Opening - Sarah

James Hansen, a NASA climatologist and professor at Columbia University, stated in a 2009
open letter to Barack Obama, “Coal plants are factories of death… The danger is that the
minority of vehement anti-nuclear ‘anti-environmentalists’ could cause the development of
advanced safe nuclear power to be slowed such that utilities are forced to continue coal-burning
in order to keep the lights on. That is a prescription disaster.”

We live on a planet that is undergoing accelerated global warming and is now half-urban. Five of
6 of us live in the developing world, but as we migrate to cities and other urban areas, toward the
bright lights and job opportunities, what we require is electricity. It’s the most coveted and
sought-after commodity by everyone in every corner of the world, especially those destitute.
Electricity used for cities is what’s called baseload electricity. That's when energy is being
powered continuously and ceaselessly, and so far there are only three major sources of it -- coal,
gas, and nuclear. It would be wonderful if there were more options on this list, but in terms of
constant, clean, and scalable energy, solar, wind and the other renewables aren’t there yet since
they’re intermittent. Nuclear is and has been for half a century.

What happens to both nuclear and coal waste? The nuclear waste typically goes into dry cask
storage near the reactor site or, better yet, underground. Contrastingly, carbon di​oxide produced
by coal, natural gas, and solar plants, vast quantities of it, gigatons, are emitted​ into the
atmosphere where we can't retrieve them and where they are causing the environmental
predicaments that we're most concerned about. So when you total the greenhouse gases
produced in the lifetimes of these various energy sources, nuclear is slightly below wind and
hydro, further below solar, and way below, obviously, all the fossil fuels.

Wind, similar to solar, is a dilute source of energy (meaning it’s weak), and so it takes a very
large footprint on land, a very large footprint in terms of materials, 5 to 10 times that for
nuclear, and typically to get one gigawatt of electricity is on the order of 250 square miles of
wind farm. As for solar, it’s great on rooftops in minuscule proportions, but a single gigawatt is
on the order of 50 square miles of bulldozed desert (not so environmentally-friendly). A typical
gigawatt nuclear facility in the United States needs 1 square mile to operate, 1 in comparison to
250 or 50. ​Saul Griffith, the founder of Otherlab, calculated that in order for 13 clean terawatts
of energy from wind, solar, and biofuels to be generated, the size of the United States would be
required.

In countries such as Denmark and Germany, in an effort to utilize more wind and solar power,
they have quite literally run out of space and their power lines have been overloaded, thus
forcing them to revert back to coal and natural gas as their sources of energy. Nuclear can
compete with fossil fuels and coal, while solar and the other renewables don’t stand a chance.
That’s why they’re being consumed by coal production, and why when we invest in solar, we’re
just investing in coal. As a result of solar and wind producing energy sporadically and
infrequently, as we strive to implement into our lives these so-called “better” alternatives to
fossil fuels, we are, in reality, signing up for more fossil fuel burning and coal production.

With regards to time, since we’re running out of it global-warming-wise, it takes 5 years to ship
all the materials needed, design, construct, acquire all the permits necessary, and initiate a
nuclear power plant. For a solar power plant, it takes anywhere between 3 to 5 years, and wind
between 2 to 5. So, evidently, there’s not much of a difference if any at all. We’re not wasting our
time and we’re not waiting for nuclear power. It’s standing by waiting for us to use it. As for
expenses, yes it’s true nuclear power is more costly -- 50 times more than solar and 25 more
than wind. Yet what’s also true is that every month, a nuclear power plant generates
419,040,000 kilowatt-hours, while a solar plant generates, in a month, 858, 500 kilowatt-hours.
We’re paying 50 times as much for nearly 500 times as much energy. The only obstacle we must
now overcome is the illogical fear-mongering and alarmism that occurs on the anti-nuclear,
anti-environmentalist side.

