The Nuclear Option

For all the years since environmentalism began, the debate in America over renewable energy has focused on "safe" options, like solar and wind power, which struggle on the edge of economic viability. Even just last month, I watched commentary on the major networks like CNN or FOX news speak of the need for advances in technology in the energy industry, experts in their fields saying with a straight face we cannot achieve zero emissions without technologies we haven't even invented yet. In short, both the media and the experts have given us the impression a carbon-neutral civilization is some lofty dream that will have to wait for some distant time when he have the technology to accomplish it.

But what if I told you the technology exists right now to achieve near-zero emissions... that we could achieve a green economy without tearing apart our industrial base or completely altering our way of life... but we've chosen not to devellop that technology? No, this isn't some conspiracy theory, or some crackpot "free energy" invention... it's just a look at what other countries have done right now... It's differences in the way other societies have chosen to utilize existing technologies.

So which country in particular has caught my eye? France. That's right, those heathens across the pond we had to stop naming all our "Freedom Fries" after when they wouldn't put a rubber stamp on our invasion of Iraq. You remember them, right? And what have they done now? Oh, just quietly converted their entire energy production infrastructure to nuclear power...

That's right. Another industrialized country has been using that "ooh, so scary" radiation stuff to generate their electricity... and, that's funny... I don't see France glowing yet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf40.html

"...France now claims a substantial level of energy independence and almost the lowest cost electricity in Europe. It also has an extremely low level of CO2 emissions per capita from electricity generation, since over 90% of its electricity is nuclear or hydro."

To recap, France generates 80% of it's electricity through nuclear power. And another 10% by hydroelecticity... 90% of their electricity is made by "carbon neutral" means... they are light-years ahead of us in environmentalism, and energy independence!

And you won't hear a peep out of the news media about it, nor from the "experts" in the energy industry. We've been left to delude ourselves that safe nuclear energy, once the dream of every warm-blooded engineer in the 1950s, is an impossibility. While we've spent the last 30 years since the Energy Crisis of the mid-1970s, rallying around the cries of "No nukes! No nukes!", conjuring up images or Chernobyl, or Three Mile Island, the French have been building nuclear plants like crazy (Yes, that is a French nuclear facility in the picture!) so they don't have to rely on unstable foreign supplies of oil from Koran-waving Arabs in the Middle East.

Ah, so that's the reason the French didn't get all hot under the collar about Iraq... they're quite franky, not in the same oil-dependency boat as us. Our infrastructure will collapse in a year without Arab oil, theirs wont!

Am I getting your attention now?

Ah, but what about nuclear waste, the Achille's heel of all the nuclear-powered dreams of madmen like the one writing this blog... if we're digging out a mountain to store it (Yucca Mountain, to be exact) and France has gone 80% nuclear, then obviously, they must be buried under mountains of nuclear waste by now!

Sorry to disappoint you, but they've been recycling nuclear waste...

How is that possible? Because all "spent" nuclear fuel rods contain large ammounts of unused nuclear fuel.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf69.html

"Most of it - about 96% - is uranium at less than 1% U-235 (often 0.4 - 0.8%), and up to 1% is plutonium. Both can be recycled as fresh fuel, saving some 30% of the natural uranium otherwise required. The materials potentially available for recycling (but locked up in stored used fuel) could conceivably run the US reactor fleet of about 100 GWe for almost 30 years with no new uranium input."

in other words, 97% of what we bury as nuclear waste is perfectly good, still unstable (fissile) uranium atoms, leaving the door open to extract perfectly good, still unstable (fissile) uranium atoms from "spent" fuel rods, to make a brand-new fuel rod!

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf40.html

"France chose the closed fuel cycle at the very beginning of its nuclear program, involving reprocessing used fuel so as to recover uranium and plutonium for re-use and to reduce the volume of high-level wastes for disposal. Recycling allows 30% more energy to be extracted from the original uranium and leads to a great reduction in the amount of wastes to be disposed of. Overall the closed fuel cycle cost is assessed as comparable with that for direct disposal of used fuel, and preserves a resource which may become more valuable in the future."

And here's where the really amazing example of American idiocy comes into play: we (irony time!) chose not to reprocess our uranium! Because of fear weapons-grade nuclear fuel might end up lying around the country to fall into the wrong hands.

But Europe did. So now we have this dreadful reprocessed nuclear material all over France, where (double irony time!) there's a large Arab Muslem population, some of whom are the Koran-waving extremists... but we decided to curse ourselves with truckloads of half-spent nuclear fuel because we figured, that well... being a security-minded society and the greatest military might in the world, we couldn't protect that sort of stuff from falling into the wrong hands on our own soil even if we tried. (I'm not even going to waste another word on the irrationality of that!)

The point is, with this "unamerican" nuclear fuel reprocessing the French have been using... all our our nuclear "waste" sitting ready to be forever buried, could be recycled by the same method, since it was never reprocessed in the first place!

Oh, and just to drive home that we as Americans could make nuclear power work on the same scale it has for France, guess where the technology for the French nuclear plants came from? You see, the success of the French nuclear power program has been because they chose a single nuclear power plant design, and then "copy-pasted" it all over the landscape... and you'll never guess where that single design for all French nuclear plants came from... (triple irony time!)

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/readings/french.html

"Ironically, the French nuclear program is based on American technology. After experimenting with their own gas-cooled reactors in the 1960s, the French gave up and purchased American Pressurized Water Reactors designed by Westinghouse. Sticking to just one design meant the 56 plants were much cheaper to build than in the US. Moreover, management of safety issues was much easier: the lessons from any incident at one plant could be quickly learned by managers of the other 55 plants. The "return of experience" says Mandil is much greater in a standardized system than in a free for all, with many different designs managed by many different utilities as we have in America."

A supply of clean energy, enough to last us for centuries, from resources on our own soil... It's not science-fiction, it's the road not taken.