McCain: ‘the future is nuclear.’ Are you serious?

Written by: Bob FunkJune 19th, 2008
Comments:8 Comments
Category:'08 Election, Energy Policy, John McCain, Nuclear Power
Rating:
(2 votes, average: 3 out of 5)

Loading ...

The news is everywhere, McCain wants to substantially increase the United States’ reliance on nuclear power - it’s a pretty bad idea.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain will push to almost double the number of nuclear reactors in the U.S. as part of a broad plan to address the nation’s energy woes… he would increase research in so-called clean-coal technology and push to add 100 new nuclear reactors, almost double the 104 nuclear plants now in use.

First, nuclear power may appear cost-effective, but it simply isn’t and ends up costing taxpayers massive amounts of money.

The Price-Anderson Act, enacted in 1957 as a temporary, 10-year measure to support the fledgling nuclear industry, limits the amount of primary insurance that nuclear operators must carry to $300 million and caps the total liability of nuclear operators in the event of a serious accident or attack to $10.5 billion. A serious nuclear accident could cost more than $600 billion in 2004 dollars[2] - taxpayers would be responsible for covering the vast majority of that sum.

Despite the current subsidies, the industry wants taxpayers to pay for building new reactors, too.

a 1.8-cent tax credit for each kilowatt-hour of nuclear-generated electricity from new reactors during the first 8 years of operation will cost $5.7 billion in revenue losses to the U.S. Treasury through 2025.

This is just a taste of the extreme costs associated with nuclear power - it is a failed industry that relies almost completely on taxpayer funding.

Second, the nuclear industry has a “culture” of “deficient safety”:

The safety culture of the workforce at some nuclear plants has been so deprived that it has compromised the safe operation of the facilities.

The NRC has revised its licensing processes to give “certainty” to the industry through the limitation of public involvement in NRC licensing and regulatory actions. Under this new regime, the NRC has effectively crippled the public’s ability to raise important questions about the safety of operating and proposed nuclear facilities, and it has impaired the ability of stakeholders to effectively judge the NRC’s capacity to ensure that safety.

Third, the waste produced by nuclear power is highly dangerous:

Nuclear power is not a clean energy source: it produces both low and high-level radioactive waste that remains dangerous for several hundred thousand years. Generated throughout all parts of the fuel cycle, this waste poses a serious danger to human health. Currently, over 2,000 metric tons of high-level radioactive waste and 12 million cubic feet of low level radioactive waste are produced annually by the 103 operating reactors in the United States. No country in the world has found a solution for this waste. Building new nuclear plants would mean the production of much more of this dangerous waste with no where for it to go.

Fourth, nuclear power WILL NOT solve global warming:

The vast majority of public interest and environmental groups are adamantly opposed to nuclear power because it creates dangerous waste, brings unnecessary risks, and cannot rescue us from climate change. Over 300 national, state, and local organizations have endorsed a statement clearly outlining their reasons for continuing to oppose to nuclear power as a solution to climate change,11 while not a single environmental group is advocating for more nuclear plants.

This is only a quick sketch of why nuclear power should not be considered - there are so many more reasons than what I have presented (another example is that nuclear power is not a long-term solution - we won’t always have uranium).

Do we really need a president this uniformed and this risky with the safety and security of our nation?

Related Posts:

The Responsible American Media and Iran

McCain confuses Somalia and the Sudan

An Anniversay We Cannot Forget

Thu, Jun 19, 2008

'08 Election, Energy Policy, John McCain, Nuclear Power

This post was written by:

Bob Funk - who has written 64 posts on Intelligent Discontent.

Contact the author

8 Comments For This Post

red craig Says:
June 19th, 2008 at 5:27 pm

The rest of the world has come to realize it was a mistake not to develop nuclear energy. Doesn’t it seem to you that you ought to look further into the subject? All your misinformation comes from Public Citizen. Do yourself a favor and look for sources that don’t aren’t committed to ideological causes. Otherwise no one will take you seriously.