There have been, as the opposing side will relay to you, approximately 100 nuclear accidents
from the use of nuclear power, most of which, they’ll tell you were serious. Yet, what they define
as “serious,” and what the government defines as “serious” is at least 1 life lost or more than
$50,000 worth of property damage. What about the 150 people in the United States and much
more elsewhere that die yearly as a direct result of wind farms (due to maintenance activities
and such)? What about the 440 that die solely because of rooftop solar plants every year? The
1,400 because of hydropower? The 4,000 because of natural gas, and the 100,000 because of
coal? In comparison to 150, 440, 1,400, and 100,000, every year 90 people die on account of
nuclear power. What about the $297 billion we dedicate to maintaining and repairing renewable
energy plants every year, in comparison to the $31.7 billion we spend on nuclear plants?

Three large-scale accidents involving nuclear power reactors have occurred since the onset of
commercial nuclear power in the mid-1950s: Three-Mile Island in Pennsylvania, Chernobyl in
Ukraine, and Fukushima in Japan. The partial meltdown of the Three-Mile Island reactor in
March of 1979, while a disaster for the owners of the Pennsylvania plant, released a very
minimal quantity of radiation to the surrounding population. As for Chernobyl, it was easily the
worst nuclear accident in history. 29 disaster relief workers died of acute radiation exposure in
the immediate aftermath of the accident. In the past 30 years, UNSCEAR -- the United Nations
Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, composed of senior scientists from 27
member states -- has observed and reported at regular intervals on the health effects of the
Chernobyl accident. It has identified “​no long-term health consequences​” to populations
exposed to the Chernobyl fallout except for thyroid cancers in residents of Belarus, Ukraine, and
western Russia who were present during the time of the incident and who were not evacuated.
By 2008, UNSCEAR ​had attributed​ some 6,500 excess cases of thyroid cancer in the Chernobyl
region to the accident, with 15 deaths. That presents a total of 44 deaths owing to the Chernobyl
incident.
These statistics are so low that they must seem intentionally minimized, yet they are the
peer-reviewed products of extensive investigation by an international scientific agency of the
United Nations. They indicate that even the worst possible accident at a nuclear power plant --
the complete meltdown and burnup of its radioactive fuel — was far less destructive than other
major industrial accidents across the past century. During the accident in Japan at Fukushima
Daiichi in March of 2011 radiation exposure beyond the station grounds was very limited and, in
actuality, more people died as a result of the evacuation than the radiation. It’s only sensible,
from a risk management standpoint, to agree that the risks of an overheating planet outweigh
the risks of a nuclear incident, and that further, the occurrence of another nuclear incident
similar in severity to Chernobyl or Fukushima, or rather, the occurrence of a “serious” nuclear
incident at all, with today’s modified and tested reactors, is impossible.

Nuclear power releases ​less radiation​ into the environment than any other major energy source.
The worst offender is coal. It produces energy at 100 times the radiation of nuclear energy. And,
as we’ve discussed, calling upon solar power or the other renewables is equivalent to calling
upon coal production.

As for nuclear power’s association with nuclear weapons, most countries participate in
international initiatives designed to limit any proliferation. The international safeguards system
has since 1970 successfully prevented the diversion of fissile materials into weapons, and its
scope has been widened to address undeclared nuclear activities and accidents, and also to any
sort of deliberate reactor attack by a terrorist group.

In terms of the productive manufacturing of weapons, the best disarmament tool so far is
nuclear energy, seeing as 10% of American electricity comes from decommissioned warheads
converted into nuclear. The new generation of reactors is rather small, around 10 to 125
megawatts, and can be used to power data centers, factories, and homes without occupying
much space or necessitating much construction time and expenses. These reactors could easily
be our carbon-free future and the majority of them are already out there being implemented
safely and productively.

You don’t have to be pro-nuclear power to understand that it’s much more effective than solar,
geothermal, wind, and hydroelectric power, you just have to understand basic arithmetic. The
capability of the sun shining, the wind blowing, and the rain falling simply isn’t enough. If we
want to keep our lights on, we’ll put into effect a solution that generates energy all the time and
one, because of its unpredictability doesn’t force us to revert back to coal, natural gas, and other
fossil fuels -- the root of the global warming plight we’re striving to remedy. This arithmetic
problem will not just disappear. At this rate, we’re not going to produce an adequate amount of
energy from renewables ever. The opposing side will claim, as they have been for decades, that
in 2 years, 5, 10, we’d be amazed at the innovations in solar and wind power, and thus wouldn’t
need nuclear power to come and save us. It’s been over a century, and where are any of those
innovations? We require nuclear since solar and wind and the other renewables are unreliable
and inconsistent, and they’re not being ameliorated, unlike nuclear which has ​been developing
and improving for the past few decades and is now an ideal energy source. Nuclear deserves
better than the anti-nuclear prejudices and fears that have plagued it. It’s a valuable, an
irreplaceable, part of the solution to the greatest energy threat in the history of humankind.

