Though still cloaked in fathomless irrationality, nuclear power is emerging once again from the shadows of its many catastrophes to position itself as a major player in the efforts to reduce or stabilize the causes of radical climate change.
According to the World Nuclear Association, some 55 new reactors are under construction around the globe, mostly in China, India, and Russia. Four to six new reactors are almost ready to come online in the United States, adding to the 92 reactors still active at the 54 commercially operated nuclear power plants mostly in the northeast part of the country.
Nukes are being sold to us as the major non-intermittent, stable source of energy with no greenhouse gas emissions. And, as such, nuclear power is portrayed as the ideal steady power source in an era soon to be weaned from oil and gas and dominated by intermittent solar and wind and other renewable technologies.
But to contend that nuke energy generation is CO2 free is yet another half-truth spun by nuclear lobbyists. The fuel for every truck, every piece of construction machinery, every gig of energy used to build a reactor, not to mention every drop of lubrication all come from fossil fuels. And let’s not dwell on Chernobyl, Rocky Flats, Fukushima, Three Mile Island, Church Rock or the hundreds of other “unintended consequences” associated with the use and manufacture of nuclear materials. They speak for themselves. Nor shall we delve into the nagging worry of nuclear weapons proliferation and the theft of radioactive material by rogue states and terrorist organizations.
Although the nuclear energy lobby doesn’t want us to think so, there are many other ways, and far less expensive and less dangerous ways, to mitigate the “intermittency problem” of solar, wind, and tidal energy, ways that make it clear that the tremendous risks involved in nuclear energy need not be taken — if the
nuclear industrial complex can be politically overcome, and renewable engineering given a decent chance to prove itself.
Nuclear risk is not some distant or hypothetical issue for the Land of Enchantment. The current resurrection of the nuclear power industry has a direct impact on the health and safety of our people. New Mexico could end up being the repository for most if not the all the highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel rods in the nation.
Last week, the Albuquerque Journal reported that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is getting close to “issuing a license to Holtec International for an interim nuclear waste storage facility on private land between Carlsbad and Hobbs.” Initially, the $2.4 billion project will house domestic spent fuel rods in some 500 underground stainless steel canisters on the 1,000 acre site. If this is allowed to happen now, chances are that more spent nuclear fuel rods — many, many more —are sure to come our way. And we all can guess what the euphemism “interim” might actually mean in this time of political chaos.
According to Chemical Engineering News there are more than 90,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel from commercial reactors stored at the 92 commercial nuclear reactors currently operating across the country. The first phase of the Holtec project could hold about 8,680 metric tons hot waste, all shipped in by rail, the Journal said. Google estimates that the 90,000 metric tons breaks down into something on the order of 30 million spent fuel rods. The Carlsbad Current Argus figures that if the Holtec project is allowed to expand over the years, it could store more than 100,000 metric tons of nuclear waste. It doesn’t take a genius to do the math.
Holtec’s most avid support comes from economic development interests in Republican southern New Mexico, which represents a distinct electoral minority. But once again, it seems as if an anti-democratic minority-rule political reality is infecting our decision making, even when such a minority has no control of any branch of state government here. Southern New Mexico could be about to impose its political will on the rest of us. It wants New Mexico to store spent fuel from reactors mostly from states east of the Mississippi. New Mexico, of course, has no nuclear power plants in its territory.
There is, as one would expect, ferocious environmental and Democratic opposition to the Holtec project. The Governor, the Congressional delegation and most Democratic state legislators all worry that with no permanent storage sites on the horizon anywhere else in the country, New Mexico will become the perpetual home of this terribly dangerous stuff and, along with the Waste Isolation Pilot Project and all of its plutonium waste, turn that part of the state into a profoundly toxic nuclear graveyard. Governor Lujan Grisham has gone so far as to call the plan “economic malpractice,” favoring one highly controversial industry over already existing oil and gas, dairy and ranching interest in the area. New Mexico lawmakers also oppose a similar effort to store high-level nuclear waste at a Waste Control Specialists site in Andrews, Texas near our western border.
The Southwest Alliance to Save Our Future, with membership from across the state, has characterized the Holtec Project as an act of “environmental injustice,” charging it with burdening people of color here with high-level nuclear waste that is “one of the most dangerous substances on the planet.”
“Our land could be contaminated for generations, destroying our way of life (ranching, agriculture, oil industries, tourism) as we know it,” an Alliance news release “fact sheet” contends. The fact sheet says that not only are Holtec’s canisters “susceptible to cracking,” but that creating a so-called “temporary facility” could “result in double exposure” because when a permanent site is found all the waste here will have to be moved out, again by rail.
It’s never made much sense to me to go to all the trouble to produce energy by boiling water with highly toxic radioactive fuel rods to release steam to drive turbines. It can take more than ten years to build a reactor at a cost of $6 to $9 billion each. With luck, reactors last for 40 or so years. When you dismantle them, you have to contend with safely storing their radioactively contaminated components.
And if something should wrong while they’re up and running — if there’s a meltdown, an explosion, an earthquake, a tsunami, an act of sabotage — then massive amounts of long-lived radioactive poison could be released into the environment.
Is this a rational way to make steam? Do wind and solar generation of energy have the potential for anything even remotely like such calamitous side effects and unintended consequences? Obviously not.
