How Clean Is Nuclear Power?
True to form, Glenn Doty writes a thorough and quite helpful comment on my piece about measuring the increase in the use of renewable energy. He closes with two ideas on which I would like to comment in return:
1) Of course, natural gas is far better than coal, and slightly worse than nuclear.
Personally, I think it’s impossible to put nuclear on a scale of “goodness” or “badness,” because we are incapable of knowing its implications to our health and safety. I’ll go out on a limb here and guess you haven’t polled the people living around Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island. And what might the future bring? More operational disasters? Catastrophes with handling nuclear waste? Rogue states with small dirty nuclear weapons? It’s impossible to predict, but it can’t be good.
2) At least coal power is plummeting. That’s good any way you wish to calculate anything.
Amen, my friend.
Craig,
I guess I just de-rate uncertain problems based on probability. Fukushima was certainly a tragedy… but had a dam been directly hit by one of the largest earthquakes and one of the largest tsunamis ever recorded – the dam could very well have caused a similar or even larger tragedy… No-one is stating that we shouldn’t use hydropower… but I can assure you that if an 8.0+ earthquake had an epicenter within a few miles of the Grand Coolee Dam then the amount of damage that would occur would make a joke of Fukushima.
I think what Fukushima taught us is that you shouldn’t build nukes on major fault lines – we can all agree that’s pretty dumb. In the same vein we all learned from Chernobyl that you cannot afford to skimp on maintenance or safety protocols with nuclear energy… again we can agree this was horribly irresponsible, and no-one will claim the Soviet government of being overly compassionate or environmentally friendly.
But when we discuss energy in our country we have to discuss real probabilities of outcomes with our safety standards. Any new nuke built today has an absurdly low risk of catastrophe, and will produce baseload energy (offsetting coal) for at least 6 decades that has ~5% of the carbon intensity of natural gas, with no sulfur, NOX, halides, metalides, etc… and less than 1/5th the environmental contamination of coal power.
Not bad.
Natural gas, on the other hand, has certain carbon emissions… a high likelihood of well and pipe leakage (methane has a GWP of ~72, so the methane leaks actually result in natural gas-based electricity having a CO2e/MWh of ~70-80% of coal, though the direct emissions from combustion are less than half), and some sulfur and NOX considerations – especially for cheap peaker plants.
Far worse, however, is the fact that the marginal cost of natural gas is market dependent… so it will only offset coal power when the market is saturated. Our record-shattering “winter” that wasn’t winter resulted in a glut of natural gas and has crashed market prices for gas. It’s speculated that gas might even be low enough that the marginal price of natural gas based electricity could be a discount compared to coal based electricity for a time… But as soon as the market corrects, coal will be cheaper again, and natural gas will cease offsetting coal… so the benefit only appears when market forces align. Otherwise not-so-much.
That’s my take. I recognize that others score risk differently, and I recognize that nuclear power does carry some potential risk. But coal is certainly far far far far far far more damaging than nuclear even including some instances of catastrophe… and if you de-rate the catastrophic damage based on the low probability of such a thing occurring, I believe natural gas ends up a little worse than nuclear as well.
It’s true that we continue to learn lessons about what not to do with nuclear. But I’m not sure that makes me feel any better about the overall safety issues. What will be next lesson teach us?
Having said that, you make some excellent points here about hydro, coal, and natural gas.
Re: market forces, please see my comment at the end of this: http://2greenenergy.com/plug-in-hybrids/21825/.