Nuclear Power
Nuclear Power
Nuclear Energy—Too Cheap To Meter Yet Too Expensive To Keep
by Dale Y the Green Guy
The age of nuclear power began on August 5th, 1945. That was the day the world was forever changed, for better or worse, when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. I need not go into the horror, the consequences or the ramifications of that singular event. It was a terrible thing to do, and whether it was justified or not is a question for the ages.
That day marked the beginning of the nuclear age, and with the nuclear age came nuclear power. Submarines and ships had nuclear reactors installed which gave them virtually unlimited cruising range. Nuclear powered aircraft and rockets were designed that promised an infinite fuel supply. New worlds could be conquered, fuel problems would be a thing of the past.
At the heart of all of these ideas was the nuclear reactor. In the simplest of terms, nuclear reactors have radioactive particles taken to the brink of a meltdown, and to keep them from melting, they are cooled with water. The water becomes so hot, it turns into steam, and the steam can be channeled through turbines that turn generators for power. As long as water flows around the reactor to keep it cool, and a multitude of main and back up pumps would assure that would always happen, there was no perceived danger whatsoever.
On paper, this is the perfect and perfectly safe formula to generate electrical energy. There are no pollutants sent into the atmosphere, no burning of fossil fuels, a very small carbon footprint, all with incalculable amounts of nearly free energy that can be produced.
The idea for nuclear power plants took hold in the 1950s. In all actuality although a U.S. nuclear power plant in 1951 produced the first usable electricity, it was in Russia where the first power plant was incorporated into the electrical grid in 1954. Later in that same year, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission stated that, “In the future, electricity will become too cheap to meter.” Such were the haughty claims of virtually an unlimited power capability during the early days of nuclear energy.
Nuclear power plants began to get built all over the world, and as they all began to come online, a problem developed that had been initially overlooked. What to do with the nuclear waste?
No one realized that as the nuclear rods, which powered the reactors, released their energy, they slowly became un-reactive. Granted, they were still very much radioactive, but as their reactivity dipped below a certain point, as fuel sources, they became useless. At that point, they needed to be replaced and disposed of. But where do you dispose of highly radioactive material?
In most cases, used material is placed in 50 gallon lead drums and buried. They have an underground life of 50 years, so after that point, these barrels must be dug back up. The material inside must be placed in new barrels, and once again, re-buried. Suddenly, nuclear power is not “too cheap to meter” after all.
Nuclear waste can certainly be reprocessed and used over and over again, but this is a very expensive task. And nuclear accidents from this “safe” technology abound. There have been dozens of accidents at nuclear reactors all around the world, and the clean up dollars allocated for them has been astronomical in both dollars and in some cases, human lives.
On paper, nuclear power is the real deal, but in real life, it falls far far short of any great expectations. And although the jury is out on nuclear energy as a whole, which guarantees energy savings across the board, right now it is safe to say that it’s “too cheap to meter” yet too expensive to keep.