As someone who has worked in the nuclear power industry, I recognize nuclear power as essential to an affordable clean energy energy portfolio as we look to mitigate the climate effects of carbon emissions. However, if we are to embrace nuclear power, we need to be completely honest about its risks and costs.
In the early 1990s, I worked at Commonwealth Edison in Chicago. At that time, the company operated the Zion Nuclear Power Station, the second-largest nuclear energy producing plant in the U.S. At ComEd, we publicly touted the safety and cost-effectiveness of the Zion operation. Privately, there was constant company angst over the problem of toxic nuclear waste — what to do with high-level radioactive materials that will take tens of thousands of years to decay before they are harmless to humans and other life on our planet.
Zion Station was retired in 1998. Since then, there has been an ongoing and complicated series of activities to deal with spent toxic fuel rods and other contaminated materials, with cleanup costs in the billions. Those costs were never factored into the “low-cost energy” narratives we promoted to the Chicago public.
A small percentage of nuclear waste is recyclable. Some Zion toxic waste was put on trains and sent to Utah’s EnergySolutions for recycling. However, it turned out that the recyclable Zion waste was far less profitable for EnergySolutions than originally touted to investors, and the company had to downgrade profitability projections of the Zion recycling operation multiple times over the course of a few years.
Today, most of the Zion Station radioactive waste remains in Zion, Illinois, on the banks of Lake Michigan, adjacent to a metropolitan area that now exceeds 9.5 million people. Like most nuclear plants around the world, the Zion waste is stored at the Zion site in “dry cask storage.” Dry cask storage is designed to safely house toxic radioactive waste for about 100 years.
But waste from nuclear power producing plants is toxic for tens of thousands of years. Dry cask storage is really us leaving our grandchildren a very toxic problem that we choose to create, with no answer for how to solve it. And despite best efforts, there have been dry cask leakage failures at a number of sites, including the retired Hanover site in Washington State that continues to leak nuclear waste into groundwater and the Columbia River.
All this probably sounds like I am against nuclear power generation. I’m not.
Our planet is running a climate fever from carbon emissions. Nuclear power generation, despite its drawbacks, is an essential part of the equation to mitigate carbon emissions for the next few decades while we develop cleaner forms of generation and storage like wind power, solar, geothermal, hydrogen and more advanced batteries.
However, we have to be honest about the costs and risks of nuclear. Having worked in the industry, I see today a lack of honesty from interests promoting the technology.
First, nuclear is “carbon clean,” but the waste is incredibly toxic and lasts for a very, very long time in whatever location it is stored. Safe storage requires very advanced and expensive technology — for centuries. Can we call that cost-effective? I don’t think so.
Second, the industry continues to blame the federal government for not providing a national centralized nuclear waste storage facility. Why is this the government’s fault? They tried. No one, including the most remote geologically low-risk site at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, was willing to agree to be the dump site for the nation’s nuclear waste. Government tried. The people spoke. No one signed up for it … for good reasons.
Third, the industry pushes back on Federal Energy Regulatory Commission oversight, claiming that “the free market” alone will provide the right incentives for producers to behave ethically. I’m a free-market capitalist, but I also believe this dangerous technology needs independent oversight. The cancer catastrophe of Utah and Navajo Nation uranium miners from the 1950s and ‘60s is one of many examples that show how well principles of free market enterprise protected them. It didn’t. Southern Utah, as well as other areas across the U.S., have the cancer rates and gravestones to prove it.
So, to mitigate carbon emissions, we need nuclear as we develop better, cleaner solutions to mitigate the climate fever we have created for our planet. But we need to be very informed about the toxicity, longevity, expense and rigorous measures needed to manage radioactive waste. And we need to get off nuclear power as soon as we can, in the decades in the future.