the nuclear option

There is a growing belief that nuclear is a green energy. i am, frankly, totally baffled by this. Not only is it an odd choice from an environmental perspective, but from an ethic perspective as well. I not only can't see how nuclear is assumed to be a possible choice, I fail to even see how it has benefits...

The carbon assumption
As author and environmentalist Bill McKibbean says in answer to the 'why nuclear' question, "because it is low carbon- and that is the only reason." Nuclear energy is being pushed by many as a green energy because of its assumed low carbon foot print. There is just one little problem with the nuclear carbon foot print. It isn't all that small. Nuclear creates a carbon foot print in mining, milling, enrichment, fuel rod assembly, plant operation, maintenance, temporary storage, reprocessing, and long-term storage. That is a lot of places to slip in some carbon exhaust in a "carbon free" energy source. And none of them are small.

Pretty much all energy production methods are going to require mining, but nuclear energy actually requires constant mining to supply it with uranium for reactions. And since uranium is low volume, and low concentration in its appearances in the earths crust, it tends to be mined in massive open pit mines. Or sometimes it is produced from a process known as heap leeching, which produces massive piles of low radiation tailings. Something you just love to have sitting around, a pile of radioactive dirt. And that wonderful by-product is created by burning massive amounts of fossil fuels to power the machinery used to create the open pit disaster that we leave behind. Since i live not far from the largest open pit disaster..... umm, mine in the world, i can tell you, they are great to have around. If huge hole of environmental destruction that is visible from space, and a pile of radio active dirt sound less than "green" to you, well, you just haven't been listening to the nuclear industry.

Naturally after the earth is ripped up, we have to create the fuel rods, burning still more dead dinosaurs, reprocess it to be enriched, (guess what, that takes energy too) then assembled, etc, etc.

Even if we discount the massive amount of energy burned in the building process, nuclear is a far cry from carbon free. But lets assume, as many studies do, that it is still more carbon friendly than, say, coal fire plants. That hardly seems to be a tough claim to defend. So isn't nuclear a real possibility?

Carbon and Environmentalism

The problem is that over the last few years carbon has become the representation of fear among environmental groups. Now i am not one these payed flacks by the "burn more dead dinos" companies that have fought even discussing the possibility of global warming being discussed, and i am not about to say that CO2 is good for you, but I am afraid that some of us have forgotten that there are other issues in the world.

Back up this post a few lines i mentioned the open pits and the radio active tailing piles, recall those? Many people would argue that those things are also environmental issues. If we trade CO2 for open pits and piles of U-238, will we be gaining ground?

The United States DOE has stated that America has "thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel and material" and also "huge quantities of contaminated soil and water" right now. Today. Some of the radioisotopes that come out of a nuclear reactor as waste will be radioactive for literally millions of years. 4000 thousand years ago, egyptians where building pyramids. 30,000 years ago humans were painting on cave walls. 300,000 years ago, the first modern humans evolved. One million years ago their ancestors left the very first signs of tool using "hominins" inside the borders of modern china. That is the kind of time scale we are dealing with when we talk about nuclear waste.

Seven generation sustainability, the idea that decisions should be considered for their impact on the seventh generation to come, inspired by the laws of the Iroquois, is sometimes mentioned in environmentalist circles. Figuring out how many generations we impact by leaving million year waste is an exercise left to the math inclined reader......