I don't like nukes either. Have you got a better idea?

This is an editorial I wrote for the Moncton Times and Transcript two years ago. Given the current situation with the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan (as of this writing, worse than Three Mile Island, not as bad as Chernobyl) I thought it an opportune time for a re-run.

I don't like nukes either. Have you got a better idea?
Originally published in the Moncton Times and Transcript, May 26, 2009

Much has been made of partisan gridlock in politics, with two factions utterly unable to find common ground for the common good. Typically the factions are so busy demonizing each other that they lose sight of how ridiculous they have both become.

Much the same thing goes on in the debate over energy, and in particular nuclear power.

On what I'll call the right-wing, technocratic side of the debate, we hear that nuclear power is innocent and unfairly maligned--target of the greatest smear campaign since the Dreyfus Affair. Its dangers are grossly exaggerated by ignorant left-wing tree-huggers with an axe to grind. The "too-cheap-to-meter" nuclear-electric utopia promised in the 1950's is stifled by pointless, cumbersome government regulations that add years and millions of dollars to the cost of building a reactor. Nuclear power is perfectly safe: after all, in 60 years of the civilian nuclear power industry, there has never been a single fatality from a nuclear accident in North America. The 1986 Chernobyl meltdown, of course, was just an advance preview for the collapse of Communism--a system so flawed and riddled with incompetence that disaster was inevitable.

And the media, with their obvious left-wing bias, will never tell you that.

On the left-wing, granola-head side, we hear that nuclear power is not only dangerous but unnecessary. We could run our entire civilization, including plug-in hybrid Volkswagen buses, on solar panels and wind turbines. Unfortunately, the corporate Dr. Evils of the nuclear industry (along with the fossil fuel mafia) use their money and power and neckties to suppress clean energy sources. The production of nuclear fuel is massively polluting, and there's no safe way to dispose of the radioactive waste, assuming it doesn't get turned into weapons first.

And the media, with their obvious right-wing bias, will never tell you that.

Guh.

Okay, I should probably declare my own bias here. If you were to hold a gun to my head and force me to choose one of the above camps to stand in, I would have to go with the granola heads. I don't trust big corporations. Money makes people do crazy things, especially when a corporate structure keeps them from being held personally responsible for the consequences. I know how the tobacco industry responded to the link between smoking and cancer (deny, delay, logroll, repeat) and how the fossil fuel industry has responded to climate change (ditto.) I have to take what any industry says about itself with a very large grain of salt.

But on nuclear power, both camps are off the mark. It's not surprising. The average MBA or economist knows about as much about physics as the average English or history major, which is to say, not a lot. And these are the "educated" people. The closest many people come to learning science is watching Shark Week on the Discovery Channel. We have neglected science education, and nickel-and-dimed our school system, for decades. As a result, most adults are just not equipped to have a meaningful discussion about science and technology. So of course the debate is going to get goofy.

First things first. We cannot keep living the way we have been using just wind, solar and hemp oil. I'm sorry, Sunflower, but not even close. Our energy habits are massively out of scale with what we can practically get from those sources. It's no conspiracy: there are technical reasons that make big, on-demand power sources like nuclear- and coal-fired plants necessary to the way we live today. For a lot of reasons, nuclear power is probably the least-bad of a very bad lot.

Conversely, the idea that nuclear power is inherently safe based on its record is absurd. Part of what has kept North American nuclear accidents to a non-catastrophic minimum is probably the dense thicket of safety regulations that must be followed. If those regulations weren't in place, the nuclear industry would probably be about as well managed as a hedge fund, with comparable results. And, yes, most reactors have been trouble-free in their first few decades. So are people, usually. But as any senior citizen will tell you, a lot more goes wrong when you're seventy than at twenty-five. We should not blithely assume that our luck will hold forever.

The ugly truth is that energy is neither cheap nor safe. It's like Bilbo Baggins' magic ring: the more you use it, the more risk you assume, and the closer you come to accidentally destroying yourself. The more energy we demand--the more flat-screen TV's and weed whackers and backlit pylon signs on the highway--the more power plants we have to build. And the more power plants we build, the greater the likelihood that one of them will eventually go blooey and turn (for example) southern New Brunswick into a radioactive Forbidden Zone for generations.

I think we are going to need nuclear power in the coming years. I think the risks can be managed, but only if we are honest with ourselves about what those risks are. Most of all, we need consumers to realize that every kilowatt-hour used is, indirectly, another trigger pull in an enormous game of Russian roulette. If everyone understands that, maybe we'll all be a bit more conscientious about leaving the lights on.