For decades, the Left has either opposed nuclear power, opposed safe attempts to store its relatively small waste — or both.
For decades, the Left has either opposed nuclear power, opposed safe attempts to store its relatively small waste — or both.
T he unceasing chorus of progressive voices fearmongering about nuclear power continues to undermine public confidence in humanity’s most reliable and readily scalable form of clean energy. That is an ironic enterprise for the political movement that is ostensibly devoted to lowering harmful emissions. Even more ironically, Democrats and their allies in academia and the media helped cause the very nuclear-waste-storage situation that they now decry as unsafe.
Two left-leaning academics — Rodney C. Ewing, co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and a former chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, and Allison Macfarlane, director of the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia and a former chairwoman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission — claim in a representative recent opinion piece in Scientific American that “before we face [an] onrush [of new nuclear waste], we first need to deal with the large volume of waste we’ve already produced.” But this is exceedingly misleading.
“We need a permanent national nuclear waste disposal site now, before the spent nuclear fuel stored in 35 states becomes unsafe,” reads the subhead, ignoring the fact that nuclear waste becomes much less dangerous with time as radioactivity naturally diminishes.
Despite opposing the current storage system in favor of a permanent national nuclear-waste-storage facility, Ewing and Macfarlane somehow never mention why America’s last attempt to build such a facility failed . . . namely, because both authors of the opinion piece, along with Scientific American itself, opposed it, enabling Democratic politicians to play politics and kill the U.S. nuclear program.
“The push to establish a repository at Yucca Mountain is based on political considerations and national security concerns, not hard science,” Ewing and Macfarlane asserted in 2002, as reported in a Scientific American article highly sympathetic to their view opposing the creation of the Yucca Mountain centralized nuclear-waste-storage facility. Yet that is the exact same kind of facility they’re now demanding as a prerequisite for nuclear power. These academics are in effect complaining that America took their previous advice.
Anti-nuclear environmentalists have oscillated between claiming that a nuclear-waste repository is a necessary prerequisite for generating nuclear power and vehemently opposing the project for decades, providing political cover for Democratic politicians to oppose nuclear energy. In fact, environmentalists’ own opposition is often used as an excuse to do so.
Former president Barack Obama helped the late former Senate minority leader Harry Reid derail those plans to permanently store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada (Reid’s home state). A majority of Nevada’s residents and virtually all of Nevada’s elected officials opposed opening the facility. Still, the move was such obvious political hackery that even Obama’s hometown newspaper, which had twice endorsed him, blasted it.
“Many people in Nevada didn’t want the waste, no matter how safe or isolated the storage facility may be,” the Chicago Tribune’s editorial board wrote. “It was the ultimate NIMBY [not in my backyard] project. One of those opponents, alas, was Harry Reid, who for 10 years was Senate Democratic leader and in a position to get his way. As president, Barack Obama gave Reid exactly what he wanted, closing down the entire effort. . . . Obama’s capitulation [to Reid] defied scientific evidence as well as common sense.”
Without Yucca, nuclear-power plants didn’t have a permanent location to store spent fuel and left the federal government with $50 billion in legal liabilities. The Department of Energy submitted its proposal to build Yucca Mountain in June 2008; the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) determined in 2014 that Yucca met safety standards and said in 2016 that the Yucca Mountain site would not adversely impact the environment over a million-year period.
“While I agree that the nation should find one or more permanent disposal sites for the nation’s nuclear waste, it is not a matter of critical safety to the nation’s nuclear waste,” Jeff Terry, an energy-research professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology, told me. “While it can be aggravating to the communities that no longer have nuclear plants to be forced to house nuclear waste for the foreseeable future, we know how to safely store nuclear waste on location for 100 years.”
If all the spent nuclear fuel ever used by American reactors were placed in standard dry-cask storage, it would all fit in a single football field, stacked 450 feet high. High-level fuel-pellet waste would fit in a similarly sized area, stacked just ten feet high. That amounts to remarkably little waste given the scale of energy produced. America’s coal-power plants generate about 30 times as much waste every single day as the U.S. nuclear fleet has produced over the past 45 years. And not only is the quantity of waste produced by nuclear reactors relatively low, but the danger associated with the waste has also been greatly exaggerated. Even Scientific American, back in its saner and less politicized days, admitted that coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste.
“The used fuel is not at risk of becoming unsafe at any point in the near future, and to imply otherwise is just unscientific,” Terry continued. “Frankly, a 100-year temporary storage site allows us to develop the opportunities to reduce, reuse, and recycle the nuclear waste which historically has been the goal of the environmental movement.”
Currently, America’s nuclear waste is stored in dry casks near nuclear reactors. This system has a nearly unprecedented safety record of never having caused a single death, injury, or major release of radiation for the 50 years during which America has been “temporarily” using it.
Anyone concerned about a radiation leak from this system should watch this video, in which a fully loaded train going 100 miles per hour collides with a dry cask in a test. The cask is “virtually undamaged,” without “the slightest leak,” while the train is annihilated. The U.S. simply doesn’t need a centralized storage facility right now.
Perhaps a magazine that has previously claimed that men invented women in the 18th century solely to oppress the latter shouldn’t be taken seriously on nuclear physics?
This isn’t to say that Democrats, and media outlets sympathetic to them, are exclusively to blame, of course. Former Republican president Donald Trump’s budget, during his first three years in office, strongly supported reactivating Yucca Mountain. But his administration then reversed its position in 2021 and removed funding to open the facility from the budget.
Some people concerned about the environment are waking up to the absurdity of nuclear-waste alarmism. One activist who now supports nuclear power describes the source of her prior opposition to the energy source this way: “When you join the environmental movement it is just completely standard that you’re anti-nuclear. It’s like taking communion at church.”
Anti-nuclear, progressive environmentalists’ flip-flopping on nuclear-waste-storage solutions, their deliberate sowing of baseless distrust toward nuclear energy, and their efforts to legally strangle the nuclear industry all reveal the political Left to be fundamentally unserious about reducing emissions.