opinion@dailylobo.com
As of September 16, Japan has shut down the last of its nuclear power plants for an indeterminate amount of time pending safety inspections. Due to public pressure, they do not have a set reactivation date; right now, nuclear power efforts are effectively in limbo as the Japanese government decides what to do about the nation’s nuclear reactors.
Anti-nuclear proponents may rejoice, but as of now Japan must fall back on fossil-fuel burning plants to close the power deficit left by the shutdown of those plants. Even with the recent issues with Fukushima, including the release of contaminated water into the Pacific, nuclear power still prevents more deaths than burning fossil fuels as an energy source.
Nuclear power, when properly operated with an eye toward safety and responsibility, is safe: the U.S. Navy’s nuclear fleet has never had a nuclear-related incident since launching the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine, the U.S.S. Nautilus, in 1954. 5400 reactor-years’ worth of operating time have accumulated without an incident.
Yet, we can all recite incidents that have happened at civilian plants. Three Mile Island. Cherynobl. Fukushima Daiichi. Leaving aside the Ukrainian plant — it’s something of a given that Soviet reactors weren’t well-designed back then, for those who know a bit about the topic — we’re left with Three Mile Island and Fukushima at the top of everyone’s minds.
What do these two incidents have in common versus the track record of the U.S. Navy? They were run by businesses.
Businesses have influenced several poor decisions in the nuclear field. From building a nuclear power plant atop a landfill in Michigan to keeping a failing plant active at Three Mile Island, resulting in a meltdown, businesses have caused the majority of modern nuclear incidents through negligence and the desire for cost-effectiveness at any price, especially when that price is safety. Three Mile Island is famous for releasing radioactive gas into the atmosphere — all due to improper training of its personnel and a lack of proper instrumentation in the control room to display exactly what was going on.
Business should have no hand in this industry. Properly operated and run, nuclear power is safer, less polluting and more reliable than fossil fuels for power generation. Nuclear has caused fewer deaths worldwide, even including the various Soviet failures, than fossil fuel plants.
The greatest pollutant that an average nuclear plant injects into the environment is heat — their coolant systems are designed to dump excess heat, often into nearby rivers. However, through the use of cooling towers — the tall towers billowing steam — this heat transfer is minimized.
aFossil fuel burning also produces thermal pollution, but the black smoke coming out of their towers isn’t steam, but instead excess carbon being blown into the atmosphere. It has been theorized that nuclear power, through its limited usage across the world, has prevented 1.8 million deaths from air pollution caused by coal and other fossil-fuel burning power plants.
It should come as no surprise that businesses are perfectly willing to contaminate for a buck. Back in 2011, the Business Roundtable, a group of CEOs, fought against the Environmental Protection Agency’s attempts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, claiming them as harmful to their industries — which, in corporate speak, means that it ate into their bottom lines.
To put it another way, it was perfectly fine for them to poison our world just so long as they could profit from it.
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As such, for-profit companies should have absolutely no business involving themselves in the nuclear power industry. The Tokyo Electric Power Company, the operator of the Fukushima Daiichi plant, is a publicly traded, for-profit company, and has routinely made a point of withholding information about the state of the incident, not talking about nuclear power incidents until long after the moment to do something about them has passed, and has constantly downplayed the damage to the reactor and the results of their loss of control.
The desire for another dollar directly contrasts with the principles that should be guiding the nuclear field: safety first.
Nuclear power has the potential to be clean, safe and plentiful, but it also has the potential for abuse at the hands of those who would rather make another buck, who already have a history of abuse, not only with nuclear plants, but with various forms of power generation and manufacturing worldwide.
