Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
—George Santayana
The Wall Street Journal has again suggested that nuclear power be part of a climate solution. We understand. Energy, including nuclear energy, is big business and financial press has to cover it. Every business wants to impress us with their green initiatives. Climate warming is a clear and present danger. We, as an industrial society, are practically obsessed with carbon emissions and nuclear energy, with no carbon emissions, appears as a savior.
California, perhaps the most environmentally conscious of all states, is eyeing a return to nuclear power. Nuclear energy is “firm,” says a recent study sponsored by the Environmental Defense Fund and the Clean Air Task Force—unlike the green energy sources the state has favored, like wind and solar, which fluctuate with the weather.
California had led the way on environmental issues. Embarrassed by nationwide attention to the smog in Los Angeles in the middle of the last century, the state began to clean up its act. The state was first to check tailpipe emissions and require the use of catalytic converters. By the 1980s and 1990s, California cars were the cleanest burning cars in the country. San Francisco and the Bay Area communities are seeking to ban natural gas hookups in new homes. There are far more electric vehicles sold in California than in any other state.
But all those Teslas need to be charged up. And if you can’t count on the wind to keep blowing, the sun to keep shining (remember the fog that San Francisco is famous for?), and hydroelectric turbines to keep spinning (the lakes behind the dams are drying up from the longest drought in the state’s history), then why not consider nuclear energy? We can count on the fission of radioactive material, right?
California may be justifying nuclear energy for its steady and dependable supply, but the real reason behind the change in thinking is more basic. The sun, wind and waves combined simply can't provide enough enough energy for its nearly 40 million people (more than any other state).
If green-eyed California are reconsidering nuclear energy, others must be further along in their plans. Indeed, China has stated that it will build 150 nuclear reactors over the next 15 years.
What a relief, says a world wringing hands over China’s coal-fired energy plants.
As green energy became big business (companies have to build thousands of 300-foot wind turbines), so came increases in the calls to employ green technology. Waking up to the call was the nuclear energy industry, nearly abandoned after a series of disasters and an inability to clean up after itself. What to do with nuclear waste has been a problem with nuclear energy since its inception and continues to be one. But now, nuclear energy could paint itself green because it produces no greenhouse gas.
Reconsideration of nuclear power has galvanized the engineering community. Engineers favor a return to “clean, safe” nuclear power. Why shouldn’t they? They have not come up with a power source more plentiful or as potent as the atom. Not steam, not coal, not oil. They tried really hard to make the sun, wind and waves work. All the time, the answer, though not in sight being the size of an atom, was right there.
The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) extolled small, community-serving nuclear reactors. These small modular reactors (SMRs) with less than 100 MW of output are practically plug-and-play compared to the massive nuclear reactors of yesteryear. They’re safer, too, as much as risk is in proportion to size.
Lest We Forget …
The worst-case scenario for a small modular reactor (never stated in industry literature) is that it may wipe out a town -- not an entire countryside as did Chernobyl or Fukushima.
It’s odd that engineers, trained to consider the worst case are ignoring it. Calls of protest, against proliferation of nuclear power, are heard only from doomsayers and anti-technology groups. Are the rest of us just more practical, more flexible—and more forgetful?
To forget is a human trait that is often repeated in word as well as in deed. In Jaws, the mayor of Amity forgets the shark is still in the water and opens the beaches. In deltas and on banks of rivers, people resettle after floods force them from their homes. San Franciscans forgot about earthquakes and rebuilt over faults. We have rebuilt houses where wildfires are of increasing risk.
We call this resilience, not forgetfulness.