The ban on more nuclear power is surviving

NOTE: Parts of this post are lifted from an earlier Capitol City Musings post from February 26, 2008.

Both houses of our legislature are under the control of people calling themselves DFLers. But they seem to differ on the matter of whether we should continue our ban on additional radioactive power plants [generally referred to in the media as “nuclear” power plants.

So you can choose your house and take your chances.

I side with the House of Representatives which has voted to continue the ban.

As I noted last year, electrical energy serves selfish users and nuclear energy in particular encourages deferring the actual paying of the true costs to generations well into the future. This, with modest modification for typos and style, is what I wrote then. And the link above will let you see the original post if you wish to see it.

One of the dirty secrets of electrical energy is that it is produced some distance from where it is used and we users tend to forget that there are environmental costs involved with its usage. This partly explains the popularity of hybrid cars which emit less pollution on the road, but increase whatever is going out of a power plant. In either case, there is an environmental cost, but with electricity we pass the problem on to somebody else.

Nuclear power appeals to this same selfishness. It may seem cleaner at the moment, but instead of sending the problem to a rural or exurban area, it sends the problem to future generations.

The half lives of these products are calculated to be in thousands of years. [And that just means that half of the radioactivity is gone then; the other half will take longer.] We may develop adequate secure places to hide the stuff which may survive our lifetimes and the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren, but can we be sure that we can make places secure much longer than that?

We don’t know what cataclysms may come up. And, of course, we never know what some crazy person or persons will for terroristic or mental health purposes do what.

We really need to find better ways to handle our energy needs. I don’t know if the sun and wind can ever be harnessed to do it all, but it doesn’t seem that we are even trying too hard to find out. I admit that if the sun stops shining that we would have a problem, but how we get our electricity would seem to be a minor problem under those circumstance.

We need better ways to limit use. Letting NSP or Xcel or other providers raise rates to encourage less usage will only make the providers wealthier, but somehow we need to adjust our accounting systems so that we factor in all the costs.

Maintaining a moratorium on nuclear power plants seems to be a minimal first step toward doing that.

I really don’t want to come across as an environmentalist. There are a lot of matters that "environmentalists” are getting wrong. But I do think we need to look at some of the things they raise and at things they don’t raise too.

Word choice is powerful. Just another matter to wonder about: How popular would nuclear power ever have become, had the name “radioactive power” been established instead of “nuclear power.”