Nuclear energy is the highest risk form of power production, right?
That’s been my unexamined assumption as I looked through various non-fossil energy alternatives. Today, though, while researching Three Mile Island (you know, a what-did-really-happen? piece) I ran across an old Oak Ridge National Lab report that made me think a little deeper. Not just about whether energy and risk, but also about the ways that coming from inside the government gave nuclear energy incredible financial and rhetorical advantages over outsider technologies.
Here’s the money chart from that report.
It seemed a little fishy, so I dug in a bit (although far from comprehensively). The researchers used the risk ratings for nuclear power plants found in the Rasmussen Report, which a later ORNL report found underestimated the risk of a serious accident by a factor of 20.
On top of that, one reason solar — all the renewables, really — got such risk ratings comes from the calculated need for “backup” for these systems. “Some solar or wind systems may require energy storage capabilities. When the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow, the consumer still needs energy. Storage can take many forms — rocks, liquids, batteries, pumped air or other systems. In the present work, a rock-and-oil system was assumed.”
Further, they assumed that there would be grid backup for all renewables. That means that solar’s risk rating is essentially the average of the energy system plus whatever risk is entailed producing solar panels or thermal plants. Kinda cheap, but still interesting insofar as that’s the only kind of system that we can imagine for the next few decades.
Another lesson you could pull from this report is that coal is a public health not just a global health problem. It’s like an externality generating machine.
I doubt that a New York Times Report of a report from 1982 studying reactor operations from 1969 to 1979 can be taken to impeach the earlier report. I have no idea if either report is meaningful. But I do know that the NYTimes was then, just as it is now, a left wing partisan hack rag that could not be trusted to understand nor accurately report anything on an issue of so much political importance.
Your project is interesting, but you need to dig into the underpinnings of the ideology of the anti-nuclear crusaders. I would suggest that it originated in a Soviet dezinformatsiya (disinformation) campaign, which was directed at the US nuclear weapons arsenal. 1982 was the peak of the leftist campaign against Ronald Reagan’s strategic moves against the Soviet Union. The anti-nuclear campaigners tried to stop the stationing of US nuclear weapons kin central Europe. They produced reams of propaganda to try to persuade the American people that all nuclear technology was too dangerous and expensive for our society to use. Memes like nuclear winter were propagated.
Fortunately for the US and the peoples of eastern Europe. The anti-nuclear campaign failed to achieve its goal of unilateral disarmament. And, the Soviet Union and its puppet regimes collapsed.
Unfortunately, the campaign permanently damaged nuclear electric generation. Even so, we have had about 3000 reactor years of operation since 1979, and no incidents of the type forecast by the so-called report.
To gain background on Soviet dezinformatsiya campaigns start here:
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=260
Also for a source on the tangled history of ORNL:
http://www.thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/
and
http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/