Global warming makes nuclear power look good
MIDDLETOWN, Pa. (AP) — The nation’s worst nuclear power plant accident was unfolding on Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island when an industry economist took the rostrum at a nearby business luncheon.
It did not go well.
Those in the standing-room- only crowd listened raptly to economist Doug Biden’s thoughts about cheap, reliable nuclear power, but Biden could not calm their nerves or answer their pointed questions: Should they join the tens of thousands of people fleeing south-central Pennsylvania? Should they let their children drink local milk?
Three decades later, fears of an atomic catastrophe have been largely supplanted by fears about global warming, easing nuclear energy into the same sentence as wind and solar power. Dogged by price spikes and an environmental assault on carbon dioxide emissions, fossil fuels are the new clean-energy pariah.
“There’s a lot of support for nuclear now, and most of that support is borne out of a concern for the desire to have emissions-free energy sources,” said Biden, who still advocates for power companies as the president of Electric Power Generation Association in Pennsylvania.
Policymakers in numerous states are warming to nuclear power, even in states where the facilities are banned. Nuclear reactors generate one-fifth of the nation’s power. Some see nuclear as a stable, homegrown energy source in light of last year’s oil price spikes. Others see it as a way to meet carbon-reduction goals.
Public interest is emerging, too: A Gallup Poll released in recent days shows 59 percent favor the use of nuclear power, the highest percentage since Gallup first asked the question in 1994.
If the U.S. nuclear industry is hitting a new high point, today marks the anniversary of its low point. Thirty years ago, the meltdown of Three Mile Island’s Unit 2 puts its perils and shortcomings came under the world’s microscope.
No one was seriously injured in the accident, in which a small amount of radiation was released into the air above the Susquehanna River island 12 miles south of Harrisburg. Studies of area residents have not conclusively linked higher rates of cancer to radiation exposure.
Since then, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has not granted one license for a nuclear power plant. The industry say it has made major safety advances, but huge obstacles remain.
It takes years to license and build a reactor. Construction costs billions of dollars. The nation has no long-term storage site for the 2,000 tons of radioactive waste being produced annually by the 104 reactors operating in 31 states.
In the last two years, 26 applications for new reactors have poured into the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which expects to issue a license no earlier than 2011. No such application was filed in the 28 years ater the TMI accident.
Even lawmakers in two fossil fuel-rich states, Kentucky and Oklahoma, are advancing bills that would effectively lift a moratorium on nuclear power.
Republican Charlie Crist of Florida and Democratic Govs. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania and Martin O’Malley of Maryland all support proposals for new reactors in their states.