The nuclear dilemma
President Bush went to Exelon's Limerick Nuclear Plant near Pottstown yesterday to push for an aggressive program to build more nuclear plants. As is well known, no new nuclear plant has been ordered in the U.S. since the Three Mile Island nuclear accident near Harrisburg, Pa., in 1979.
The reasons not to build more nuclear plants are many. It is an unforgiving technology that is beyond the ability of some electric utilities to employ in a way that does not endanger the public. All the talk about a new generation of nuclear technology that is supposedly meltdown proof sounds too much like the assurances pre-TMI that such an accident could never happen. We still don't know for sure what the longterm health impacts of the TMI accident were. It is ironic to the extreme that Bush chose to go to Limerick to make his announcement. Limerick came in years late and well over budget, and saddled customers of Philadelphia Electric Co. (now part of Exelon) with electric rates that were among the highest in the country.
Yet there are reasons America should build more nuclear plants. They don't create greenhouse gases when they boil water to create electricity. Global warming is real, as former Vice President Al Gore is said to make clear (I haven't yet seen it, but have read the reviews) in the new documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. We need at least a few more baseload power plants that don't use natural gas so electric rates can be kept at a moderate level. Power plants eventually wear out and must be replaced. While wind and solar power and conservation can make serious inroads in the nation's power needs, they can't do it all.
Can it be done safely? That is the major issue in a nation that has not forgotten TMI or the Chernobyl accident in the former Soviet Union. Can we finally open a safe storage facility for nuclear waste somewhere? Perhaps in both the East and West halves of the country? I would hate to see all nuclear waste travel west by rail through the St. Louis, Mo., chokepoint to get to the Yucca Mountain facility in Nevada.
I suspect part of Bush's push is motivated by a desire to defeat the environmentalists, just as he hopes to do by allowing oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. Much of that oil would be sold to Japan and China. It's a symbolic thing, a boot on the throat of anti-Bush enviromentalists. But global warming is real, and nuclear power could be part of the solution. That's not a ringing endorsement from me, only a resigned nod to what may be necessary.