Rebuttals - Elan

Response to MC question
Rebuttal to Ezra’s response
Second rebuttal

- Fuel is available

Fuel can be unearthed in the form of uranium from seawater and there is also
plenty of uranium in granite. Either way, there’s also more cheap uranium
extracted from conventional uranium ores. Fuel is not an issue, since uranium is
available plentifully, and several thousand years in the future, when it won’t be,
we still have seawater and various elements to extract it from.

- Mining nuclear energy not problematic

According to UNSCEAR, the hazards of uranium mining are exceedingly slim, if existent
at all. There have been no deaths reported in association with mining. Besides,
nowadays, uranium is predominantly being mined from seawater and granite, where the
workers are introduced to approved, more than decent working environments.

- Why there is no time lag between planning and operation,

takes little time and resources to construct a nuclear plant:

All reactors. Although most are under the impression that it takes an outlandishly prolonged
amount of time to design and construct a nuclear power plant, in reality, it takes a mere 5 years
until one has received all of the obligatory permits and is in operational order. First of all, this is
a reduced time compared to that of the twenty years it once took for the same processes to be
carried out with older nuclear power plants, and, only minimally greater than that of solar and
the other renewables, if greater at all. For solar, it takes between 3 to 5 years and wind between 2
to 5. There were regulations put into place before and after the Three Mile Island meltdown that
resulted in plant startup delays of many years, but as nuclear reactors have been modified over
the course of the past few decades, there have also been ​new regulations​ put into place by the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission (Combined Construction and Operating License) that
guarantee if a plant is built as planned, it will be allowed to operate immediately, which avoids
the potentially time consuming hearings that can be associated with solar and the other
renewables.​ ​The production of nuclear energy uses 760 metric tons per TWh and 160 of steel.
That’s 340 tons of concrete less than geothermal, 7,240 less than wind, and 13,240 less than
hydro. It’s also 1,640 less tons of steel than wind, 3,140 less than geothermal, and 7,740 less
than Solar.

- Radioactive waste can be stored safely and effectively, no

risk of it being exposed

The thing about nuclear waste is that it’s the only waste from electricity production that is safely
contained anywhere. All of the other waste for electricity goes into the environment including
from coal, natural gas and, believe it or not, solar panels. There’s no plan to recycle solar panels
outside of the EU. That means that all of our solar in the United States will join the waste
stream. And that waste contains heavy toxic metals like chromium, cadmium, and lead. So how
much toxic solar waste is there? Well, to get a sense for that, let’s look at how much more
materials are required to produce energy from solar and wind compared to nuclear. 16,000
tonnes per terawatt hour of steel, fuel, glass, concrete, and cement are used for solar, 14,000 for
hydropower, 10,000 for wind, 5,000 for geothermal, and less than 1,000 tonnes for nuclear. As
a result, solar actually produces 200 to 300 times more toxic waste than nuclear.

- Can the radioactive waste leak?

No. It has never and will never. It just sits either near the reactor site or underground being
monitored, not leaking. The U.S. Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, New Mexico
currently stores low-level and transuranic military waste and could store commercial nuclear
waste in a 2-kilometer thick bed of crystalline salt. The salt formation extends from southern
New Mexico all the way northeast to southwestern Kansas. It could ​easily accommodate​ the
entire world’s nuclear waste for the next thousand years. Finland is even further advanced in
carving out a permanent repository in granite bedrock 400 meters under Olkiluoto, an island in
the Baltic Sea off the nation’s west coast. It ​expects to begin​ permanent waste storage in 2023.