Bob Funk Says:
June 19th, 2008 at 6:14 pm

Red Craig, I realize all the quoted info comes from one source, but I did that purely for the sake of convenience. All the information above is proven and very difficult to refute.
Red Craig, I encourage you to take your own advice and look into nuclear power a bit more than you have. On face, it seems great, but once you dig deeper its only another failed power source that we shouldn’t be investing in.

Please, Red Craig, refute the above information.

red craig Says:
June 20th, 2008 at 2:03 pm

Price-Anderson

The Price-Anderson act has been mischaracterized from the beginning. Anti-nukes find powerful ammunition in it and use it prominently in their arguments. In fact, the law does much less than they claim.

I should say at the outset that I am not an attorney and therefore I am not qualified to interpret law or court decisions. That said, here is an excerpt from the US Supreme Court decision in the case of SILKWOOD v. KERR-McGEE CORP., decided January 11, 1984.

“In sum, it is clear that in enacting and amending the Price-Anderson Act, Congress assumed that state-law remedies, in whatever form they might take, were available to those injured by nuclear incidents. This was so even though it was well aware of the NRC’s exclusive authority to regulate safety matters. No doubt there is tension between the conclusion that safety regulation is the exclusive concern of the federal law and the conclusion that a State may nevertheless award damages based on its own law of liability. But as we understand what was done over the years in the legislation concerning nuclear energy, Congress intended to stand by both concepts and to tolerate whatever tension there was between them. We can do no less. It may be that the award of damages based on the state law of negligence or strict liability is regulatory in the sense that a nuclear plant will be threatened with damages liability if it does not conform to state standards, but that regulatory consequence was something that Congress was quite willing to accept.”

From this decision, it seems clear enough that describing Price-Anderson as a liability limit is incorrect and misleading. Nor does it shield companies from lawsuits based on negligence.

On the other hand, even this decision contends that the original purpose of Price-Anderson was to encourage companies to enter a new field. Since the field is no longer new, one could ask why the law continues to exist. I think the answer lies in the other benefits. One is that it clarifies the US Government’s responsibilities. Every aspect of nuclear energy, including design, construction, and operation, is supervised by the Federal Government. In the case of an accident, and in the absence of legislation, the Government very likely would find itself in the position of defendant. The act clarifies this point: the Government will only be on the hook after all other coverages, from commercial insurance and owners’ assets, have been paid out. A second benefit is that victims of an accident can recover their damages without suing. Under liability law, they would have to determine who was at fault and prove it in court. The process would take years and, even if they won, they’d lose because lawyers would take most of the money. Under Price-Anderson, they’d only have to show they had taken losses and they’d be compensated.

As it is, Price-Anderson is a requirement for anyone doing nuclear work. It doesn’t limit victims’ ability to recover damages. What it does is to guarantee that money will be there to pay them.

Subsidies

Public Citizen crows over the subsidies enacted to encourage new nuclear plants, but fails to mention that this subsidy is smaller than subsidies offered for renewable energy sources. Meanwhile, fossil fuels continue to receive subsidies in the form of tax credits. One doesn’t expect consistency or fairness from Public Citizen; that’s why it’s not a good information source. Any objective study, such as this one will show that if there were no energy subsidies and fossil-fueled plants had to meet reasonable clean-air standards (or pay for the damage they caused) nuclear would be as cheap as any energy source available.

Safety and Waste

This is just standard propaganda and has no basis in fact. No one has ever been harmed by nuclear-energy waste. No one has been harmed by any nuclear power plant except for the Soviet monstrosity at Chernobyl, which had literally no effective safety measures, not even a containment. Meanwhile, the US is continuing its work on establishing facilities for dealing with spent fuel as other countries are doing now.

Anti-Nuclear Groups

This is no doubt the silliest argument ever presented. “Nukes are bad because I and all my friends say so.” These are all political groups with a distressingly poor record of achievement. While the executives’ incomes have been rising, the state of the world’s environment has been steadily growing worse. More on this can be found here.

