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By Paul Danish

Who is responsible for global warming? The usual suspects include Big Coal, Big Oil, Big Cars and living large in America. But there is another, less likely suspect who is at least as culpable as the usual ones.

The greens. Anti-nuclear environmental activists.

Don’t think so? Well, let’s begin by reviewing what’s been going on in France for the past 33 years and contrast it with what’s been happening on our side of the pond.

In 1974 the French government decreed that henceforth new power plants built in France would be nuclear. Up until then France had generated most of its electricity from burning imported crude oil.

The decision to go nuclear was prompted by the OPEC cartel’s price fixing and the post-Yom Kippur War Arab oil embargo, both of which occurred in 1973. By the end of 1973, the price of crude had passed the then unheard of level of $10 a barrel, a 400 percent increase. “That’s enough,” said the French, and proceeded to go nuclear — with elan, panache and Germanic efficiency.

As a result, today France gets 78 percent of its electricity from nuclear power plants — and has the smallest per capita carbon footprint of any major industrial country.

Electric power production is the single largest source of human-generated greenhouse gases — and the fastest growing one. Thanks to having gone nuclear, when it comes to global warming, France is arguably part of the solution instead of part of the problem.

Target: U.S. nuclear power

Meanwhile, about the time the French were going nuclear American environmental and peace activists were gleefully doing everything they could to destroy the American nuclear power industry.

They combined a sweeping ideological attack on the safety, economics and morality of nuclear power with a rolling thunder of legal and regulatory challenges and mass demonstrations and blockades at plant construction sites — like the 1976 demonstration at the Seabrook plant in New Hampshire.

The campaign succeeded in completely stopping new orders for reactors and in turning the process of building those already on order into a Kafkaesque nightmare. But it failed to shut down the nation’s already operating nuclear plants or prevent the completion of some on order.

The upshot is that today the U.S. gets about 20 percent of its electricity from 104 functioning reactors — the last of which was ordered in 1973 — and about 50 percent of its electricity from coal. That’s because when American utilities couldn’t build new nuclear power plants, they built hundreds of coal-fired ones.

All of which raises an inconvenient question:

How much smaller would the U.S. carbon footprint be if in 1974, like the French, we had required all new power plants to be nuclear?

Well, according to the Energy Information Administration, in 1974 U.S. power plants burned 391 million tons of coal. In 2006 they burned 1.035 billion tons, an increase of about 643 million tons a year. Think of that 643 million tons of coal as the annual “peace bonus” in the greens’ war on nuclear power. It would not have been mined or burned if the U.S. had gone nuclear in 1974.

Burning 643 million tons of coal a year produces roughly 1.8 billion tons of carbon dioxide, which will continue to be produced year-in, year-out decade after decade, even if — and this is important — no additional coal-fired power plants are built. (The working life of a coal-fired power plant is about 60 years.) Burning 643 million tons of coal a year will cause the CO2 content of the atmosphere to increase by 1 part per million every three to four years. When it comes to global warming, anti-nuclear activism is the gift that keeps on giving.

The question of waste

But what about nuclear waste?

The French partially recycle theirs, recovering new reactor fuel and reducing the mass of the waste produced by their nuclear program by 90 percent. American nuclear power plants don’t recycle; the greens targeted that too.

Spent fuel from American nuclear power plants, about 60,000 tons of it so far, is stored in concrete buildings. There have been occasional releases of small amounts of it, and if it isn’t ultimately recycled it will have to be stored for millennia, but the crucial point is that it is being stored.

The CO2 from U.S. coal-fired power plants is not. In the past 20 years alone, 50 billion tons of it (including 28 billion tons of the greens’ “peace bonus” CO2) has been dumped into the atmosphere.

Viewed from this perspective, anti-nuclear activists have plenty of culpability for global warming.

Pardon my French, but J’açcuse!

Paul Danish is a resident of Boulder.

READER COMMENTS

France is much smaller than the US - while nuclear does make up 78% of it's electrical generation, the US actually generates almost twice as much electricity from nuclear (610,365 MkWh vs 368,188).

Also, the US isn't sitting on its hands doing nothing:

The US nuclear power industry has been virtually frozen since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, but in the US Congress 2005 energy bill, tax credits worth $3.1 billion, along with liability protection and compensation for legislative delays, were added for the industry. On 30 December 2005, for the first time in years, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) certified the design of a new reactor—the 1000-MW Westinghouse advanced passive (AP) reactor.

Six US power-plant operators are preparing combined construction and operating license (COL) requests to the NRC that could restart construction in the next five years. NuStart Energy, a consortium of nine nuclear energy companies, submitted plans for a General Electric simplified boiling water reactor at the Grand Gulf nuclear station near Port Gibson, Mississippi, and an AP-1000 reactor at the Bellefonte nuclear plant near Scottsboro, Alabama.

http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-59/iss-2/p19.html

Paul,

What you failed to point out is the United States Navy has successfully operated hundreds of nuclear power plants aboard Navy ships for more than 50 years.

As someone who attended engineering school in the late 1970's, I applaud you for writing the facts and providing such an effective comparison. I would add to that analysis the death rate of men in the coal mining industry ( I say "men" intentionally as these are the people dying in coal mining). So, in addition to the environmental considerations, we have the direct deaths caused by failure to embrace nuclear power. It is also instructive that you note the failure to recycle nuclear fuel as an efficient system would certainly do. One must conclude this resistence to recycling was to make nuclear power as objectionable as possible.
Another consideration is the "location" lobby, sometimes referred to as "NIMBYs", who insist on using electricity, while also insisting that electriciity be produced elsewhere. The worst example being the state of California, which experiences power shortages while refusing to approve new power plants, preferring the plants be built in neighboring states and transported into California. This is the primary driver behind the shortage of transmission systems in the western power grid. The people promoting "plug-in" electric cars are promoting environmental elitism - the energy still gets used, but the pollution is deposited near somebody elses home.

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