● In 2015, there was a natural gas leak in Aliso Canyon, California. So much methane gas
was released, it was the equivalent of putting half a million cars on the road.
● Fun fact, in Paducah, Kentucky, there’s this huge government facility that has enough
nuclear waste in it to run the United States for 125 years.
● Innovations are also being made regarding fuel. In the past 30 years, we have developed
different types of it which cannot melt. Fuel pebbles designed to be their own
 self-contained systems have been created. If a power failure does happen, the pebbles
empty into a holding tank where they cool down on their own and there is no need for
backup generators or water.

- The cost is not so expensive and can be managed

As we mentioned before, the cost of nuclear power is decreasing rapidly (24.6% in the last
decade) while the cost of renewable energy is increasing (approximately 17.2% in the last
decade) due to new tarrifs, the disappearance of key tax incentives, and space limitation. Costs
for existing plants are predictable and don’t fluctuate much year-to-year, which can be very
useful if thinking about a power generation portfolio that mitigates future risks. One really great
attribute about existing nuclear plants is that we’ve, for the most part, already paid the large cost
of constructing them. Further, every month, a nuclear power plant generates 419,040,000
kilowatt-hours, while a solar plant generates, in a month, 858, 500 kilowatt-hours. We’re paying
50 times as much for nearly 500 times as much energy. There’s also bountiful funding for
nuclear energy. The trillions of dollars that are invested in coal power plants per year, just the
tiniest fraction of those trillions, could be better invested in nuclear, with which we would
generate cheaper, cleaner, safer, superior energy.

- There is no weapons proliferation risk

If there were any chance that more nuclear energy increased the risk of nuclear war, we would
all be against it. Yet, we believe that diplomacy is almost always the right solution. People say
what about North Korea? Korea proves the point. In order to get nuclear power — and it’s been
this way for 50 years — you have to agree not to get a weapon. That’s the deal. South Korea
wanted nuclear power. They agreed not to get a weapon, and they don’t have a weapon. North
Korea wanted nuclear power. We didn’t let them have it, and they got a bomb. They are testing
missiles that can hit Japan and soon will be able to hit us in the United States. So if you’re
looking for evidence that nuclear energy leads to bombs or warheads you can’t find it in Korea or
anywhere else.

The IAEA is the international organization that monitors nuclear facilities and materials and
safeguards any possibility of weapon proliferation. States that are party to the ​Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty​ (NPT) as non-nuclear-weapon states are required to sign a
comprehensive safeguards agreement​ with the IAEA. That agreement allows the IAEA
inspection and monitoring rights in order to verify the state’s reports of its declared nuclear
material and activities. As such, it undertakes said regular inspections of civil nuclear facilities
and audits the movement of nuclear materials through them. These safeguards are backed by
diplomatic and economic measures.​ ​New reactor designs have features of ​passive safety​, such as
the flooding of the reactor core without active intervention by reactor operators. Further, the US
Nuclear Regulatory Commission​ now also requires new reactor license applications to consider
security during the design stage. The IAEA has an ​Additional Protocol​ that can be voluntarily
added to an IAEA safeguards agreement. ​As of ​December 2017​, 147 states have signed
safeguards agreements with the IAEA including an Additional Protocol, and 132 of those
agreements are currently in force.

- There is no meltdown risk/Chernobyl and Fukushima were

very much blown out of proportion, why a nuclear
incident with today’s reactors is impossible

Princeton University nuclear expert Harold A. Feivson, in his essay titled “A Skeptic’s View of
Nuclear Energy, wrote, “A future nuclear capacity of 1,000 reactors worldwide would be faced
with a 1 percent chance of such an accident each 100-year period.” This is much less than
natural gas, hydroelectric, coal, and in some cases, solar and wind power. Besides, a nuclear
incident doesn’t automatically mean hazardous radiation is being leaked and people are dying -
it just means that some technical component of the reactor malfunctioned and needs to be
repaired and refined. It’s not as if solar and wind farms are never defective. In fact, they
malfunction much more often than nuclear reactors and plants do, and that is precisely why
their mortality rate is higher. Merely rooftop photovoltaic solar panels are 5 times as deadly as
nuclear plants and wind farms just under 2 times as deadly. Nuclear results in 0.2 to 1.2 deaths
per 10 terrwatthours, while natural gas results in 0.3 to 1.6, hydroelectric 1 to 1.6, and coal 2.8 to
32.7. While nuclear power has caused less than a few thousand deaths total, coal kills 800,000
people every year and solar 440 every terawatt hour.