Thanks for allowing me to answer your challenge. Your conclusion that it’s a “failed energy source” is untenable. Nuclear energy generates 20% of the electricity the US uses, cheaper than any source except for hydroelectric, and it has a perfect safety record. It accounts for 70% of the country’s non-fossil electricity. Countries all over the world look to it as an essential part of their programs to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions. While other non-fossil energy sources can be part of the solution, nuclear is the only one that can provide energy full-time.

red craig Says:
June 20th, 2008 at 2:21 pm

Oops, typing error. The last link should be this.

Frank Says:
June 20th, 2008 at 10:59 pm

Response to red craig-

I agree with craig. Nuclear energy is safe and does not add CO2 to the atmosphere like coal fired power plants. And it is part of the answer for attaining energy independence in America. Unfortunately, it is not a “green” solution, nor a progressive solution to energy independence. There is no way to remediate nuclear waste products. Our current solution is to leave it for later generations to deal with. This is not a solution. It’s as bad as underground CO2 sequestering proposed by “clean-coal” proponants. It looks good now, but it doesn’t actually deal with the waste.

America either needs to improve existing methods of producing energy to reduce hazardous waste (including CO2) or we need to start focusing on new greener technology. Now that we understand how human activity affects the world we live in, we no longer can focus only on meeting our energy needs. We must include the welfare of the planet also. McCain just hopes more of the same (nuclear and offshore drilling) will solve our energy problems. His energy policy is as old as he is.

red craig Says:
June 21st, 2008 at 8:41 am

Frank, thanks for commenting.

3. The “waste problem” was always fictitious and, like all fictitious problems, was easily solved. Nuclear wastes are much smaller in quantity than coal wastes and thus are much safer. Spent fuel is being reprocessed, as it is in the UK, and more countries are setting up to do it, including the US. Reprocessing the wastes separates out the valuable uranium and transuranic actinides to use as fuel. The remaining wastes are only 3% of what was there before and lose their toxicity in much less time. [chart] Many geologic places, such as caves or abandoned mines, could store those wastes safely for the time periods required. Besides that, proven technology exists to irradiate the wastes into other, shorter-lived materials. [source ] To deal with the wastes this way doesn’t require any technological breakthroughs, just a political decision.

N Says:
August 14th, 2008 at 9:38 pm

I’d ask if you actually did research when you researched this topic for your article, but you obviously haven’t. Most of what you are saying is true, IN THE 1970s. Why should you think that what I have to say is correct? Well, it might have something to do with me studying nuclear physics and researching the technological advances that have been made in nuclear energy, which you obviously did not.

First of all, the vast majority of your arguments revolve around your perception of nuclear waste from plants being toxic. Now before I go any further, you seem to be implying in your article that nuclear waste equals and increase in greenhouse gasses. It doesn’t quite work that way bud. I’d explain why, but since you could just hop on to Wikipedia to get an explanation and you probably wouldn’t get it anyway, I’m not going to bother.

Secondly, since whoever your source is obviously stopped looking at how nuclear plants worked sometime in the ’80s, here’s a primer on some new advances in Nuclear Energy: Uranium, you know, that stuff that powers nuclear power plants, can now be encased totally in carbon. This negates both the harmful effects of being around radioactive uranium and any potential hazards of waste leakage after disposal while allowing the power plant to run at or better than previous levels. If you don’t believe me, head over to Scientific American and read all about it. Suffice it to say, it’s the same basic reason why your cell phone isn’t causing a massive cancerous growth in your ear.

Nextly, the mining and refining process has been dramatically improved, making the entire process much more earth-friendly. That, coupled with the above mentioned carbon containers, makes Nuclear energy just about the most earth friendly power out there. The manufacturing process of photo electric cells, aka solar panels, is about as earth friendly as dumping a gallon of mercury into every lake in the US. The oxygen you get from debinding it with hydrogen to make hydrogen for fuel cells is not exactally thrilled at what you did to it, and can lead to some rather nasty consequences (i.e. death) if you come into contact with the now free and very active atoms.

Lastly, from a terrorism/accident (i.e. plant accident) standpoint, the new advances of nuclear plants make it the safest against explosions. If someone drives up to the plant containing the active uranium rods and blows up a bomb, instead of finding themselves creating a nuclear meltdown, they will get the bowling ball equivalent of cracking open a gumball machine. If someone were to do this to a ‘clean’ coal fired plant, you’d get a nice, not so little, boom. If someone did this to a photo electric cell (solar panel) manufacturing plant, you’d have to evacuate a 20-30 mile radius. If a terrorist did this to a hydrogen plant for making hydrogen fuel cells, you’d have a VERY big explosion.

