The use of nuclear energy, like so many other issues, tends to divide people rather sharply. From one point of view, it’s a miracle, a triumph of the inquisitive human spirit. We have become masters of the world! We can transform matter itself! We are conquering the Universe! Strange as it may seem, a few decades ago society still had a firm belief in a positive future, in the ascent of humanity. We had faith in scientists, the most prominent of whom was Einstein, an interesting, eccentric, jovial genius.
Source: https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/albert-einstein-tongue-1951/
The next step, we were enthusiastically told, will be to exploit nuclear fusion, the process that takes place inside stars. Soon we'll be brimming with unlimited energy, able to do anything! We'll be living in amazing comfort, with no need to work. We’ll move mountains and humanity will reach the far corners of the Universe! Meanwhile, until fusion is harnessed, we have fission. We're gonna slice uranium atoms like apples, build magnificent power plants, and flood the world with light!
Source: Wikipedia
In all that enthusiasm, one little detail is generally omitted. Namely, why nuclear fission was developed in the first place. Was the goal enhancing cellular fission so that plants can grow better? No. Perhaps gold production, the way alchemists had hoped? Nope. Maybe poor people being able to heat their homes in winter without needing to chop wood? No, no, think about it a bit more. Oh, right, it was developed for weapons in World War II. And where is the plutonium 239 isotope used in atomic bombs produced? In a particle accelerator? A weapons factory? Or on Pluto itself? Wait, it’ll come to me in a second... Oh yes, in nuclear power plants, those leading institutions in the peaceful use of nuclear energy!
Source: Mick Truyts,Unsplash
This puts our wonderful vision of humanity in a slightly different light. You can do all kinds of math magic, concluding how safe and economical nuclear energy is but that has never been the point. The original motivation is producing fissile material for bombs. Of course, we need to put nice things on the flag: abundance, security, comfort, cheap heat. We’ve been murmuring these mantras for so long that by now nuclear power has grown into a colossal industry. Plant construction and operation became a power centre in its own right. There’s big bucks in it, and its lobbying power somewhat supersedes that of your uncle Steve.
The constructors' positive outlook is enviable. We will design an infallible, accident-proof system! Yes, and what if an earthquake is followed by a tsunami, knocking out the entire electrical system and there’s no way to cool the reactors? Then you have Fukushima. Oops, we didn't think of that. And how smart is it to build reactors on a geological fault line? The Diablo Canyon power plant in California has, against all protests, been built on top of one, and its operating licence has just been extended. In God we trust. Well, there is an old saying in Hungary loosely translated as “Man plans, God slams.”
Anyway, Chernobyl was a human error, people protest. I think the engineering professions also exhibit a typical human error. They tend not to face up to the inconvenient fact that all human-made systems are operated by humans. Even when they are operated by artificial intelligence, they are ultimately controlled by humans. There are very few really foolproof machines, and humans have considerable talent and creativity for acting like nutcases.
© Gary Larson - The Far Side
We must thus expect that nature will produce events that it has not produced before, and that whatever can break will eventually break. The question is, how dire are the consequences when that happens. Engineers are generally good at their job so planes rarely fall out of the sky on their own. When they do, a few hundred people die, we mourn them, then get on the next plane with no worries and fly home.1 A nuclear accident, on the other hand, can destroy millions of lives, and the consequences last nearly forever. A nuclear power plant is a time bomb in more ways than one. If there’s a war nowadays you don’t have to possess nuclear weapons. You simply bomb the enemy's reactors to smithereens and the game’s over.
Among the many ardent supporters of nuclear energy, few are financially motivated. Most people are genuinely convinced of its usefulness. Icarus has fallen, but we will master the skies! And anyways, how do we punks dare to ask such cynical questions, poking our noses into the affairs of scientists? Let's leave these theological scientific questions to priests experts! Well, just because we don’t know nuclear physics, radiation will still affect us. (As we learned in Catch 22: being paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.) And the big issues of society are not decided by scientists, but by politicians and, increasingly, by billionaires whose knowledge of the subject is on the same level as ours.
