What's the best way, politically, to switch from Coal to Atomic fuel?

Question

I read an article by a Democrat, who suggested taxing coal plants so that running them would be more trouble than it's worth. I talked to my Republican Dad, who said we should offer tax deductions to atomic plants. I'm not quite sure what I think. What do you?

Answer 1

Coal is by far much safer than atomic energy. Coal is also less polluting than atomic power. It is possible to almost completely remove all the pollutants from coal whereas atomic waste can never be cleaned.
We have enough coal in this country to supply our energy needs for over 200 years, giving plenty of time to develop other forms of energy.

Answer 2

Solar power is cheaper, and safer than coal or nuclear power plants, and it creates no pollution.

A solar power plant that used heliotropic mirrors to heat a steam generator, much the way coal and nuclear reactors do, could power the entire United States, and could be situated in say, the Mohave Desert.

Such a power plant might occupy a few square miles of desert.

The main purpose of nuclear power plants, is not to produce power, but to produce fissionable materials from breeder reactors, for nuclear weapons. You can't do that with coal, solar or other power sources such as hydroelectric dams.

Solar power does not pollute.

Answer 3

I concur with the others who have suggested that nuclear power is not necessarily the best way to wean ourselves off fossil fuels. Solar power, biomass-ethanol from better sources than corn, and of course conservation and improved efficiency are all very promising. There are some very interesting developments in use of wind and of ocean waves, too.

Thermonuclear power (fusion) might also be better, in terms of the byproduct difficulties, than fission, which leads to considerable questions about used fuel. But thermonuclear technology is not really at all close to productive use.

The spent-fuel problem might be addressed by reprocessing. Several decades ago, someone pointed out that if you remove certain isotopes (I think I recall strontium-90 being mentioned), the residuum has a much, much shorter half-life, and those particular isotopes are the gamma-ray emitters which can be deployed for medical purposes or for irradiating food for safety. (Worried about E. coli in your burgers lately?)

There are also far better technologies for generating plants. In the '70s (c. Three Mile Island incident), it was mentioned that virtually everyone building nuclear plants was ordering 30-year-old designs from Westinghouse or Babcock and Wilcox; these are water-cooled, meaning the coolant becomes a radioactive hazard. One pilot plant, using helium coolant and a graphite-matrix fuel core, was immune to those problems, and the graphite matrix would actually become stronger from an hour of overheating if you lost coolant. But nobody deployed that technology for production, and we continue to build the messy plants to now 60-year-old designs.

We also don't build or operate them well. See Robert A. Heinlein's story, "The Roads Must Roll," for an early discussion of methods for bringing crucial but dangerous and complicated technology under control. He proposed a quasi-military organization of responsible engineers; that solution is, I think, still the only hope for avoiding the problems the nuclear power industry continually exhibits. Two examples:

(1) At Three Mile Island, picture a startup routine in which someone in a control room had, as part of a checklist, specifically demanded a visual check of the two valves they had failed to open: the problem would never have happened with a decent organization.

(2) Admiral Hyman Rickover, when asked why military nuclear-powered vessels had not exhibited the rotten safety record of civilian plants, reportedly replied, "We trained them right!"

But I do not believe that the U.S. power industry is ever likely to make the investment in organization, in control of wasteful and unsafe construction practices, in safer technologies, or in a controlled and systematic reprocessing pipeline, or that U.S. politicians are currently capable of driving those changes. (The left will howl about nukes, and the right about business interference.)

The alternatives to fossil fuels other than nuclear power appear to offer better prospects politically, and they don't present all the problems that we would have to solve from the ground up, in a system in which those problems have become entrenched for over half a century.

Answer 4

I'm assuming your young, if you want to find the most efficient (politically speaking) way of doing anything . . . Listen to the Democrats, then listen to the Republicans, and incorporate both ideas into one cohesive policy. Moderation is always best.