Former U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chair Gregory Jaczko is still implacably opposed to development of traditional nuclear power plants, despite technological fixes intended to make them safer, the Las Vegas Sun reports in an editorial based on Jaczko’s new book.
“In a perfect world, nuclear energy would be a perfect tool for combatting climate change. Nuclear power plants don’t burn fossil fuels, don’t emit greenhouse gases into the environment, and don’t speed global warming,” the Sun writes. “But with some groups reversing their former opposition to nuclear energy,” the paper adds, Jaczko “is going on the offensive to explain why nuclear energy is nowhere near a perfect solution to the climate crisis.”
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Jaczko opens his argument with the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, an episode that “wiped out environmental gains that Japan made by burning less fossil fuels,” the paper says.
“What happens after Fukushima is they shut down all of their nuclear plants over time,” he told the Sun in an interview. “So then what did they do? They had to turn to polluting fossil fuels. So you wind up with this solution where it’s kind of boom or bust: You’ve got nuclear power, but once you turn it off, what do we do? Well, we have to turn to dirty fossil fuels.”
Even when researchers come up with new materials and methods that might make their operations safer, the Sun adds, the industry rejects those innovations as “prohibitively expensive”.
Meanwhile, Jaczko cited a sea of recent developments that are making power storage cheaper. “Not just advancements in battery design,” writes the Sun, “but such methods as pumped-storage hydroelectricity, in which water is pumped to a higher elevation during overnight hours when electricity demand is low and then is released to operate turbines during peak hours.”
And then, “there’s the issue with nuclear waste — a hazard we’re familiar with in Southern Nevada,” the Sun notes. Jaczko “continues to be alarmed about the long-term safety of the [proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear storage site] and the prospect of transporting high-level waste from across the country to Nevada.”
Jaczko’s “bottom-line assessment is that despite decades of development, nuclear energy remains too hazardous and costly to be a viable source of power,” the Sun concludes. “There’s going to be an accident,” he told the paper. “The only question is when and where.”