Source: Sherise Van Dyk, Unsplash
But nuclear reactors are much cleaner than coal power plants! True enough. During normal operation, nuclear power plants not only produce negligible radiation, but also little conventional pollution. They don’t smoke, their main source of pollution is heat. The nuclear power plant at Paks makes a real hotspot of the Danube. The bulk of pollution occurs during mining, transport and, above all, waste disposal. Uranium miners’ health reports in Hungary were classified, along with those of local inhabitants. No doubt to prevent the whole country rushing to become an uranium miner.
Apart from the possibility of accidents, the really big problem with nuclear energy is waste. Spent fuel rods will continue to radiate for tens of thousands of years. Beside that there are massive amounts of “low level nuclear waste”, virtually every material that spent time in the plant. The building itself must be guarded long after it has ceased to operate. In countries with huge, sparsely populated areas, such as Canada or Russia, the situation in this respect is considerably better than in Europe, where every square inch is inhabited. So let's take the spent fuel back to Russia! Yes, transporting them thousands of kilometres away is really safe. Incidentally, they have been refused to be accepted from Paks for decades. And, since the planned final storage site has not been constructed, the growing heap of nuclear material has been “temporarily” stored on the site of the power plant. Let's hope a little more carefully than below.
How “economical” nuclear energy is another matter altogether, with some factors generously ignored in the calculation. One is the actual cost of disposing of radioactive waste, another is the consequences of accidents, yet another the gigantic subsidy the industry enjoys. Why do centralized states love nuclear power plants? Why don’t they create a long-term secure environment and incentives for local renewables such as roof-mounted solar panels and environmentally friendly micro-hydroelectric plants? The rows and rows of communist apartment blocks with their distant hot-water heating source spring to mind. Inefficiency and pollution are dwarved by the fact that taps can be turned off at the flick of a switch. Let the dissenters freeze when they're thinking of rebellion. They won't even be able to turn on the lights or check the internet to see where the police is coming from.
But energy consumption keeps increasing because people want a better life!
No, people want elementary, natural pleasures which modern society quite effectively denies them. They're manipulated to death by advertising and led to believe that the next energy-guzzling gadget will bring them the happiness they've been missing. It makes no sense why an area with a declining population like Hungary would need more and more energy. In general, the poorer a country is, the less efficiently it uses energy. In Hungary energy efficiency can be improved by bounds and leaps. One of the new energy drains in our parts is air conditioning. In 25 degrees Celsius trains are cooled to the point of freezing while in the winter they become a sauna.
The question “coal-fired or nuclear?” is like choosing between a guillotine and a hangman’s noose. Instead of overconsumption and senseless waste, we need to use energy sensibly and then we won't need to build more power stations. Fortunately, this is not the sole dominion of our great and holy lords. Peons like us can do a lot in this field. An adobe house will be cool in summer and warm in winter without air conditioning. And there are even easier ways.
Artwork by Rontó Lili in the book Gyógyító szavak (Healing Words).
Many years ago I read an article or blog post somewhere. The author measured how much electricity his computer, modem, monitor, printer, etc. consumed in a turned-off state during the night. He multiplied it by the cost of electricity and arrived at an annual amount of about thirty Euros. (With today’s prices it would be several times that much.) He found an elegantly simple solution: he bought a switchable power distributor for one Euro, replugged his machines, and flicked the red switch every night. The barely audible electric sizzle stopped; the room became peaceful and quiet.
For a while I went around giving switchable distributors to my friends, and of course I also followed the example of that esteemed individual. If enough of us do this, we can get rid off a power plant. If all inhabitants of the planet do it, quite a few. They don’t have to be built, they won’t produce any smoke or radiation and won’t make a mess of the landscape. It’s a nuclear bomb-proof solution. All it takes is flipping a switch.
Air and noise pollution is another matter.