There are better ways, less dangerous and less costly ways, to solve solar and wind power’s intermittency problem, without adding more CO2 to the atmosphere. It’s just that non-technical general media isn’t talking about them much.
Scientific American ten years ago published a piece entitled “Solution to Renewable Energy’s Intermittency Problem: More Renewable Energy.” The essay, written by Nathanael Massey, says that “by 2030, scaled-up green power could meet the total demands of a large (electric) grid 99.9 percent of the time, according to new research from the University of Delaware.” The other one-tenth of one percent (or four days out of a four-year study) could be made up from small scale battery storage, he wrote.
What’s required is “scaling up renewable generation capacity to seemingly excessive levels — more than three times the needed load, in some instances.” That “proved more cost-effective than scaling up storage capacity, due to the high systems costs” associated with such storage.
That may seem like a lot of overbuilding, but it’s in line with the over production of fossil fuels needed to keep a grid system running constantly. “If you think about it,” said Willett Kerptom of the University of Delaware, fossil fuel “power plants burn three times the amount of fuel energy needed to produce their energy output. You burn three units of coal to get one unit of electricity” plus all the greenhouse gas emissions.
In a 2022 piece from Stanford University’s Mark Z. Jacobson wrote that it’s entirely possible “to make the transition to 100% clean, renewable energy,” and avoid blackouts, keeping an electricity grid “stable every minute of every day … by taking advantage of multiple tools that are already available.” Basically, you combine the full range of renewable electricity-generating technologies” from onshore and offshore wind turbines, solar photovoltaics, concentrated solar power plants, geothermal plants, and hydropower plants.” This full range is known collectively as wind-water-solar (WWS) technologies.
Jacobson explains that “we can make a WWS-supplied grid stable” by not only using a full array of renewables, but by combining wind and solar energies, because they are “complementary in that the sun often shines when the wind isn’t blowing, and vice versa. Thus, combining wind and solar smooths the power supplied with using wind or solar alone. Similarly, combining wind or solar energy from distant facilities (in different time and climate zones) can average over productivity lulls in particular locations.” The location of wind farms is also important. Offshore wind is “usually less variable than onshore wind and often peaks when electricity demand peaks.” And Jacobson says that a minimal reliance on storage technologies that include batteries, and a combination of “pumped hydropower storage, flywheels, compressed air storage, and so called gravity storage” can help stabilize a grid. Battery costs have “declined 97% since 1991,” Jacobson says, and in many places “solar plus batteries is already cheaper than coal or nuclear and is replacing both.” Gravity storage refers to a growing industry which generates energy from falling substances, sometimes using permanent cranes to provide the height.
Just like using engineering ingenuity to stabilize WWS grids, the perpetual storage of highly radioactive “spent” fuel rods could use some creative thinking too. Moving all the nation’s 90,000 metric tons commercial nuclear waste to New Mexico by rail seems to me to be a dangerous and irresponsible idea. There is no pressing urgency to do so. All that toxic tonnage is already stored safely on-site at the nation’s nuclear power plants. Moving them now may be a good economic idea for Holtec, but it is a very bad environmental idea for us and one that exploits New Mexico’s poverty, our minority majority demographics and our out-of-sight-out of mind isolation.
Surely, a geologically and politically stable storage site can be found somewhere in our country. Storage technologies are as old as mining. The Onkalo Spent Nuclear Fuel Repository in Finland and similar sites in Sweden, for instance, are dug in to solid rock and are stable for millennia. It can’t possibly be that there are no rock formations in the entire United States stable enough to store nuclear waste safely. And surely the country can wait until such a site is found.
We don’t have to have Holtec’s storage plan shoved down our throats, as long as New Mexico Democrats can keep it at bay, and as long as they can retain power in this November’s election.
There is no pressing need for the Holtec Project here. The status quo is as safe as anything having to do with radioactive waste can be.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
If the waste is put at Holtec, it will never leave New Mexico.
Once again we are subjected to lies and half truths meant to convince us of things that are against our best interests. Thank you, V. B., for explaining this so well. I always remember hearing someone who had been part of designing the containers Westinghouse constructed to carry nuclear waste to WIPP saying they were “guaranteed to be safe.” Days later we read of the first in a string of accidents. Like global warming itself, opponents to safety must reconsider what they are doing to all of us–themselves included.
V.B., well said. Thank you!
Excellent reportage! Before I retired recently as editor and publisher of Corrales’ newspaper, I reported continuously on climate change –and nuclear waste storage problems– beginning in 1974. I learned about both of these societal problems while covering establishment of the United Nations Environment Program in Nairobi. Much later, as I reported on the UN climate change conferences in Paris and Glasgow, I searched for and could find no one –environmentalist, scientist or government official– who was at all concerned that the climate confrontation probably would accelerate a global shift to nuclear power and its long-term (exceedingly long-term) implications for New Mexico. So thank you, V.B., for raising these issues. Let’s find ways to mainstream this understanding. –Jeff Radford, Corrales
Good one, V.D.
Thank you for your brilliant piece on the madness of Holtec’s intention to dump high level waste in the SE part of NM. When there is a serious accident, all they have to do as a private company is declare bankruptcy and the state is left holding the waste. The government is not in line to clean it up. Thank you for educating people with your clear-headed expose.
Truly,
Carol Merrill