nuclear-news

This is Shaffer’s second atomic power promotion to appear in the Monitor this year (MonitorOpinion, June 13), again hyping the industry’s discredited tale that nuclear energy is “emissions-free.”

I am grateful I was able to show (Monitor Forum, June 23) why that claim is blatantly false, when nuclear power’s carbon footprint properly includes emissions from atomic fuel extraction and manufacturing. But now the Monitor has brought back the same industry representative to fly in the face of undisputed facts and disseminate the same misinformation.

In my opinion, that is as bad as Matt Lauer letting Donald Trump get away with his often-repeated lie about having opposed the Iraq War. Better to remember the old adage: “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”

I repeat: only reactor operation is carbon-free; all the many other stages in the nuclear fuel chain – uranium mining, uranium milling, fuel fabrication, fuel enrichment, reactor construction, reactor decommissioning and waste management – use massive amounts of fossil fuel and emit massive amounts of carbon. As does transportation from each stage of the fuel cycle to the next, via ship, truck or rail. This information has been quantified by independent researchers with ties to no industry.

Among further facts independent researchers have exposed: nuclear carbon emissions are increasing with the industry’s growing reliance on low-grade uranium ore as high-grade supplies are exhausted; and, emissions from the construction and decommissioning of nuclear power plants are so significant that each plant must operate for two or three years just to offset its energy inputs. (By comparison, a wind power plant offsets its sunk energy costs in only three to seven months of operation.)

Growing up in the 1950s – the dawn of the atomic era – I felt the appeal of nuclear power hype – that it would be the “peaceful atom” and “too cheap to meter.” Once those claims were categorically exposed as noxious hype, the world’s most dangerous industry seized on the climate change crisis to contrive a fig leaf to try to counter the inescapable reality – atomic power is poison power. Hopefully people will not get fooled again by nuclear energy’s shiny new “emissions-free” hype.