Oh, and a fun little fact about coal fired plants, even the new ‘clean’ coal plants? Do you want to make 200,000$ a year doing unskilled labor? Then you can scrub coal towers clean of the gallon mercury that builds up daily! What fun! You get paid that much because if you get a tear in your suit you’d go from sane to mad hatter in under 60 seconds, and not long after that you’d die from a combination of mercury poisoning and asphyxiation! What a great job. And no matter how ‘clean’ you make coal, unless you make it Not Coal you are still going to be having the same problem with the mercury and other fun by-products as you did before.

Isn’t it funny that when you actually spend time researching something, the one thing everyone despises (nuclear energy) turns out to be the much, much better option than what everyone popularly thinks is best (i.e. ‘green’ energy)? Isn’t life fun?

Pogie Says:
August 15th, 2008 at 8:29 pm

Research is fun. I note you don’t actually cite any sources or provide any qualifications. Here’s what David Lochbaum, a 17 year employee of the U.S. nuclear industry, has to say about the idea of expanding nuclear power:

Global warming is UCS’s foremost concern. If we fail to do the right thing about global warming, then solving other problems becomes moot. UCS recently re-examined nuclear power’s role in combating global warming. We concluded that an expansion of nuclear power could help curb global warming because nuclear power plants do not emit global warming gases during operation and the emissions during the nuclear fuel cycle and plant construction are relatively modest.
Unfortunately, history has repeatedly shown that the safety and security risks of this nuclear curb are both significant and sustained. Those advocating a nuclear revival should recall the famous words of George Santayana: Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

red craig Says:
June 19th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
The rest of the world has come to realize it was a mistake not to develop nuclear energy. Doesn’t it seem to you that you ought to look further into the subject? All your misinformation comes from Public Citizen. Do yourself a favor and look for sources that don’t aren’t committed to ideological causes. Otherwise no one will take you seriously.
Bob Funk Says:
June 19th, 2008 at 6:14 pm
Red Craig, I realize all the quoted info comes from one source, but I did that purely for the sake of convenience. All the information above is proven and very difficult to refute.
Red Craig, I encourage you to take your own advice and look into nuclear power a bit more than you have. On face, it seems great, but once you dig deeper its only another failed power source that we shouldn’t be investing in.

Please, Red Craig, refute the above information.
red craig Says:
June 20th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
Price-Anderson

The Price-Anderson act has been mischaracterized from the beginning. Anti-nukes find powerful ammunition in it and use it prominently in their arguments. In fact, the law does much less than they claim.

I should say at the outset that I am not an attorney and therefore I am not qualified to interpret law or court decisions. That said, here is an excerpt from the US Supreme Court decision in the case of SILKWOOD v. KERR-McGEE CORP., decided January 11, 1984.

“In sum, it is clear that in enacting and amending the Price-Anderson Act, Congress assumed that state-law remedies, in whatever form they might take, were available to those injured by nuclear incidents. This was so even though it was well aware of the NRC’s exclusive authority to regulate safety matters. No doubt there is tension between the conclusion that safety regulation is the exclusive concern of the federal law and the conclusion that a State may nevertheless award damages based on its own law of liability. But as we understand what was done over the years in the legislation concerning nuclear energy, Congress intended to stand by both concepts and to tolerate whatever tension there was between them. We can do no less. It may be that the award of damages based on the state law of negligence or strict liability is regulatory in the sense that a nuclear plant will be threatened with damages liability if it does not conform to state standards, but that regulatory consequence was something that Congress was quite willing to accept.”

From this decision, it seems clear enough that describing Price-Anderson as a liability limit is incorrect and misleading. Nor does it shield companies from lawsuits based on negligence.

