The antinuclear movement and fossil-fuel interests

Throughout the past week, I have gotten increasingly angry as I read more and more drivel coming from the establishment about how the lessons of March 11, 2011 should result in our society turning its collective back on nuclear fission power production. According to countless pundits, the events that took place on that day –…

Throughout the past week, I have gotten increasingly angry as I read more and more drivel coming from the establishment about how the lessons of March 11, 2011 should result in our society turning its collective back on nuclear fission power production.

According to countless pundits, the events that took place on that day – and the slowly developing script that was hyped with incredible consistency by advertising-supported media conglomerates for months after that day – are supposed to result in atomic amnesia for the world’s 7 billion residents.

If we accept the frequently pushed story line, 3/11 is supposed to make us forget all of the advantages of atomic energy. We are supposed to stop comparing atomic energy to the fossil fuel that currently supplies about 85% of the world’s energy market and instead we are supposed to compare the overall risks of nuclear energy production to the risk of what some of us wryly refer to as “unobtainium”. That invented word is a short-hand way of referring to a perfect energy source that cannot be obtained anywhere in the real world.

Here are some of the fission facts that we are supposed to ignore as a result of 3/11/11.

Fission does not produce any air polluting emissions. That means no NOx, no SOx, no fly ash, no mercury, and no CO2.

Aside: Fission’s lack of CO2 production is something that causes cognitive dissonance for a number of people and organizations who frequently chatter about energy. They maintain a public persona of favoring radical, cost-is-no-object action to slow greenhouse gas emissions. As soon as someone asks them about using nuclear energy as another tool in the battle, efforts to combat climate change fall to the bottom of their priority list. End Aside.

Fission uses manufactured fuel whose total cost when delivered to power plant customers is 1/4 of the wholesale market price per unit of energy as the “cheap” natural gas that is is temporarily and uniquely available in North America.

Aside: It is worth a detour here to provide specific details about fuel costs. It takes 10,000 BTU of nuclear heat to make a kilowatt hour of electricity, so multiplying the cost of nuclear fuel per kilowatt hour by 100 yields the cost for one million BTUs of nuclear heat. The average cost of commercial nuclear fuel in the United States was 0.65 cents per kilowatt hour in 2011 which equals 65 cents per million BTU. That reported cost for fuel at the power plants includes the following: “amortized costs associated with the purchasing of uranium, conversion, enrichment, and fabrication services along with storage and shipment costs, and inventory (including interest) charges less any expected salvage value. The cost of commercial nuclear fuel has remained relatively constant for the past 20 years.

In contrast, the wholesale price of natural gas changes daily. The quoted price does not include any delivery charges, does not include the cost of storage, and does not include ancillary costs associated with contract obligations to “take or pay”. However, Bloomberg.com reported the wholesale price of natural gas at Henry Hub at $2.21 per million BTU at the end of the trading day on Friday, March 9, 2012. Adding all of the additional cost associated with getting that gas to the customer can double, triple or quadruple the total cost of the natural gas that gets burned at the power plant.

North Americans are also spoiled. Natural gas costs about $16 per million BTU when delivered as LNG to Japan and about $12 million per million BTU when delivered via pipelines from Russia to Europe. End Aside.

The raw materials used in making commercial fission fuel have a virtually unlimited supply; for the past 50 years we have been using 0.5% of the energy potential of mined uranium and simply stockpiling the remainder in carefully inventoried storage areas.

In addition to that wasteful use of the raw material, governments have placed onerous restrictions on uranium mining. Australia, home to more than 23% of the world’s known resources, limited extraction activities to just three mines for many years.

Virginia, where I currently live, passed a law in 1982 placing a moratorium uranium mining pending further study. The moratorium was imposed soon after the discovery of a single deposit that contains an estimated 119 million pounds.

The moratorium was never lifted because the market price of uranium had fallen from $40 per pound to $10 per pound by the time that the required studies were completed. The owner paused efforts to develop the deposit, but renewed them 20 years later after the prices for the material increased substantially. There are several organized opposition groups that are focusing on maintaining the moratorium.

The Secretary of the Interior in the United States recently put more than a million acres of some of the richest uranium deposits in the United States off limits to uranium production. That decision has been framed as one that protects the Grand Canyon, but a large portion of the land removed from potential mining activity does not border that natural wonder.

However, uranium, with all of its obvious abundance, is only a small portion of the potential fissionable raw material resource base. Thorium is about four times as abundant in the earth’s crust. After some very promising technology developments in the period from 1945-1985 most of the nuclear world walked away from efforts to develop thorium as an alternative fuel source.

Fission power plants can take advantage of well-proven manufacturing principles to reduce costs as designs are refined, supply chains are redeveloped and as learning occurs during all phases of the construction effort. As many antinuclear activists remind us, fission is just another way to boil water or heat a gas. It uses machinery that is virtually identical to that used in other thermal power stations that cost 1/5th as much. There is no logical reason for that cost discrepancy except for the fact that nuclear heat is treated with kid gloves, has onerous standards of perfection imposed, and has experienced a 30 hiatus in manufacturing and construction activities.

Fission, because of its energy density, has accumulated an incredible record of protecting the public from harm resulting from our growing need for reliable energy. When problems happen in fission power plants, there are multiple layers of defense that result in what computer system engineers call “graceful degradation” and what automotive engineers refer to as “crumple zones”.

The photos of the damaged nuclear plants at Fukushima are as dramatic as the photos of the wreckage at a NASCAR track after a spectacular crash, but the bottom line of both types of accidents is generally the same. In nearly every NASCAR crash, the public that is not in the race does not get harmed. In a similar manner, no member of the public was harmed by the damaged nuclear plants at the Fukushima power station.

Even the people in the race or at the power plant have a high probability of survival without any injury or long term negative health effects. That fact seems almost miraculous to everyone except the engineers who made the material selections, the system engineers who designed the plants, the people who created the operating procedures, and the people who trained the workers who provided the support and on-scene innovation required to ensure that final result. It is not miraculous, but the result of applying hard-earned knowledge and understanding.

Of course, neither racing nor generating massive quantities of reliable power are absolutely, perfectly, 100% safe activities, but the risks are acceptable compared to the benefits. In the case of racing, there are some who think it is frivolous, but there are millions who enjoy the activity and would fight hard to protect their right to continue enjoying it.

In the case of generating massive quantities of reliable electric power, there are BILLIONS of people who appreciate how that activity enables them to flip a switch to have light, to store weeks worth of food in a climate controlled refrigerator, to enjoy automatic environmental comfort control, to turn a tap to obtain abundant fres