President-elect Barack Obama needs to include nuclear energy in his plans to address our energy needs. While he says he supports the use of nuclear power, his comments that we should not build new plants until we solve the waste problem require a political solution.
Scientifically we know how to have less waste and treat what waste there is. The weapons proliferation fears of the 1970s created the political barrier to executing this strategy. The volume of nuclear waste is more than a million times smaller than the waste from burning coal and has been stored at plants across the country since the beginning of U.S. nuclear power in 1958.
The volume of waste produced since then in its current form would cover one football field to a depth of 20 feet - not a huge problem. What is not so easily solved is our need for more electricity, which the Department of Energy predicts will grow by 25 percent by 2030.
That much power cannot be effectively produced with alternatives because we just cannot build that many windmills (that produce power only when there is the right amount of wind) and certainly not with fossil fuels (that we are trying to avoid because of climate change and air pollution).
I have been an environmental professional since 1997, and there are no sustainable primary-power options with carbon emissions to the environment as low as nuclear. We can even build reactors to create more fuel than they use - truly, a renewable-fuel source. There are applications submitted for more than 30 new nuclear plants that utilities want to build. These need to move forward.
We need to start building the facilities that will deliver clean, abundant and domestic energy. And we should build 200, not 30.
- Thomas Draur, Johnston
That much power cannot be effectively produced with alternatives because we just cannot build that many windmills (that produce power only when there is the right amount of wind) and certainly not with fossil fuels (that we are trying to avoid because of climate change and air pollution).
I have been an environmental professional since 1997, and there are no sustainable primary-power options with carbon emissions to the environment as low as nuclear. We can even build reactors to create more fuel than they use - truly, a renewable-fuel source. There are applications submitted for more than 30 new nuclear plants that utilities want to build. These need to move forward.
We need to start building the facilities that will deliver clean, abundant and domestic energy. And we should build 200, not 30.
- Thomas Draur, Johnston