Besides, both the Fukushima and Chernobyl reactors were slide-rules - a type of plant that
becomes unsafe if you ever shut the power off, one that is not being at all used today.

Three Mile Island​ - According to the ​U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission​, “The
approximately 2 million people around TMI-2 (the name of the reactor) during the accident are
estimated to have received an average radiation dose of only about 1 millirem above the usual
background dose. To put this into context, exposure from a chest X-ray is about 6 millirem and
the area’s natural radioactive background dose is about 100-125 millirem per year… ​In spite of
serious damage to the reactor, the actual release had negligible effects on the physical health of
individuals or the environment.”
Chernobyl​ ​- Chernobyl is the worst nuclear accident we’ve ever had - there was a nuclear
reactor without a containment dome and it was on fire. It was just raining radiation down on
everybody. It was a terrible accident. And yet, ​when the United Nations Scientific Committee on
the Effects of Atomic Radiation calculated the death toll of the incident, what they concluded
was that 29 disaster relief workers died of acute radiation syndrome and 15 of thyroid cancer
over the course of the last 25 years, totaling the mortality rate at 44.

The Chernobyl incident was far less destructive than many other energy plant catastrophes,
including a number of renewable plants. Bhopal, in India, where at least ​3,800 people died
immediately​ and many thousands more were sickened when 40 tons of methyl isocyanate gas
leaked from a pesticide plant. And, Henan Province, in China, where at least ​26,000 people
drowned​ following the failure of a major hydroelectric dam in a typhoon. This rate is lower than
the average fatalities from accidents involving a majority of other energy sources. For instance,
the Chernobyl rate is nine times lower than the death rate from liquefied gas and 47 times lower
than from hydroelectric stations. In 2012, there were 90 deaths related to nuclear power, while
hydroelectric had 4,000 in that same year.

Thyroid cancer is the best cancer to contract because hardly anybody dies due to it. It’s highly
treatable. You can have a surgery to remove the thyroid gland and take thyroxine, which is a
synthetic substitute. In fact, most of the people who died were in remote rural areas where they
couldn’t receive the treatment they needed. And there’s no evidence of any increase in thyroid
cancer outside of the three nations most affected, Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. There’s no
evidence of an effect by Chernobyl on fertility, birth malformations, or infant mortality; nor for
causing an increase in adverse pregnancy outcomes or stillbirths; nor for any genetic effects.
And lastly, and most surprisingly, there’s no evidence of any increase in non-thyroid cancer
including among the cohort who put out the Chernobyl fire and cleaned it up afterward.

“The average effective doses” of radiation from Chernobyl, ​UNSCEAR also concluded​, “due to
both external and internal exposures, received by members of the general public during
1986-2005 [were] about 30 mSv for the evacuees, 1 mSv for the residents of the former Soviet
Union, and 0.3 mSv for the populations of the rest of Europe.” A sievert is a measure of
radiation exposure, a millisievert is one-one-thousandth of a sievert. A full-body CT scan
delivers about 10-30 mSv. A U.S. resident receives an average background radiation dose,
exclusive of radon, of about 1 mSv per year.

Fukushima​ ​- ​As for the Fukushima accident, besides for one death due to radiation, no
harmful health effects were found in the 195,345 residents living in the vicinity of the plant who
were screened by the end of May 2011. ​Meanwhile, 1,500 people died being pulled out of nursing
homes, hospitals — it was insane. It was a panic. The Japanese government shouldn’t have done
what they did, as they violated every standard of what you’re meant to do in the midst of an
accident.​ You’re supposed to shelter-in-place. In fact, by pulling people out of their homes and
moving them around outside they actually exposed more people to more radiation. Moreover,
this has to be put in comparison to the other happenings, such as the 20,000 who died instantly
from drowning. ​So while there was no increase in thyroid cancer, there was the stress and fear
from believing you were contaminated despite the evidence showing that that wasn’t the ​case at
all.

