By Ned Farquhar
Of the Journal
From its uranium mines to the national labs, New Mexico is nuclear.
We derive electricity from Arizona's Palo Verde nuclear plant. Eunice is home to the first new uranium enrichment facility in the United States in several decades. New Mexicans may be better positioned to consider the pros and cons of nuclear power than anyone else in America.
Is it safe? Is it the answer to global warming and dependence on fossil fuels? Are there valid concerns about the relationship between weapons and electricity? Should we invest in a nuclear future?
That's what proponents urge. They say it's safe, affordable domestic energy that could displace foreign oil.
In some respects they are right. The technology for producing nuclear energy has improved. France is now 80 percent nuclear, having developed waste storage and reprocessing options it considers safe. In comparison the United States gets about 20 percent of its electricity from an aging but generally quiet fleet of about 100 nuclear plants.
Yet anyone who proposes nuclear power as a silver bullet, the single answer to our convoluted energy and security issues, is ignoring huge issues.
The first is waste. Not only has the United States failed to create a safe, long-term repository for its commercial nuclear waste, it seems no closer to doing so than it was 25 years ago.
Storing waste from our commercial nuclear power industry, even temporarily at the sites where it was produced, is expensive. According to The New York Times, government officials indicate that taxpayers will pay out at least $11 billion to nuclear utilities in the next several years as a penalty for the government's failure to establish a nuclear waste repository.
Industry represents that the taxpayers' total could reach $35 billion— a subsidy not reflected in the purported low cost of nuclear power.
Why is it so hard to site nuclear waste facilities? The experience in Nevada, proposed home to long-term waste storage at Yucca Mountain, is instructive. Most Nevadans are firmly opposed, and if anything their opposition has grown stronger over the past 15 years.
Proponents say we could avoid a lot of our waste problems by reprocessing, or as some mistakenly say "recycling," the nation's commercial nuclear waste. The United States rejected this option about 30 years ago, a decision reversed by the Bush administration. President Bush's proposed budget targets more funding for nuclear reprocessing than for energy efficiency and weatherization in low-income homes.
Nuclear reprocessing isn't an easy decision. It reduces the immediate waste stream from commercial nuclear electricity generation, but it also creates more dangerous, highly radioactive material necessary to the development of nuclear weapons.
Globally, there are concrete threats related to nuclear energy. The United States is pushing to close down nuclear programs in North Korea and Iran. Pakistan, among the world's most unstable nations and home to terrorists including al-Qaida, has the bomb.
As a nation we have decided we should be less accountable under international law, while increasingly making short-sighted, opportunistic decisions about the who and where of nuclear energy around the globe.
For instance, President Bush pulled the United States out of the global nuclear test ban treaty while attempting to identify and designate who should (India, Pakistan) and shouldn't (Iran, North Korea) have nuclear energy and nuclear weapons.
Owing to improved technology and computer applications, we might not see as much potential for "human error" in the management of nuclear facilities as we once did. But human error remains a huge challenge because we designate nuclear friends whose loyalties may well shift in future years, and because we can't safely manage a huge and growing international nuclear waste stream. Further, it's human error, perhaps folly, to think we can forever keep all fissionable materials out of the hands of all terrorists.
The money we invest in nuclear energy would buy a huge amount of battery research for plug-in cars, tax credits for renewable energy production and storage, and energy efficiency investment to reduce demand. Today renewable wind, solar, and geothermal energy constitute less than 2 percent of our electricity supply.
These resources pose far lower threats— no waste, no international weapons and terrorism threat, no mining impacts such as those that caused the Navajo Nation to ban uranium mining. Our energy future demands investment in a diverse, sustainable energy supply before we consider expanding nuclear power here and abroad.
Ned Farquhar is an energy/climate advocate for the Natural Resources Defense Council and a board member of Western Progress. He is a former adviser to Gov. Bill Richardson. The views expressed are his own. E-mail: inthewest@comcast.net.
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