EarthSky originally posted this interview with electrical and nuclear engineer Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. in May 2009. Also see the counter post: Paul Wilson believes nuclear power is a good, safe choice
Arjun Makhijani is one scientist who believes that nuclear power is too costly and too risky.
The technical case for nuclear power, just like the technical case for wind energy, and solar energy, is partly built on the idea that it’s a low CO2 technology. But it’s a high cost, high-risk technology, and it is very expensive. Today, wind energy, for instance, is cheaper than nuclear power. If you use a combination of efficiency, wind, and solar energy, it would cost less.
Makhijani said that there’s still no long-term plan for storing radioactive nuclear waste, which some fear could be used to make nuclear weapons.
Plutonium is generated in every nuclear power plant in its operation – about 40 bombs worth every year.
Makhijani has done studies to show how the U.S. could have low-carbon energy without nuclear power.
We have the technology today to say, we can do this completely with wind and solar energy. We don’t have a shortage of low carbon dioxide energy sources. We have a shortage of two things – we have a shortage of time in which to solve the problem, and we have a shortage of money.
Dr. Makhijani told EarthSky that cost is the number one reason why he argues against developing nuclear power. He explained that since a very large amount of heat and fission products are generated in a relatively small volume, it is essential to control the chain reaction to a very close degree. A mishap could result in a meltdown, he said. So the construction has to be of extraordinary quality, the materials are expensive, the labor is expensive – highly skilled welders, inspectors of welds, and so on.
He also said that precautions against severe accidents require back-up systems that will function with very high probability. And he added that delays in nuclear construction often extend for years and are very costly.
Perhaps the push for nuclear power is a product of socioeconomic ‘reasoning’.
The leaders of the family of humanity can do better and I trust all of us, leaders and followers alike, will choose necessary behavioral change rather than the profane maintenance of a morally disengaged and patently unsustainable socioeconomic status quo. Socioeconomic reasoning is feeble, fundamentally flawed reasoning, and suggests its inconsequentiality, because such “self-interested” reasoning is faulty; it has everything to do with what is economically expedient and socially suitable {as well as politically convenient, religiously tolerable and culturally prescribed} and nothing to do intellectual honesty, moral courage and an appreciation of the practical requirements of biophysical reality. What is often called socioeconomic reasonng is a kind of ‘reasoning’ that cannot lead the human community to meaningfully embrace sustainable lifestyles, to sensibly protect biodiversity and to recognize the necessity for preserving Earth and its environs.
For the past eight dark years economic powerbrokers, their bought-and-paid-for politicians and the absurdly enriched talking heads in the mass media have adamantly insisted that everyone live as they have, without regard either to human limits or Earth’s limitations and in evidently unsustainable ways. Our children will learn {the hard way} from these not-so-great elders the price to be paid for the unadulterated arrogance and unbridled greed of a single generation.
The brightest and best, most powerful advocates of socioeconomic reasoning are leading the children down a “primrose path” to some sort of colossal ecologic and/or economic wreckage, I fear, the likes of which only Ozymandias has witnessed.
Makhijani does get one fact correct. With all of the environmental law suits, project stoppages, policy changes, and other unnecessary red tape, a nuclear power plant can take up to 10 years to build, driving the costs way up. The Chinese can build a nuclear plant in 54 weeks from ground breaking to 100% operation and build it for much less cost than we can. They don’t have environmentalists pulling the plug on the project every other week.
Makhijani makes several additional points that are somewhat misrepresentative of our current state of technology. They are:
“If you use a combination of efficiency, wind, and solar energy, it would cost less.†– not really. Nuclear is slightly more expensive to build than wind and 1/4 the cost of solar. However, that picture changes when you realize that wind and solar are both intermittent and inefficient. A solar plant typically runs at less than 40% its rated peak capacity and wind far less. A solar plant rated at 1 MW will average an output of less than 400 KW.
