The Nuclear Energy Quandary
Some years ago, a New York utilities analyst estimated that only about one-fourth of America’s nuclear power plants were run by companies that understood the unique challenges of nuclear energy. Rancho Seco, near Sacramento, was not among the 25%, so voters shut it down last week.
The plant, which produced less than half of the power it was designed to do--when it ran at all--was, like some lemon from an automobile assembly line, constantly laid up for repairs. It might have worked properly some day, but the people who relied for power on the Sacramento Municipal Utility District could not count on that. Closing it down probably was a prudent decision, even if it will now cost as much as $300 million to seal off all of its radioactive parts.
Rancho Seco was the first nuclear plant in the nation to be ordered closed by voters, but that is a less important part of history than whether the nuclear power industry learned anything from Rancho Seco during the 15 years that it operated, off and on. The answer seems to be no.
One clue is that the industry is not clamoring for changes in the system that would give new power plants a better chance for a full life than Rancho Seco had.
The changes that are needed include standardizing plant design, making tough calls about whether a utility company can be trusted with nuclear power and following rigid nuclear rules without the kinds of politically based exceptions that too often are made on matters such as emergency evacuation plans.
Peoples of the world cannot go on burning fossil fuels to produce energy without accelerating a warming of the Earth’s atmosphere that already has reached a point from which it cannot be reversed for decades or perhaps centuries. In the heady days of discovery right after World War II, it seemed that nuclear power might provide unlimited amounts of electricity at costs, as they said then were “too cheap to meter.” Nobody understood the potential greenhouse effect then. If they had, they might have worked harder at making nuclear power work right.
One reason that so many of America’s 110 nuclear power plants give their owners so much trouble is that no two of them are alike. Each is tailor-made for the company that pays for it. Because there is no standard model, trouble at one plant does not necessarily translate into lessons to be learned about operations at another. No other nuclear nation that we know of operates that way.
Nuclear power advocates are promoting a fresh start, a new round of construction of nuclear power plants. Before that happens, Congress must insist on knowing whether the last generation of plants needs improving and why there is so little standardization among nuclear plants.
It also must face the possibility that the United States may never be able to match the smooth operating record of nuclear power plants in some other countries. That would mean putting a similar amount of time and money into research on other energy producers such as photovoltaic solar cells or fuel cells that create energy from hydrocarbons without burning them as fallback resources to help reduce the greenhouse effect.
