By Robert Kunzig, ENVIRONMENT Executive Editor
When I was in college one of the great issues on our campus was the plan to build a nuclear power plant at nearby Seabrook, New Hampshire. A good friend of mine, after reading Thoreau’s thoughts on civil disobedience, was inspired to occupy the construction site and get himself arrested, along with 1,400 other people—that mass arrest on May 1, 1977, was one of the largest in U.S. history. The power plant got built anyway, but it took 14 years, and it was only half the originally planned size, and it was one of the last to be built in the country for a long while. In 1979 the accident at Three Mile Island stopped the U.S. nuclear industry cold.
In some ways, not much has changed. The Seabrook demonstrators were worried about nuclear meltdown, nuclear waste, nuclear proliferation, nuclear terrorism. Those concerns are still with us. But for many environmentalists, they now take a back seat to the biggest worry: climate change.
Nuclear power has a tiny carbon footprint, like wind or solar power. Its footprint on the landscape is far smaller. But as Lois Parshley writes for us this week, as a way of meeting President Biden’s goal of decarbonizing the nation’s electric grid by 2035, nuclear has an Achilles’ heel: It’s expensive and takes a long time to build. The only two U.S. reactors now under construction, at Plant Vogtle in Georgia (pictured above), are billions over budget and years behind schedule.
Help is on the way, in the form of new, smaller, safer reactor designs—but again, many years away. Meanwhile, the existing reactor fleet is aging and having trouble competing. Last Friday saw the final shutdown of the Indian Point power plant, on the Hudson River, which just a few years ago, was providing a quarter of New York City’s electricity. A lot of that will probably now come from gas—at least until the offshore wind boom kicks in.
If you just look at the numbers, nuclear is pretty safe: Far, far fewer people have died from it than from the air pollution produced by burning fossil fuels. But these choices are never just about numbers.
It’s not irrational for some people to prefer energy sources that don’t carry with them the tiny but ever-present risk of catastrophe, or the need to bury long-lasting toxins in a deep hole for our descendants to discover. Just as it’s not irrational for other people to prefer not to see a wind farm on the ridgeline outside their back window. Many roads lead to freedom from carbon pollution. All of humanity doesn’t have to choose the same one. We just all need to get there somehow.
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