McCain’s non-straight talk on nuclear power
This week John McCain has an article in the Financial Times, “America must be a good role model.” It has two paragraphs on the need for leadership on greenhouse gas reductions, but endorses only one low-carbon energy source:
Right now safe, climate-friendly nuclear energy is a critical way both to improve the quality of our air and to reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources.
That dependence, I am afraid, has become a vulnerability for both the US and Europe and a source of leverage for the oil and gas exporting autocracies.
You can tell a politician is being wishy-washy when he or she uses the phrase “dependence on foreign energy sources.” There is really only one foreign energy source Americans care much about — oil. It comes from unstable and undemocratic regions, and our trade deficit in it now exceeds $1 billion a day.
But nuclear power can’t significantly reduce US oil consumption or imports — because very, very little electricity in this country is generated by burning petroleum (only 1.6% of electricty in 2006 came from oil). [In the future that could change when a significant number of vehicles on the road substitute electricity for gasoline, but that is not imminent.]
And since McCain presumably knows that, he uses the catch-all phrase “foreign energy sources” to try to make it look like nuclear power is homegrown and patriotic. But is it? In fact, we import the vast majority of the uranium we use, so it is an even bigger “foreign energy source.”
McCain also cleverly throws in a second sentence that links America to the European vulnerability to leverage from Russia’s large natural gas exports. Yet as the U.S. EIA notes, “net natural gas imports equaled 16 percent of U.S. natural gas consumption, a ratio that has remained relatively stable in the past 8 years.” Moreover, most of that comes from Canada, by pipeline. Hardly a worrisome dependence.
What about uranium? Well just last month the Bush administration signed a remarkable deal:
So if, under a President McCain, we build a bunch of new nuclear reactors — they could be fueled 100% by Russia.
I can almost hear Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin saying, “Excellent.”
March 20th, 2008 at 4:28 pm
What, no 4′ners have uranium for our dependence?
March 20th, 2008 at 6:26 pm
Vladimir is more likely to say “замечательный”, but I suppose he might say “превосходный”.
March 21st, 2008 at 10:13 pm
Nuclear power is going to be essential to our energy independence, but I think it will be thorium rather than uranium that gets us there.
March 22nd, 2008 at 12:55 am
@Kirk:
We (USA) do not currently does not reprocess spent nuclear fuel. I think that spent fuel reprocessing and using alternative raw materials (such as thorium) might be the key to avoid the Russian import dependence.
March 22nd, 2008 at 8:44 pm
Will the person with the blueprints to the mythical, thorium-powered, plutonium consuming, molten-salt, fast-breeder reactor please forward them to John McCain so he can build the damn thing. While I have read long screeds by nuclear advocates claiming (seemingly correctly) that 95% of current nuclear waste can safely and easily be processed into fuel and consumed but I have yet to hear of such a thing being built.
So somebody please, put up and build your nuclear shmoo or shut up.
March 24th, 2008 at 9:14 pm
Pangolin, there’s nothing mythical about a molten-salt, thorium-burning reactor. It’s not a fast-breeder and it’s no good for making plutonium (which is why the thing never got green-lighted in the first place in the 60s). About 4GB of documents relating to its technology and construction are available here if you are interested:
http://www.energyfromthorium.com/pdf/
June 20th, 2008 at 1:03 am
The French have been making steady progress with the Thorium molten salt non-moderated reactor. But we will need a bold political leader to step forward and push for a prototype reactor to be build or it will continue to slog along on the 30 year plan. From what I’ve read it looks like the waste from one current reactor will get one new reactor going. By the time we are ready to shut down the new reactor more than 90% of the waste is gone and what’s left isn’t as bad as our current stuff.
June 20th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
This is all hog wash. Wind, Geothermal, Hydro Thermal are all viable sources of energy especially at the current prices of oil. However this is all about exaggeration, and fraud. Global warming is not being caused by cars, or trucks. Volcanoes spew out more carbon dioxide that all the cars in the world combined. The sun is in a solar cycle, and is heating up. All the planets in the solar system have increases in temperature. The surface is heating not the atmosphere. This is all about money. How can we fool the people into accepting a new tax, and governance. The IEA (i.e. UN is pushing Global Warming along with a number of environmental groups on “computer models” that model whatever data you put in. This data is highly subjective - meaning you have to guess what you think the number should be, not what they actually are.