Some scientists did an interesting study. They took a bunch of school children from France to
Fukushima and had them wear dosimeters, which is what we call geiger counters now. You can
see here that when those kids go through the airport security system their radiation exposures
spiked. When they flew from Paris to Tokyo on the airplane their radiation exposures spiked.
They went through the French embassy’s security system and their radiation exposures spiked.
When they went to the city of Tomioka, which received a lot of radiation from the accident, it
was just a tiny blip compared to the security systems. Let’s put this in an even larger context. If
you live in an urban area or metropolis such as London, Berlin, or New York, you increase your
mortality risk by 2.8 percent, just from air pollution alone. If you live with someone who smokes
cigarettes your mortality risk increases 1.7 percent. But if you were someone who cleaned up
Chernobyl, your mortality risk increased just one percent. That’s just because there wasn’t as
much radiation exposure as people thought. People from Colorado have an annual exposure to
radiation about the same as those who live near Chernobyl. Only eight percent of Russians
surveyed accurately predicted the death toll from Chernobyl, and zero percent accurately
predicted the death toll from Fukushima.Meanwhile, there are seven million premature deaths
per year from air pollution and the evidence against particulate matter only gets stronger. That’s
why every major journal that looks at it concludes that nuclear is the safest way to make reliable
electricity.

- Much less, if no carbon dioxide emitted into the

atmosphere for nuclear in comparison to solar and the
other renewables

According to the Energy Information Administration, nuclear power is the largest clean energy
source in the United States. It produces more carbon-free electricity than all other energy
sources combined.​ ​When Vermont’s Yankee plant closed, there was a 650,000 metric-ton
increase in carbon emissions within just two months. Moreover, ​nuclear energy provides more
than 96 percent of New Jersey’s clean energy. If New Jersey were to lose its nuclear energy, its
clean energy shortfall would be equal to the power used by 2.2 million homes—more than 56
percent of the homes in the state.​ In 2018, Pennsylvania’s nuclear power plants prevented more
than 57 million metric tons of carbon emissions which is the equivalent of taking 12 million cars
off the road. The saved social cost of carbon is more than $2.6 billion annually, according to the
federal government’s evaluation.

- No, space isn’t an issue.

The typical 1,o0o megawatt nuclear facility in the United States takes around 1 square mile to
operate. The Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) reported that wind farms require up to 400 times
and solar photovoltaic plants 450 times more land area than nuclear energy to produce the same
amount of electricity. Both solar and wind farms require covering a very widespread amount of
land with solar panels and wind turbines, and then there’s also the dilemma of building large
and durable overhead transmission lines to bring all that electricity from the countryside into
the city. On the other hand, nuclear power more commonly travels through underground
transmission lines that are both less expensive and less space-consuming. In terms of solar and
wind farms, constructing them is not like constructing any other farm or reactor site: you must
first clear the whole area of landscape and wildlife, killing off animals and annihilating their
habitats.

A lot of small modular reactors are showing promise such as Toshiba 4S which is “super safe,
small, and simple;” the Russian barge-mounted reactor which is water-cooled; the SSTAR which
is easily portable; the Hyperion which is astonishingly inexpensive; the NuScale which includes
a steam generator; the mPower which also includes a steam generator; the Arc-100 which is an
integral fast reactor and actually burns nuclear waste; and Bill Gate’s TerraPower reactor which
has a lifetime supply of fuel, uses depleted uranium as opposed to enriched so it can’t be used for
nuclear weapons, and requires refueling only once every decade. Further, NASA has successfully
tested a nuclear reactor that works in space. They put it through stress tests to ensure that it
would operate safely even if systems failed or astronauts had to shut it down. For now, this
vision of nuclear power in space will have to wait until humans have enough experience in space
to develop it there. But it is a promising, extraordinary prospect.

- Nuclear reactors do not corrode or decay

There are two problems regarding corrosion in nuclear reactors: 1. stress corrosion cracking and
activity build-up and 2. the build-up of activated corrosion products onto the reactor cooling
system surfaces. Both of these problems can and are being solved via one method: using high
Nickel and Molybdenum content, experimenting with Manganese and other additive content,
and reducing Iron and Chromium content has proven to be entirely effective for reducing
corrosion in not merely Molten Salt and lightweight reactors, but actually all nuclear reactors.
This is the method that is now being applied to modern reactors and also the older,
20th-century ones to prevent any further stress cracking. It’s the reason why we do not witness
any corrosion in essentially any reactors.

