nuclear-news

The class produced a booklet, Santa Cruz and the Environment, which took a lot of local heat for publicizing the environmental issues affecting Santa Cruz at that time, including the proposed nuclear plant. Investigating the advertised efficient, economical, safe and clean nature of nuclear plants revealed that none of these claims were really true.

A closer look also revealed that nuclear plants were far more expensive to build than conventional plants. Much of the cost of the early plants was covered by subsidies, including about a third of the construction costs coming from the Atomic Energy Commission, which had the conflicting roles at that time of both promoting the use of nuclear energy but also regulating it. The federal government was also subsidizing the insurance, the fuel, as well as the removal and storage of radioactive waste.

Safety is a much more serious issue with a nuclear plant than a fossil fuel plant, simply because the accidental release of radiation can be carried over large distances by wind and water, stays around for a long time, and can produce both immediate and long-term impacts. While there had been a number of accidents in test and experimental reactors at that time, there were few commercial plants in operation such that their overall safety record was good.

The partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania in 1979, followed by the Chernobyl disaster in the former Soviet Union in 1986 with the release of radiation that spread over much of western Russia and Europe, and then the Fukishima Daiichi disaster in 2011, all contributed to a much greater public concern for the safety of nuclear plants. Ultimately, nuclear plants all depend upon error free construction and operation, and unfortunately humans are not quite perfect.

While nuclear plants don’t produce the visible emissions of fossil fuel plants, they do produce radioactive wastes. Of greatest concern has been the spent fuel, high-level radioactive waste that must be isolated from humans and the biological environment for thousands of years, which is still being stored in tanks in Washington, Idaho and South Carolina. No permanent solution has yet been agreed upon such that California banned any new nuclear plants decades ago until this waste storage/disposal problem had been resolved.

Ten nuclear power plants were proposed through the years along the California’s coastline. Only four were built and three of those have now been closed. Gary Griggs is director of the Institute of Marine Sciences and Long Marine Laboratory at UC Santa Cruz. He can be reached at griggs@ucsc.edu http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/localnews/ci_23650404/gary-griggs-our-ocean-backyard-nuclear-plant-santa