On the other hand, even this decision contends that the original purpose of Price-Anderson was to encourage companies to enter a new field. Since the field is no longer new, one could ask why the law continues to exist. I think the answer lies in the other benefits. One is that it clarifies the US Government’s responsibilities. Every aspect of nuclear energy, including design, construction, and operation, is supervised by the Federal Government. In the case of an accident, and in the absence of legislation, the Government very likely would find itself in the position of defendant. The act clarifies this point: the Government will only be on the hook after all other coverages, from commercial insurance and owners’ assets, have been paid out. A second benefit is that victims of an accident can recover their damages without suing. Under liability law, they would have to determine who was at fault and prove it in court. The process would take years and, even if they won, they’d lose because lawyers would take most of the money. Under Price-Anderson, they’d only have to show they had taken losses and they’d be compensated.

As it is, Price-Anderson is a requirement for anyone doing nuclear work. It doesn’t limit victims’ ability to recover damages. What it does is to guarantee that money will be there to pay them.

Subsidies

Public Citizen crows over the subsidies enacted to encourage new nuclear plants, but fails to mention that this subsidy is smaller than subsidies offered for renewable energy sources. Meanwhile, fossil fuels continue to receive subsidies in the form of tax credits. One doesn’t expect consistency or fairness from Public Citizen; that’s why it’s not a good information source. Any objective study, such as this one will show that if there were no energy subsidies and fossil-fueled plants had to meet reasonable clean-air standards (or pay for the damage they caused) nuclear would be as cheap as any energy source available.

Safety and Waste

This is just standard propaganda and has no basis in fact. No one has ever been harmed by nuclear-energy waste. No one has been harmed by any nuclear power plant except for the Soviet monstrosity at Chernobyl, which had literally no effective safety measures, not even a containment. Meanwhile, the US is continuing its work on establishing facilities for dealing with spent fuel as other countries are doing now.

Anti-Nuclear Groups

This is no doubt the silliest argument ever presented. “Nukes are bad because I and all my friends say so.” These are all political groups with a distressingly poor record of achievement. While the executives’ incomes have been rising, the state of the world’s environment has been steadily growing worse. More on this can be found here.

Thanks for allowing me to answer your challenge. Your conclusion that it’s a “failed energy source” is untenable. Nuclear energy generates 20% of the electricity the US uses, cheaper than any source except for hydroelectric, and it has a perfect safety record. It accounts for 70% of the country’s non-fossil electricity. Countries all over the world look to it as an essential part of their programs to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions. While other non-fossil energy sources can be part of the solution, nuclear is the only one that can provide energy full-time.
red craig Says:
June 20th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
Oops, typing error. The last link should be this.
Frank Says:
June 20th, 2008 at 10:59 pm
Response to red craig-

I agree with craig. Nuclear energy is safe and does not add CO2 to the atmosphere like coal fired power plants. And it is part of the answer for attaining energy independence in America. Unfortunately, it is not a “green” solution, nor a progressive solution to energy independence. There is no way to remediate nuclear waste products. Our current solution is to leave it for later generations to deal with. This is not a solution. It’s as bad as underground CO2 sequestering proposed by “clean-coal” proponants. It looks good now, but it doesn’t actually deal with the waste.

America either needs to improve existing methods of producing energy to reduce hazardous waste (including CO2) or we need to start focusing on new greener technology. Now that we understand how human activity affects the world we live in, we no longer can focus only on meeting our energy needs. We must include the welfare of the planet also. McCain just hopes more of the same (nuclear and offshore drilling) will solve our energy problems. His energy policy is as old as he is.
red craig Says:
June 21st, 2008 at 8:41 am
Frank, thanks for commenting.

3. The “waste problem” was always fictitious and, like all fictitious problems, was easily solved. Nuclear wastes are much smaller in quantity than coal wastes and thus are much safer. Spent fuel is being reprocessed, as it is in the UK, and more countries are setting up to do it, including the US. Reprocessing the wastes separates out the valuable uranium and transuranic actinides to use as fuel. The remaining wastes are only 3% of what was there before and lose their toxicity in much less time. [chart] Many geologic places, such as caves or abandoned mines, could store those wastes safely for the time periods required. Besides that, proven technology exists to irradiate the wastes into other, shorter-lived materials. [source ] To deal with the wastes this way doesn’t require any technological breakthroughs, just a political decision.
N Says:
August 14th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
I’d ask if you actually did research when you researched this topic for your article, but you obviously haven’t. Most of what you are saying is true, IN THE 1970s. Why should you think that what I have to say is correct? Well, it might have something to do with me studying nuclear physics and researching the technological advances that have been made in nuclear energy, which you obviously did not.

