Fear & Loathing in Springfield

I blame the Simpsons.

Sure, Chernobyl, Fukushima and Kim Jong Ill’s big red button haven’t helped much either, but it's Homer and his barrels of truant green sludge that’s done it. Thanks Matt Groening.

Back in the 1950s when it first hit the scene, nuclear power was heralded as a miracle energy source. Hippies didn’t like it because it shared part of its name with some rather nasty bombs, but otherwise, everyone was pretty excited by the possibilities of endless, free, atomic energy for all.

“Too cheap to meter”, was the promise.  

Alas, things didn’t turn out that way. Over the past 3 decades nuke’s share of the global power mix has fallen from 17% to 10%. New projects across the world have been plagued by surging costs, interminable delays, and bloated bureaucracy. Germany, a nation previously known for its pragmatism and efficiency, has prematurely and moronically closed its world class operational nuclear plants.

Given that we’ve got a bit of a carbon problem, you’d think we been going all-in on this zero-carbon, low resource intensity, 24/7 reliable energy source. But no, until very recently, nuclear power has been less popular than Prince Andrew.

What on earth happened?

Well, ironically, the culprits standing in the way of a nuclear renaissance and mass decarbonisation are self-proclaimed “environmentalists”. They make an awful lot of noise and not much sense, and do everything in their power to block nuclear energy expansion.

Armed with brimming coffers, a powerful lobby, and a deluded sense of righteousness, they’ve successfully used all manner of tricks and slight of hand to sway Joe Public and policymakers against nuclear technology.

They shout about the costs, about meltdowns, about build time (all of which we’ll address in another article). But chief of their fear-mongering fibs relate to what they call “the global crisis of nuclear waste”.

Lets set the record straight.

So, back to Homer. When you think of “nuclear waste”, you probably conjure up images like the one at the top of this article. You think of mountains of green radioactive goo leaking out of barrels and into water systems, spawning a generation of three-armed children from The Hills Have Eyes.

Or maybe you think of a bad guy from 24 plotting to release a nuclear waste-infused dirty bomb in Brooklyn unless Jack Bauer can get to him in time.

These are the references we’ve been fed, and they’ve been pounced upon by the anti-nuclear brigade who don’t have a clue about energy systems, science, or economics, but know enough about propaganda to make Stalin proud.

This narrative is all wrong. The mainstream perception of nuclear waste couldn’t be further from the truth. In an energy and climate landscape where there are no perfect solutions, no silver bullets, only trade-offs, the waste is actually an advantage of nuclear energy, not a disadvantage.

Here’s a very brief summary of nuclear waste’s journey in the real world: after about 5 years of working hard in a reactor to generate power, the metal nuclear fuel rods which contain the uranium get a nice long soak in a pool to cool down for another 5 or so years.

After that, they’re either recycled into new reactor fuel (circular economy, woop woop) or they’re encased into steel and concrete “casks” where they’re stored on site. There they remain, low in number and totally harmless.

It’s boring, it’s regulated to the nines, and it has a better track record than Coldplay.

So that you’re well armed next time you come across the same old regurgitated guff, let’s bust a few myths about nuclear waste:

• Myth: it’s a radioactive green slime that’s prone to leaking everywhere

• Truth: it’s a solid metal fuel rod encased in glass, steel, ceramic and concrete. There have been no recorded cases of problematic nuclear waste leak.

• Myth: we don’t know what to do with it

• Truth: thanks to uranium’s extreme energy density, there’s hardly any waste. All the highest potency waste from the US nuclear power sector over the past 50 years could fit into a single American football field to a height of approximately 3 meters. We have various long term storage solutions such as safely burying it deep underground where it will be sealed until the sun falls out of the sky. The world, sub and sur-terranean, is a big place. We aren’t gonna run out of suitable space anytime soon.

• Myth: it’s dangerous

• Truth: there’s not a case of anyone, anywhere, ever, being hurt by the radioactivity from nuclear waste. You get more radiation exposure on an aeroplane than you do by standing next to a nuclear reactor. The regulation imposed on the entire nuclear industry is so suffocatingly stringent that the chances of a dangerous event are almost nil.

• Myth: it remains highly radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years

• Truth: remember half-lives from high school chemistry? Not really? Me neither...Because of the waste’s short half-life, it loses 99% of its radioactivity within the first 40 years. It becomes safer and safer over time. Although, there’s a very small quantity of high-level waste that remains dangerous for thousands of years that needs long term solutions (eg recycling, concrete casks, underground storage).

All energy sources have waste. For oil, coal, and gas it’s billions of tonnes of uncontained CO2 in the atmosphere. For wind, solar, and batteries it’s mind-boggling unknowable quantities of non-recyclable metals and toxic minerals that become obsolete after 20 years of use and end up in landfill. For nuclear, it’s a paltry quantity of contained solids.

I know which I prefer.

This is what I mean when I say that waste is an advantage of nuclear compared to alternative energy sources.

It’s not even a novel problem. We already deal with and transport millions of tons of toxic waste and materials that remain dangerous forever. Think mercury, lead, arsenic etc.

And, unlike radioactivity from nuclear waste which is easily detected by a Geiger counter, these other toxic materials often don’t warn you that they’ve polluted the environment until the local hospital is full of sick kids.  

Bury it. Send it into space. Turn it in a museum for school children to visit (the Dutch have actually done this and it’s genius). Have someone as odious as Katie Hopkins guard it so that no one would dare go anywhere near it. There are plenty of solutions to this non-problem.

The whole thing is a distraction. A giant squawking canard created by anti-humanist nuclear opponents who know that they can’t win the argument on facts and reason so have turned the debate into a PR showdown. And they’re winning.

That I’m even writing this proves that the nuclear industry is far behind in the fight for hearts and minds. What is it they say? “A lie will fly around the whole world while the truth is getting its boots on”.

But we’ll get there. Eventually. There’s no viable path to decarbonisation without nuclear, unless we want to make huge sacrifices to our collective standard of living by relying on the intermittent whims of wind and sunshine to energize our lives. I certainly don’t.

And when push comes to shove, as it seems it soon will, the Germans won’t either. The economic malaise, the higher bills, the loss of power - in both senses of the word - will reach a point of pain where there’s no option but to course correct. It’s just a matter of when.  

In the meantime, expect more unnecessary suffering. Now that’s a waste to get upset about.