The Amherst Student • March 23, 2022
Opinion
9
Nuclear Power Really Is the Future
Photo courtesy of Pixabay
Diego Rao ’23, in response to last issue's “Seeing Double,” makes the case for the proliferation of nuclear power. He argues that new types of safer reactors are absolutely necessary in the face of the looming climate crisis. Diego Rao ’23 Contributing Writer In its previous issue, The Student published an article titled “Nuclear Power Isn’t the Future.” The piece’s author, Cole Graber-Mitchell ’22, voiced fears about poisoned air and water, dirty bombs, and persistent environmental racism, arguing that these risks outweigh the benefits of nuclear power in pursuit of a sustainable future. Yet nuclear power in fact offers greater relief from these threats than any alternative available. The climate crisis is forcing a global reckoning with how we source the energy that drives our lives and economies. Fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas must be phased out as quickly as possible if we are to avert disasters worse than those that have already struck. Renewable sources like solar, wind, and hydroelectric power are zero-emission, but they
meet only a small fraction of our energy needs; collectively, these sources provided just 7 percent of total U.S. energy consumed in 2020. Nuclear power, despite being vastly more burdened by regulation and stigma, already tops that figure at 9 percent. Simply building more solar plants and wind farms won’t cut it, in part because these energy harvesting methods are so land-intensive that they have harmful environmental impacts of their own. In addition, solar power, even with government subsidies, is still more expensive per unit of energy than nuclear power. Graber-Mitchell suggests that we close the gap between our energy demands and renewables’ capacity by reducing how much energy we use, but cutting our consumption by any significant measure is not a realistic option. Indeed, some of the crises sparked by climate change will require still more energy
to address. Droughts resulting from disturbed weather patterns will need to be answered with desalination, an energy-intensive process that turns salty seawater into fresh water that people can farm with, clean with, or simply drink. Direct carbon capture can neutralize some of the greenhouse gasses that drive the process of global warming, but this technology, too, requires vast amounts of electricity. Nuclear power offers abundant, cheap, and clean energy to meet these demands. One of the most appealing aspects of fossil fuel-based energy is the capacity to scale production up or down depending on demand, which varies constantly according to shifting circumstances. More lightbulbs are on at night than in daytime, for example, and it takes more energy to heat a building in the middle of winter than in more temperate months. This capa-
bility, known as load following, is simply impossible for solar and wind power generation; no amount of engineering will ever allow us to control whether the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. Energy storage systems can buffer some of this gap, but most storage technology uses lithium-ion batteries, which require minerals whose extraction is so brutal on the laborers and environments involved that these substances have been compared to blood diamonds. Nuclear power plants built according to modern designs, on the other hand, have load-following capabilities that are competitive with the dirty generation systems that dominate the market today. The safety of nuclear power plants is validly one of Graber-Mitchell’s core concerns. But modern designs disprove his claim that “it is pure hubris to think that technology can save
us from the danger posed by nuclear fission.” Older reactors relied on human and mechanical responses to operating conditions — both potential points of failure. Newer configurations, however, like the class of power plants known as pebble-bed reactors, leverage fundamental principles of physics to guarantee their safety. The laws of nature make it literally impossible for these sorts of plants to melt down; nothing — not human error, not natural disasters, not terrorists or foreign militaries — can turn a plant like this into Chernobyl or Fukushima. Nuclear power is based on the fissile decay of radioactive isotopes like uranium; the core, or nucleus, of an atom splits apart, releasing energy (in the form of heat, which gets converted into electricity) and free neutrons, many of which strike
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