First of all, the vast majority of your arguments revolve around your perception of nuclear waste from plants being toxic. Now before I go any further, you seem to be implying in your article that nuclear waste equals and increase in greenhouse gasses. It doesn’t quite work that way bud. I’d explain why, but since you could just hop on to Wikipedia to get an explanation and you probably wouldn’t get it anyway, I’m not going to bother.

Secondly, since whoever your source is obviously stopped looking at how nuclear plants worked sometime in the ’80s, here’s a primer on some new advances in Nuclear Energy: Uranium, you know, that stuff that powers nuclear power plants, can now be encased totally in carbon. This negates both the harmful effects of being around radioactive uranium and any potential hazards of waste leakage after disposal while allowing the power plant to run at or better than previous levels. If you don’t believe me, head over to Scientific American and read all about it. Suffice it to say, it’s the same basic reason why your cell phone isn’t causing a massive cancerous growth in your ear.

Nextly, the mining and refining process has been dramatically improved, making the entire process much more earth-friendly. That, coupled with the above mentioned carbon containers, makes Nuclear energy just about the most earth friendly power out there. The manufacturing process of photo electric cells, aka solar panels, is about as earth friendly as dumping a gallon of mercury into every lake in the US. The oxygen you get from debinding it with hydrogen to make hydrogen for fuel cells is not exactally thrilled at what you did to it, and can lead to some rather nasty consequences (i.e. death) if you come into contact with the now free and very active atoms.

Lastly, from a terrorism/accident (i.e. plant accident) standpoint, the new advances of nuclear plants make it the safest against explosions. If someone drives up to the plant containing the active uranium rods and blows up a bomb, instead of finding themselves creating a nuclear meltdown, they will get the bowling ball equivalent of cracking open a gumball machine. If someone were to do this to a ‘clean’ coal fired plant, you’d get a nice, not so little, boom. If someone did this to a photo electric cell (solar panel) manufacturing plant, you’d have to evacuate a 20-30 mile radius. If a terrorist did this to a hydrogen plant for making hydrogen fuel cells, you’d have a VERY big explosion.

Oh, and a fun little fact about coal fired plants, even the new ‘clean’ coal plants? Do you want to make 200,000$ a year doing unskilled labor? Then you can scrub coal towers clean of the gallon mercury that builds up daily! What fun! You get paid that much because if you get a tear in your suit you’d go from sane to mad hatter in under 60 seconds, and not long after that you’d die from a combination of mercury poisoning and asphyxiation! What a great job. And no matter how ‘clean’ you make coal, unless you make it Not Coal you are still going to be having the same problem with the mercury and other fun by-products as you did before.

Isn’t it funny that when you actually spend time researching something, the one thing everyone despises (nuclear energy) turns out to be the much, much better option than what everyone popularly thinks is best (i.e. ‘green’ energy)? Isn’t life fun?
Pogie Says:
August 15th, 2008 at 8:29 pm
Research is fun. I note you don’t actually cite any sources or provide any qualifications. Here’s what David Lochbaum, a 17 year employee of the U.S. nuclear industry, has to say about the idea of expanding nuclear power:

Global warming is UCS’s foremost concern. If we fail to do the right thing about global warming, then solving other problems becomes moot. UCS recently re-examined nuclear power’s role in combating global warming. We concluded that an expansion of nuclear power could help curb global warming because nuclear power plants do not emit global warming gases during operation and the emissions during the nuclear fuel cycle and plant construction are relatively modest.
Unfortunately, history has repeatedly shown that the safety and security risks of this nuclear curb are both significant and sustained. Those advocating a nuclear revival should recall the famous words of George Santayana: Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Intelligent Discontent