Nuclear (not nuke-u-lar) power is back at the forefront of Americans’ minds with presidential candidate John McCain adamantly supporting the construction of 45 new plants by 2030. When I was teaching labs for some introductory courses a few years ago, another TA and I created a debate for our labs where students took different sides of the issue (particularly, permanently storing waste products at Yucca Mountain) by representing specific interest groups. We had Citizens of Nevada, the Dept of Energy, and so forth. Included in these groups was the notoriously fiercely-environmental Sierra Club. Now, regardless of the students’ political views, they were all able to see how incredibly complex this issue is: nuclear is a very promising source of ‘clean’ energy but has some other serious environmental hazards, namely, what to do with all the nasty waste if we can’t reprocess it?
Where was I going with this? Ah yes… I was reminded of this exercise last weekend when I was driving around the country (it is indeed a good life in between grad school and post-doc). I found a typical conservative talk show on the A.M. dial, and a man who had all the answers to life’s problems unabashedly proclaimed that the blame of our current ‘oil crisis’ should very squarely be placed on the backs of pro-environmental groups like the Sierra Club because of their rejection of nuclear power. Right…
Personally, I do not think that there is any technology that is going to be the ultimate fix. It won’t be nuclear nor will it be Barack Obama’s ethanol. It will likely have to be a combination of a number of energies including both of these. But it will also need to be more traditional renewables like solar and wind. Unfortunately, until the U.S. government reallly commits to investing research money into new technologies and providing incentives for companies to utilize the existing technology, we’ll still be stuck debating what to do with all of our nuclear waste and the oft-trivial pros/cons of biofuels vs. oil.
Yes, what happened to hydrogen fuel, remember that one?
Mind you, our neighbour had a battery-driven car delivered to her house the other day, on a flat-bed truck. Interestingly, by the next day, it had vanished.
Nuclear power is such a political hot-potato, in the UK as well. Will it ever overcome its “bad rep”?
I imagine nuclear will overcome its ‘bad rep’ when we figure out what the heck we’re going to do with the spent fuel. Process it? Probably not in the U.S. or U.K. with the non-proliferation treaty. Bury it? Not if we keep our threshold to guarantee it will remain safe at 100,000 years or more.
On a semi-related note: here’s an article about why Bush pronounces it nucular including a response from Merriam-Webster’s here.
Although my impression is that the public is more afraid of the possibility of an accident (or sabotage) than the waste issue, though as you point out the waste/reprocessing aspects are the main problem that demands a “solution” of some kind.
Nucula is a genus of mollusc. End of.
Don’t mean to hijack the discussion thread, but last year, I spent about half an hour fuming with my lab mates over Bush’s pronunciation of the word. That was fine. What wasn’t fine was my presenting at lab meeting that same day and mentioning Nucular Export. I guess the word stuck! I thought my advisor was going to vomit. She was not happy with me. I wasn’t happy with me either.
hehe… I pronounce it my head just before I say it to make sure I say it correctly. I blame Bush too.
Hi Nick,
I recently had a post about the topic too, see Nuclear Power: Return Of It seems to be the most obvious way out, so I am not surprised to see this happening. What I am somewhat surprised by is that there has been so little discussion about it. Best,
B.
It is interesting how the candidates have separated themselves, and I’m a little more on McCain’s side in terms of nuclear vs. corn ethanol. It was my impression that ethanol doesn’t greatly reduce greenhouse gases anyway. But I’m certainly with you on diversification: it would only take one nuclear plant scare to shut down a huge proportion of our energy generation…