderate to astronomical. I know, I know, we shouldn't factor in things that are so extremely unlikely as earthquakes and tsunamis (or, let's say, destructive tornadoes here in eastern Pennsylvania). After all, as the Onion so perfectly paraphrased the position, U.S. Reactors Are Completely Safe Unless Something Bad Happens.