THE CASE FOR NUCLEAR ENERGY IN THE 21ST CENTURY

THE CASE FOR NUCLEAR ENERGY IN THE 21ST CENTURY

by Amelia Tiemann ’19

Imagine an energy source that does not emit greenhouse gases and uses readily available natural fuel containing two million times more energy than coal. This energy source could be deployed anywhere, without excessive resource use, to provide reliable, always-on electricity. Most people would likely say that scaling up that energy source would be in our best interest, both to meet human energy needs and to keep climate change at bay. Well, you don’t have to use your imagination. Humans have employed this energy source for 70 years: it’s nuclear energy.

As a Bard freshman, I was unaware that nuclear fission was used for anything but the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. I certainly didn’t know that nuclear fission generates a sizable chunk of the world’s zero-carbon electricity (as of 2022, the figure was about 10 percent). In this country, there are 93 operating nuclear plants, delivering 20 percent of our clean power. But there could have been more. A 2017 article in Energies by Peter Lang showed that nearly all current emissions in highly polluting countries could have been avoided had nuclear energy plant construction maintained its pre-1970 pace. By my senior year, I was writing my Senior Project on why humanity needs nuclear fission. That knowledge shift didn’t come specifically from classes I was taking, but it did come from Bard doing what Bard does best—nurturing honest exploration of even the least-celebrated ideas.

Solar and wind farms, electric vehicles, and heat pumps are the popular “green” solutions. While they’re great options, they can’t reliably decarbonize on their own, since they rely on natural conditions and are intermittent energy sources. We still use coal and natural gas to generate baseload energy to serve as a backup when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing. Nuclear is a source of carbon-free baseload power, as is hydropower.

Nuclear plants generate a constant amount of electricity by splitting atoms of uranium, creating a fission chain reaction. Little fuel is required: a single uranium fuel pellet the size of a gummy bear contains as much energy as a ton of coal. Spent nuclear fuel is carefully monitored by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, but the total amount of waste is small—and it is the only waste from energy production that is not polluted into the environment.

Nuclear energy also requires the least amount of land of any energy source. And uranium mining is highly regulated, with the biggest risk being inhalation by mine workers of radon gas, a decay product of uranium ore. While today’s uranium mines themselves do not pose a serious threat to the public, nuclear industry has an obligation to address legacy uranium cleanup projects. More than 500 uranium mines used to exist on lands of the Navajo Nation. Although these mines have been closed since the 1980s, none of them have yet been cleaned up.

There are risks, of course. The worst nuclear accident in history, the 1986 meltdown at Ukraine’s Chernobyl nuclear power plant, tragically killed 33 people. Another 600 workers experienced elevated radiation levels. Chernobyl was the only instance of civilian deaths from nuclear energy. In Japan, the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami claimed 20,000 lives and caused two reactors at the Fukushima Daichii nuclear plant to melt down. Another 150,000 people were displaced as a result of the evacuation, which later proved an unnecessary cause of injuries, mainly to older people, as no deaths were linked to radiation from the plant. By comparison, half a million people die each year from fossil fuel burning. Renowned climate scientists James Hansen and Pushker Kharecha authored a 2013 study that found that nuclear energy had saved more than a million lives by replacing fossil fuels.

As a species, we are faced with an “energy trilemma.” Energy needs to not only be clean but also equitably distributed and reliable. The modern industrial world requires energy to meet the basic needs of a growing population without causing ecological disaster. The main priority is effective decarbonization, not creating more systems dependent on unreliable forms of energy. Lack of access to reliable electricity is also a major killer. According to the World Health Organization, 2.3 billion people still cook with harmful fuels, and 3.2 million premature deaths can be attributed to household air pollution. Including nuclear energy in the mix would give us a far better shot at achieving the transition to 100 percent clean energy by 2050, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change urges. All clean-energy options we have must be scaled enormously— especially given that electricity demand will double by 2050.