Helpful links:
- https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2019/01/f58/Ultimate%20Fast%20Facts%20
Guide-PRINT.pdf
- Environmental Progress | The Complete Case for Nuclear
Closing - Zac

Each and every one of us uses different kinds of energy: heating, materials, food, engines.
Energy is the miracle at the core of the modern lifestyle. But, as a result of our misusing some
forms of it and neglecting others, we are, in real-time, living amid an environmental emergency,
a climate change catastrophe. The challenge of our time is how to acquire plentiful, reliable
energy and electricity without destroying the climate.

In 2005, Stewart Brand declared that we should rethink nuclear power. In the 1970s and 80s, he
was the most passionate and active advocate for solar, wind, and the other renewables, but
essentially, he said, “Look, we’ve been trying to implement solar for a very long time and yet we
receive less than half of a percent of our electricity globally from solar, about 2 percent from
wind, and the majority of our clean energy comes from nuclear.” Since it produces energy
through nuclear fission as opposed to chemical burning, nuclear power generates baseload
electricity with nearly no output of carbon. Compared to coal, natural gas, and even the other
renewables, nuclear power produces virtually no greenhouse gas emissions.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, nuclear power produces 4 times
less carbon dioxide than solar does, 3.2 times less than geothermal, and 2 times less than
hydropower. Furthermore, nuclear provides an extensive output of power - 24 hours, seven days
a week (approximately 93% of the time). While solar and wind generate energy about 10 to 30%
of the time - they’re intermittent, and so we’re dependant on variables such as the weather and
time of day for them to produce the power we so desperately need. They’re not consistent, not
dependable, not scalable, and thus not usable. What’s interesting is that when you look at
countries that have deployed different kinds of clean energies, specifically solar and wind, there
are none that have done so at a pace concurrently with combatting the climate crisis.

In general, clean energy has been increasing. However, the percentage of global electricity
derived from clean energy sources, it’s actually been on the decline from 36 to 31 percent. And if
we care about climate change, we have to climb in the opposite direction to 100 percent of our
electricity from clean energy sources, as quickly as possible. Now, you might wonder, “Five
percentage points of global electricity can’t be too much.” Well, it turns out to be quite a bit. It’s
the equivalent of 60 nuclear plants the size of Diablo Canyon, a nuclear plant in California, or
900 solar farms the size of Topaz, which is one of the largest solar farms in the world also in
California. A substantial part of the dilemma is simply that fossil fuels are increasing much
faster than clean energy.

But there’s also something else going on, which is that one of those clean energy sources, in
particular, has actually been on the decline in absolute terms, and that’s nuclear. You can see its
generation has declined 7% over the last 10 years, and you hear a lot of talk about how that
doesn’t really matter seeing as solar and wind will make up the difference. But the data says
otherwise. When you combine all the electricity from solar and wind, you see it actually scarcely
constitutes half of the decline from nuclear. In Europe, they’re exercising a hefty amount of
clean energy, but then again, European emissions have actually been escalating since 2009. We
were promised that by 2020 their climate commitments would have been met, and evidently,
they haven’t.

When the sun’s not shining, the wind’s not blowing, and the rain isn’t pouring, we still need
power for our hospitals, homes, cities, and factories. And while batteries have made some minor
improvements recently, in reality, they’re just never going to be as efficient as the electrical grid.
Every time you put electricity into a battery and take it out, you lose about 20 to 40 percent of
the power. That’s why when we attempt to manage all the solar we’ve brought online, when the
sun goes down and people come home from work and turn on their air conditioners and their
TV sets, and every other appliance in the house, we resort to a lot of fossil fuel backup.

What we’ve been doing, counterintuitively and cataclysmically, is stuffing a lot of coal and
natural gas into the environment, and, as we know, this is not the safest or soundest approach
toward generating energy, and why when we invest in solar and the other renewables we’re
really just investing in the burning of fossil fuels and production of coal, natural gas, and oil.