The largest wind plant in the world, located in Denmark, released some disappointing figures. Three days out of the year, the plant failed to meet 2% of load demand. 82 days out of the year (that’s roughly 1 out of every four days) the plant failed to meet 10% of load demand. Wind powered plants require Class 5 land, something that the United States has very little of and most of what we do have is in protected wilderness areas. A wind power array would require 82,000 square miles of land to equal the output of an equal capacity nuclear plant. I hardly see the environmentalists allowing such large tracts of undeveloped land turned into bird death zones and lost wildlife habitat.
Wind and solar don’t load balance. Given the low efficiency, intermittent nature, and inability to adjust to load, wind and solar require a vastly different (and very expensive to build) power grid and a one for one ratio of “spinning reserve†CO2 spewing gas or coal fired power plant of equal capacity as backup. A gas or coal powered plant requires several days to start up from cold. As such, the backup plant would need to be running at all times – hence the term “spinning reserve.â€
When Makhijani, makes his cost comparisons, he fails to take into account the enormous infrastructure costs required to support wind and solar and the costs of building spinning reserve backup. Nuclear will work fine with our current infrastructure and requires no spinning reserves. In that context, building out nuclear power is far less expensive than solar and wind.
Anyone who takes the position that nuclear grade fuel can be reprocessed into weapons grade ore knows nothing about nuclear technology. It would be cheaper and less time consuming to create the weapons from mined ore. The other false assumption here is our nuclear facilities would be so poorly protected that someone would get away with stealing nuclear fuel to make a weapon, again assuming they’re stupid enough to think they could build a weapon with what they steal.
The fear mongering “mishap resulting in a meltdown†argument is old, tired, and lame. It plays on the Chernobyl accident. The Russians, in typical Russian cheapness, came up with the RBMK graphite / steam design – a design that was so fission unstable that the plant melting down was not a question of if but when. The design didn’t even have containment. Such an incredibly unsafe design would have never made it off the drawing board in the U.S.
AGR (Advanced Gas Reactor) and PWR (Pressurized Water Reactor) nuclear reactors are intrinsically fission stable. Newer plant designs, which are being built in other countries, have 10 times the efficiency of most nuclear plants in the USA and Canada today. The designs employ positive control of the reactor, meaning the chain reaction can occur only in a narrow window of conditions which must be tightly controlled. A failure of any control parameter results in operation falling outside of the “sweet spot†window and the reaction automatically shutting down and the core cooling.
Wind and solar (without spinning reserves) are fine if you don’t mind that the lights won’t turn on 60% of the time you throw the switch and if you don’t mind almost daily rolling blackouts during high load demands. American industry can’t operate on intermittent power that is incapable of load response. I’m at a loss to understand how Makhijani idealizes that solar and wind are less expensive and that they are even remotely viable in the time contexts he frames the problem in.
While I am a strong proponent of developing solar power plants, I’m enough of a realist to see that short of building more coal and gas powered plants, neither wind or solar will come to our rescue in the next few decades – far beyond the time world oil reserves peak and start to dwindle. I believe there is a strong argument to leverage nuclear power as a core energy source and supplement it with wind, solar, natural gas, geothermal, tidal, and other renewable sources until such time technological innovation has delivered a viable set of renewable solutions.
Correction: My comment on 82,000 square miles should have said 82,000 square miles to equal current nuclear plant capacity (currently 19.4% of U.S. energy supply per here).My point is still relevant. That’s a huge amount of land to meet a fraction of our energy needs.
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Nuclear power after over 50 years is still without a long term solution for the storage of used material or the long term costs associated with storage. This is especially important when it’s stated that each plant creates as a byproduct enough plutonium to make 40 nuclear bombs per year!!!
Who’s going to guard that? How much will guarding that waste cost for the next 40,000 years?
What are the long term consequences should a wind turbine or a solar array malfunction?
How many square miles around Chernobyl are uninhabitable for the foreseeable future? And, how much of Northern Japan will be?
Arjun Makhijan, To this I say, “D.U.H.” (Do Understand Health!” ) !!! What the needs are for physical endurance on this awesome and giving planet are all given. You seem to understand this. Of course this is a no-brainer!!!
The general populace always ‘try’ so hard to do what they think may be best when if they’d ‘just do’ the best all will be awesome and perfect :)
I really appreciate you being here with your gift.
What you share is of tremendous value in an immature consciousness of desirous people.
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