Nuclear Power: A 21st-century Solution or a 20th-century Mistake?

Recent media reports indicate that environmentalists are beginning to reconsider whether nuclear power can play a role in reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, a major source of the carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming.   “Not so many years ago,” noted a recent editorial in the New York Times, “nuclear energy was a hobgoblin to environmentalists.”  But when former EPA administrator Christie Todd Whitman, former Greenpeace activist Patrick Moore, and prominent ecologist James Lovelock recently urged fellow environmentalists to take another look at nuclear power’s potential benefits, it made headlines.   “Suddenly nuclear power is looking better,” wrote the Times. 

In fact, the notion that nuclear power is an environmentally friendly option is not new.   One of the first mainstream statements of this idea came from a July 2003 report authored by MIT professors John Deutch and Ernest Moniz titled “The Future of Nuclear Power.”  According to the report, the nuclear option should be retained “precisely because it is an important carbon-free source of power.”  Deutch has stated that “taking nuclear power off the table as a viable alternative will prevent the global community from achieving long-term gains in the control of carbon dioxide emissions.” 

It is true that climate change may be the defining environmental issue of our time.  We must address what Al Gore has called this “inconvenient truth.” Yet I do not think that nuclear power is a feasible solution to the problem—especially here in the United States.  Nuclear power poses three basic but intractable problems: it is dangerous, it is toxic, and—perhaps most important of all—siting new nuclear power plants is politically infeasible.

Let’s begin with dangerous.  Set aside the problems experienced at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.  We have witnessed the horror wreaked by suicidal terrorism all over the world, including the grim spectacle of commercial jets being flown into skyscrapers.  Do we really want to see what happens if a terrorist attacks a nuclear power plant? It is true that these plants are more difficult to destroy than skyscrapers, but are we so arrogant as to believe that such facilities are not tempting targets?

Nuclear advocates and engineers are convinced that nuclear power can be made very safe.  This may be true, but, as the MIT study acknowledges, no power plant can be made risk free.  Of course, all technology carries risks.  When we drive on an interstate highway, we face the risk of a crash.  Yet we accept the risk because it is relatively low and because the effect of the risk is localized.  In contrast, an error in or attack on a nuclear power plant can cause long-standing, devastating damage to people and ecosystems.  It is not a small, localized impact—just ask the people who survived Chernobyl.  The risk may be low, but the potential impact is high. 

Then there is the issue of toxicity.  Even when power plants function normally, they create poisons.   The waste products of nuclear power—spent fuel rods—remain toxic for thousands of years.  We do not know how to detoxify these waste products, and despite 20 years of trying, we have not yet been able to site a repository anywhere in the United States to store them. 

We have the resources to build a nuclear waste storage facility.  Customers of nuclear-generated electricity pay a one-tenth-of-one-cent-per-kilowatt- hour charge on their electric bills.  Utilities pass the fee into a federal account that has generated $24 billion since it began under the Nuclear Waste Power Act in 1983.  As of February 2005, there was $16.3 billion sitting in this fund.  The other $8 billion has been spent on a futile effort to site a civilian nuclear waste repository in Nevada.  Despite assurances that the proposed repository at Yucca Mountain will remain secure longer than the waste remains toxic, uncertainty over the technology of waste storage and the risks of transportation has resulted in widespread political opposition in Nevada.  Unsurprisingly, Nevada’s senators—neither of whom are by any means radical environmentalists— have continued to exercise a virtual political veto over siting a waste repository in their state.  As a result, our nuclear waste currently remains in “spent fuel pools” at nuclear power plants like the one at Indian Point, just north of New York City. 

That leads us to the problem of nuclear politics.  Just as no one wants to host the nuclear waste repository, no one wants a nuclear power plant next door.  This is not an issue of engineering or economics, but an issue of politics.  In an increasingly crowded and interdependent world, people have become more sensitive about land-use and development issues.  Indeed, in many parts of the United States, local politics have become dominated by such issues.  In many cases, environmental justice has reached the political agenda mostly because rich people are better able to defend themselves against perceived environmental “insults” than poor people.  Put simply, if we’ve started having trouble siting Wal-Marts, does anyone seriously think that we will be able to site new nuclear power plants?

To have any real impact on carbon dioxide emissions, we would need to build hundreds of new nuclear plants in the United States.  Although this may be technically and financially feasible, the politics are truly impossible in the United States.  While France is largely dependent on nuclear power and China may very well become dependent on it, the political structures and cultures of those nations are very different from those of the U.S.  Both have highly-centralized and strong central governments that have the power to muscle local concerns aside. 

Yet even as a leading player in the global economy of the 21st century, the United States is still a federation of states that retain the vestiges of sovereignty.  The late Tip O’Neill, the long-time Speaker of the U.S.  House of Representatives, was fond of saying that “all politics is local,” and he wasn’t kidding.  In the U.S., localities retain a veto over development, and as our land fills up with more people and projects, that veto will be increasingly exercised.  This local veto is protected by legislators at all levels of government, and of all ideological stripes.  It is at the core of their power as elected officials—and it is not going away.   The local veto results from legal traditions and a political culture that emphasize individual property rights.  Recently, the Supreme Court challenged this aspect of American political culture in its decision in Kelo v. The City of New London, in which the court held that the Connecticut city had the right to condemn private land as part of an urban renewal project.  But look at what’s happened since then: a fierce nationwide backlash, with states rushing to protect property rights by legislating limits to their own powers of eminent domain.  Elected officials know there are no votes in forcing development on a reluctant constituency. 

These structural and cultural realities are the main factors that make nuclear power politically infeasible in the U.S.  Nuclear advocates argue that, when the lights go out, people will accept nuclear power.  Why wait to find out? Why waste time and effort on a solution to climate change that has no real chance of gaining political traction?

The problem of global climate change is real, and it is a crisis.  I agree that the ultimate solution to reducing carbon dioxide emissions will require the development of new technology.  I agree that this need for a technological fix is urgent.  The American government should start a major research and development effort to create new power sources that are small in scale, decentralized, environmentally safe, and buildable in the political environment we have here in the United States in the first decade of the 21st century.  Despite what its advocates claimed, nuclear power never was “too cheap to meter.” The truth is that nuclear power is a discredited, mid-20th-century mistake.  Attempting to repackage an old mistake as new solution is a distraction from the real work we need to undertake.  Instead, we need to put our brainpower to work on a way to reduce carbon dioxide that can actually be implemented in the United States.

Steven Cohen is the director of the Master of Public Administration Program in Environmental Science and Policy at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and executive director of Columbia’s Earth Institute.