No exit

I have been meaning to write a longer piece for months about the way in which the combination of global warming and the oil shortage are going to force renewal of the debate over nuclear energy. An article in the Times reminds me of the issues.

Nuclear Reactors Found to Be Leaking Radioactive Water

With power cleaner than coal and cheaper than natural gas, the nuclear industry, 20 years past its last meltdown, thinks it is ready for its second act: its first new reactor orders since the 1970's.

But there is a catch. The public's acceptance of new reactors depends in part on the performance of the old ones, and lately several of those have been discovered to be leaking radioactive water into the ground.

Near Braceville, Ill., the Braidwood Generating Station, owned by the Exelon Corporation, has leaked tritium into underground water that has shown up in the well of a family nearby. The company, which has bought out one property owner and is negotiating with others, has offered to help pay for a municipal water system for houses near the plant that have private wells.

In a survey of all 10 of its nuclear plants, Exelon found tritium in the ground at two others. On Tuesday, it said it had had another spill at Braidwood, about 60 miles southwest of Chicago, and on Thursday, the attorney general of Illinois announced she was filing a lawsuit against the company over that leak and five earlier ones, dating to 1996. The suit demands among other things that the utility provide substitute water supplies to residents.

In the same way that the Bush Administration has argued that opposition to the dismantling of the Constitution is "pre-9/11" thinking, we are about to see a whole lot of arguments from nuclear power advocates that we no longer have the luxury of avoiding a massive shift to nuclear power. Peak Oil really is here, and the costs of fossil fuels will spiral ever upward. But more importantly, nuke advocates are right that with current technology, there are not a lot of alternatives that will allow new energy without adding to global warming.

I still haven't made up up my mind on that one. I think a move to nuclear power now is another manfiestation of Junior's preference for dealing with problems by cutting corners now and letting somebody else deal with the mess later. Issues like disposal of spent fuel and old nuke powerplants are very real, and have not yet been solved. It may be that there will never be a solution.

A second way in which this is a classic Dubya problem is that, just like with Iraq, one of the arguments is going to be, "you can argue all day about how we got in this mess, but we're here, so we are going to have to accept costs XYZ." Conservation and an Apollo like project on alternative energy (like, perhaps, the Apollo Alliance) could have headed off this dilemma. But as with the joke about the pyschologist changing the light bulb, the folks in charge have to want to change, and they plainly did not. Americans have been, as a society, mindbogglingly stupid on this score. As a people, we deserve to suffer for our sins. The problem with nukes is that it is our children who will pay for that sin, as they will with global warming.

And the third way in which this is like Iraq is that us lefties will be proven to be right, yet again, but the millenialist/robber baron/ostrich alliance will have again run out the clock and precluded better solutions. (I believe in solar and wind and such, but I'm not sure we can cut over quickly enough to make them work on a global scale.) We may well be forced into turning to nuclear power and leaving yet another toxic nightmare for future generations.