When Fossil Fuels Fail, Nuclear Energy is the Answer

The year 2019 marks a 41-year low for coal consumption in the United States with expenditures dropping to 691,000,000 short tons (MMst) per year. Though consumption of coal has been on a decline since 2007—in part due to the closure of many coal-fired power plants and rise of renewable energy on the market—this appears minimal when compared with the impressive clean energy campaigns launched by several nations around the world, including Germany. Currently the largest producer and burner of coal in Europe, Germany unveiled its ambitious Energiewende campaign in 2009 from what started as a grassroots movement to encourage legislators to get behind renewable energy expansion. The plan calls for the phasing out of all nuclear power plants and going completely carbon neutral—producing no net carbon dioxide—by 2050. 10 years later and in the wake of pressing concerns of climate change, Germany’s Green Party as well as the general public watch as Merkel and Energiewende legislators struggle to meet even the 2020 benchmark for carbon emission reductions: 40 percent of 1980 levels.

The issue with Energiewende isn’t solely its short time span or difficulty in its implementation given Germany’s booming transportation industry—a business almost entirely reliant upon coal and oil. It’s the unnatural shift to entirely clean energy sources in a country ill-equipped with natural resources to capitalize upon in the first place. While Germany’s northern border—from Denmark to Poland—is lined with wind turbines as far as the eye can see, geographic limitations in the rest of the country make it difficult for Germany to even attempt to sustain its current energy expenditure on clean energy alternatives. The reality is that as Germany continues to demolish nuclear power plants and invest billions of Euros into solar panels, wind turbines, and the like, an energy vacuum is going to emerge, placing pressure on the country to buy electricity from neighboring nations,almost all of which get the majority of their energy from fossil fuels.

Still, in light of UN and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports claiming a “climate change apocalypse” threatening the survival of humanity as soon as 2050, Energiewende remains an admirable feat, albeit a flawed one. The main problem with Germany’s attempt at “going green” on a national scale is its stubborn refusal to revive and implement nuclear power plants. Though it was initially a leader in the rise of nuclear power throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the 1986 Chernobyl accident froze Germany’s nuclear development, with plants beginning to be demolished in the early 21st century. Rising environmentalist concerns and the Fukushima Daiichi accident in 2011 sealed nuclear energy’s fate, as the rate of nuclear power plant destruction has continued to escalate in the past eight years. Yet, with climate change and the reduction of greenhouse gases being a priority for both an environmentally conscious public and established politicians, nuclear energy must be revisited with the intent to revitalize the industry.

While environmentalists continue to preach for the implementation of clean energy sources such as solar panels, hydroelectric dams, and wind turbines, at the end of the day, nuclear energy remains minimally ecologically invasive and is the most energy and cost-effective source of electricity we have. Since they produce energy via nuclear fission rather than chemical burning, nuclear power plants generate energy with no carbon emissions. In fact, nuclear power plants only release greenhouse gases from the required usage of fossil fuels during construction and maintenance, which amounts to the same amount of fossil fuels used as solar power: a total of four to five percent as much as a natural gas-fired power plant. Most importantly, nuclear power plants operate at a much higher production rate than renewable energy sources or fossil fuels. In terms of capacity factors—a measure of what percentage of the time a power plant produces energy—nuclear power plants, which generated almost 20 percent of U.S. electricity in 2016 alone, had an average capacity factor of 92.3 percent, meaning they operated at full power on 336 out of 365 days per year. By contrast, hydroelectric systems delivered power 38.2 percent of the time (138 days per year), wind turbines 34.5 percent of the time (127 days per year), and solar panels only 25.1 percent of the time (92 days per year).

Following accidents at Chernobyl, Fukushima Daiichi, and Three Mile Island, public perception of nuclear power has been falsely skewed to see it as a toxic and dangerous source of energy. Though the magnitude of those accidents is undeniable, data analysis of the recorded deaths and health effects from those three incidents proves that nuclear accidents are nowhere near as deadly as those in large-scale industrial disasters. For example, according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the partial meltdown of the Three-Mile Island reactor in March of 1979 led to 2,000,000 people in the region experiencing an increased radiation dose of one millirem. For context, an exposure from a chest X-ray is about six millirem and the area’s natural radioactive background dose is about 100-125 millirem per year. In a public statement, the NRC stated, “In spite of serious damage to the reactor, the actual meltdown had negligible effects on the physical health of individuals or the environment.” Similar conclusions can be drawn for accidents even as serious as Chernobyl. In the three decades following the accident, the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) has identified no long-term health consequences to populations exposed to the Chernobyl fallout, with the exceptions of an increased risk of thyroid cancer in children, people who consumed dairy products contaminated with 131-iodine, and citizens not properly evacuated in Belarus, Ukraine, and western Russia. Since the accident, around 6,500 incidents of thyroid cancer linked to the accident have been reported.

Though such numbers are significant and the effect of the fallout on local communities should not be underestimated, comparing health complications related to nuclear accidents with those related to industrial disasters of similar and greater magnitude truly puts them into perspective. Over 40 tons of methyl isocyanate gas leaked from a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India in 1984, killing nearly 4,000 people immediately, with over 12,000 other deaths reported within the next several days. A typhoon struck Henan Province, China in 1975, causing the failure of a major hydroelectric dam and an estimated 150,000 to 300,000 deaths through drowning. A comparison between the death toll of nuclear accidents and industrial disasters reveals that the former is not as devastating as the public sees it to be. Combined with improved reactor designs, standardization in emergency protocols, and a better scientific understanding of nuclear power, nuclear energy is more than sufficiently safe to provide power on a global scale.

Yet, one of the biggest obstacles to the adoption of nuclear power is contradictory information and public opinions on the larger issue: climate change. According to a poll conducted by Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, only 64 percent of Americans believe that climate change is caused by human activities. The other 36 percent is thus unlikely to support a transition to nuclear power, much less a reduction in fossil fuels, when they do not believe in any environmental consequences for their actions. The reality is, many of the current natural disasters plaguing our planet—from fires in the Amazon rainforest to record heat waves hitting Europe—are caused by increased global temperatures due to the greenhouse effect. As temperatures rise and ice caps in the Arctic melt at increasingly fast rates, sea levels will rise and threaten the existence of countless coastal cities. In fact, Indonesia has already begun moving its capital from Jakarta to a more in-land location, in light of the former capital sinking over seven inches per year. Jakarta serves as an example of what can happen to any coastal city, including New York. If humans do not reduce their usage of fossil fuels in the coming years, climate scientists warn that Miami Beach, Atlantic City, and even New York, could be underwater as soon as 2100. That’s only 80 years away.

In light of its countless benefits, nuclear energy should be the future of clean energy expansion. As finite supplies of fossil fuels run dry, clean energy sources such as hydroelectric power, solar systems, and wind turbines prove not as cost efficient as their nuclear counterparts, while also running on lower capacity factors and yielding less energy. To make nuclear power an international reality, public perception of the medium must change through greater circulation of data on the likelihood of a nuclear accident and objective information on the results of accidents in the past. The ultimate goal of halting irreversible climate change and long term survival starts with nuclear power.