Only 30 percent of energy consumed worldwide is electricity; the rest comes from the carbon-intensive transport and industrial sectors. We need to electrify these sectors as much as possible, but we cannot replace petroleum-based fuels like Jet-A or bunker fuel with solar panels and wind farms. We still use coal to generate heat energy for industrial manufacturing, which accounts for a third of our energy use.

Advanced nuclear reactors called Small Modular Reactors, or microreactors, promise novel applications over the reactors in use today. One of these is the ability to generate high-temperature heat for use in energyintensive industrial processes. Generating this heat is not possible using intermittent sources of energy. Microreactors also could cleanly generate hydrogen for production of synthetic fuels that can be a drop-in replacement for petroleum. Many advanced reactor designs are currently under development in the US and could be deployed as soon as this decade. An outside internship during my undergraduate years served as my introduction to nuclear energy and taught me how entrenched fear kept the energy source unpopular. After President Eisenhower delivered his 1953 “Atoms for Peace” speech, pledging to pursue peaceful uses for nuclear energy, the US built dozens of reactors. That progress stalled due to a confluence of factors, including lingering sentiments from the antinuclear weapons movement during the Cold War, the environmental movement, and the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. Although no one was injured in that accident, the public was shaken, and turned against nuclear energy.

When I decided to write my Senior Project on nuclear fear and the benefits lost to society because of it, my adviser, Kris Feder (now associate professor emeritus of economics), was not particularly keen on the idea. She expected I would find it difficult to address the issue of a worst-case scenario, such as a one-in-a-million nuclear meltdown that devastates cities, kills millions, and releases enough radiation to leave large swaths of land uninhabitable. To be clear, every study suggests that this type of scenario is so unlikely that it is virtually impossible. But humans are risk averse, as Feder explained. The threat of nuclear disaster, even if extremely remote, incites an unshakeable fear in us that a far more common threat, like dying in a car crash, does not. She advised that other proven clean energy sources, like solar and batteries, simply do not come with such enormous existential stakes. This fear comes from a real place, and it’s not irrational at all given the association with weapons of mass destruction and the way fear of radiation became embedded in the public consciousness. But it might be time we reexamine the place that fear holds.

In true Bard fashion, Feder helped me see the project through, knowing I’d learn something either way. As I found out that year, the case for nuclear energy’s environmental benefits almost writes itself. I also found out that while neither I nor anyone else can “solve” the one-in-a-million scenario, I could fairly and rigorously argue about the good that this technology has already provided for humankind. Climate change, the result of our own technological advancements, will be the defining threat of the 21st century and beyond. We will need to swiftly address it using the options we have (and be wary about our ability to come up with new ones in time). When it comes to the host of technological risks we face today, it is up to the reader, the scholar, and the activist to decide which threats to pay attention to. It is up to communicators, like me, to remove the mystery.

In the years since I graduated, nuclear energy has regained acceptance and even enthusiasm. Public opinion surveys have found that most Americans are now in favor of nuclear energy. The recent release of two pro-nuclear films, Nuclear Now and Atomic Hope, also won over supporters. In 2022, Grace Stanke, a University of WisconsinMadison nuclear engineering student, won the title of Miss America. Stanke impressed judges with her passion for nuclear energy as a tool for global change. She has graduated and is now a strong voice on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram, where she advocates for nuclear education for young girls. Social media has become a major science education tool. “Nuclear influencers” like Isodope and Ms. Nuclear Energy have amassed millions of views of their informed nuclear content.

There’s also more global interest in nuclear energy. In 2023, two-dozen countries signed a US-led pledge at the 28th Conference of the Parties to triple global nuclear energy capacity by 2050. The declaration signified the largest global push for new nuclear capacity in decades.

Had Bard professors not been so openminded to the topic, I may not have ended up in my current role as a communications specialist for the American Nuclear Society. To my relief, my Senior Project panel reacted positively, and even told me that my arguments had swayed their opinions on nuclear energy. Bard helped me see that interrogating tough questions is worthwhile, which is certainly truer than ever as we work toward collective, global solutions. I have plenty of reasons to have hope.

Photo by SONGS staff/Liese Mosher