Clean Energy
May 3rd, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Leah and I have made a Mother’s Day trip to western Lake Erie for the past several years. This year we went the weekend before the actual holiday. Our usual path is to drive up to Marblehead, visit the Lakeside Daisy preserve, drive through Lakeside, finally stopping at Port Clinton for a Lake perch lunch. We did all of those things but this year continued westward along the lake out to Crane Creek and Magee Marsh wildlife areas. The route takes us past all of the things that we associate with the lakeshore…lots of marinas, campgrounds, trailer parks, shacky little shacks, and large, expensive condominiums and vacation homes. These things are all transient. We drive by and they are gone. The exception is the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Plant. Situated right on the lakeshore its cooling tower and associated vapor plume are visible for tens of miles in all directions.
Nuclear fission reactors are often touted as our best long term clean energy source. I am skeptical, as usual. While they are carbon free, they are not clean. They generate waste that will be dangerous for ten thousand years. Ten thousand years is a long time…ten thousand years ago, the last great ice sheet was receding from northern Ohio. I am not afraid of radioactivity. When I was in school, I worked in radioactive environments, creating short-lived isotopes in a subcritical reactor, performing scattering experiments with a small particle accelerator…not fearful but respectful of it. Ten thousand years is a long time…
Power reactors are complex operations. Pumps, motors, sensors…people. They all need to work reliably. Most of the time they will but every so often multiple, unexpected combinations of failures show up that can develop into a real bad situation. That happened in the Japanese nuclear power plant after the Great Earthquake and tsunami. An unusual situation to be sure but I wonder what an EF-5 tornado would do. I am sure the designers thought about that but I wonder if they are thinking about it again after the Japanese reactor failures.
I am not opposed to nuclear power but I am skeptical. Again, there are proponents, the “True Believers” and there are opponents the “Non-believers”. The truth is somewhere in the middle between them. In the end, the cleanest energy is the energy we use most efficiently…we waste a lot, as witnessed even by the vapor plume blowing off the Davis-Besse cooling tower.