So nuclear seems as if the perfect option, but there’s this deterrent affiliated with it, which by
now, we’re all aware of - that people really don’t like it and for no good reason. In 2015, there
was a study, a survey conducted of people around the world. And what they found was that
nuclear is actually one of the least popular forms of energy. Even oil is more popular than
nuclear. And while nuclear edges out coal, the thing is, people don’t really fear coal in the same
way that they fear nuclear, which operates on our unconscious.

So what is it that we fear? There are really 6 things. There’s the safety of the plants themselves
and the fear that they’re going to melt down and cause damage; there’s the radioactive waste and
where to store it; there’s the association with weapons; and there’s the concern of time, space,
and expense. Understandably and expectedly, engineers review and address these factors and
search for technological fixes. That’s why Bill Gates was in China developing advanced reactors
until our own fear in the U.S. prevented him from doing so. That’s why there are hundreds of
different entrepreneurs evaluating nuclear power and 50 different companies working together
striving to build more and more reactors that function off of waste, cannot melt down, and are
cheaper than coal.

Nonetheless, in most of the world, especially the developed world, we’re not discussing
constructing new reactors. We’re actually discussing taking them down before their lifetimes are
over. Germany, for instance, is pressuring its neighbors into doing just that. In the United
States, we could lose half of our reactors over the next 15 years, which would wipe out 40 percent
of the emissions reductions we’re supposed to accomplish under the Clean Power Plan. In
Japan, they took all their nuclear plants offline and replaced them with coal, natural gas, and oil
burning, which have produced the same amount of power in the same amount of time, just with
more carbon emissions, expenses, space, and mortality rates. The world is actually at risk of
losing four times more clean energy than we lost over the course of the last 10 years. We’re in a
clean energy crisis, and thus it’s reasonable that engineers are tirelessly digging for a technical
fix to the fears that people have of nuclear.

Every scientific and medical journal that analyzes nuclear power’s safety, in fact, everyone that
seriously, unbiasedly analyzes nuclear power’s safety finds nuclear is the safest way to produce
reliable power. Everybody’s frightened about the accidents. So let’s examine the accident data -
Fukushima, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island - the World Health Organization has unearthed the
same trend amongst all of them: the vast majority of harm was caused by people panicking, and
they were panicking because they were afraid. In other words, the harm that’s caused isn’t
actually caused by the reactors or the radiation. It’s caused by our fear. All of this leads to an
uncomfortable, yet factual conclusion: nuclear power has saved millions of more lives than it’s
taken.

And what about the radioactive waste? Well, the interesting reality about the waste is how little
of it there really is. If you were to take all the nuclear waste we’ve ever created in the United
States, put it within an acre of space and stack it up, it would only reach 20 feet high. And people
claim it’s poisoning us - no, it’s not. It’s just sitting there and being monitored. By contrast, the
waste that we don’t control from energy production -- we call it “pollution.” It kills seven million
people a year and it’s threatening very serious levels of global warming.

Well, what about the weapons? Perhaps the most surprising thing is that we can’t find any
examples of countries that have nuclear power and then, “Oh!” decide to go and construct a
weapon. In fact, it works the opposite. The only way we know how to dispose of large numbers of
nuclear weapons is by utilizing the plutonium in the warheads as fuel in our nuclear power
plants. Therefore, if we want to rid the world of nuclear weapons, then we’re going to require
much more nuclear power.

There’s also the concern of time, space, and expense. But as we’ve learned, nuclear power plants
take much less time, expense, and space than the other renewables.

The other side has argued that there’s this more fundamental issue at play, which is that there’s
just not enough global demand for nuclear power. We can manufacture the machines on
assembly lines and we do know how to make them inexpensive, safe, and efficient, but there’s
just not enough people who want them. The most important enterprise, if we’re going to
overcome the climate crisis, is to keep in mind that the cause of the clean energy crisis isn’t from
within our reactors, it’s from within ourselves. If we’re going to resolve the predicament of
accelerated global warming, nuclear power is the only way to generate ample amounts of
inexpensive, clean, scalable, safe, and efficient power.
Graphs:

*Opening graph
*Rebuttals graph
*Closing graph