Cross-posted from Legal Planet.
Apparently, substantially safer designs for nuclear reactors are now available. But the safe storage and disposal of nuclear waste is a significant challenge and a yet unresolved problem. Presently, waste is stored at over a hundred facilities across the country, within seventy-five miles of the homes of 161 million people.
The major problem is the longevity of the waste – plutonium will be dangerous for 250,000 years. Although we may be able to model the geologic and physical processes at some geographic sites over such time periods, no one seems to have a clue about how to model possible changes in human behavior and society. Thus, by producing nuclear waste, we are leaving our descendants with a dangerous problem, while having no real idea how competent they will be to handle it. Assuming we care about their welfare, we seem to be taking a serious gamble at their expense.
In the short run, it is not feasible to eliminate existing nuclear facilities. The tougher problem is the basic question of whether to continue producing substantial quantities of waste in the medium to long-run.
In the medium run, we have to think seriously about the upside benefits of nuclear power and whether they are enough to the risk to later generaitons. Upside benefits seem likely mostly in terms of avoidance of carbon emissions, so as to limit what we have already seen to be the severe downside risks of climate change. Whether nuclear should be part of the medium-term strategy depends in part on how optimistic we are about alternate technologies.
In the long-run, however, it is hard to see how we could justify continued production of nuclear wastes, given the tremendous uncertainties about containment – at least if we care about the welfare of distant generations. There may be alternative ways of using nuclear reactions to produce power that do not result in the production of such long-lived, dangerous waste. But as other non-carbon energy sources such as solar become more widespread and cost-effective, the upside benefits from nuclear will fade, leaving us in a situation where the imposition on our descendants becomes increasingly hard to justify.
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Daniel Farber | November 3, 2009
Cross-posted from Legal Planet. Apparently, substantially safer designs for nuclear reactors are now available. But the safe storage and disposal of nuclear waste is a significant challenge and a yet unresolved problem. Presently, waste is stored at over a hundred facilities across the country, within seventy-five miles of the homes of 161 million people. The […]
Matthew Freeman | November 2, 2009
A little bragging is in order this morning. Last week, CPR Member Scholars Tom McGarity and Wendy Wagner won the University of Texas’s Hamilton Book Author Award for their book, Bending Science: How Special Interests Corrupt Public Health Research. The award is given to the author(s) of what is judged the best book by University of Texas […]
Matthew Freeman | October 30, 2009
One of the great political communications successes of the past 30 years has been the right wing’s relentless assault on the American regulatory system. Think of the words and images that have come to be associated with “regulation” in that time: red tape, bureaucrats, green eye shades, piles of paper stretching to the ceiling, and more. And the […]
Ben Somberg | October 30, 2009
This guest post is written by Thomas Tolin, Assistant Professor of Economics at West Chester University, and Martin Patwell, Director of the Office of Services for Students with Disabilities at WCU. In the recently published SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance the authors, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen […]
Ben Somberg | October 29, 2009
Today the Consumer Product Safety Comission released three draft reports on its findings so far regarding contaminated Chinese drywall. Here’s how the Sarasota Herald-Tribune puts the development: In what is sure to inflame lawmakers on Capitol Hill, the federal government issued a report on Thursday about Chinese drywall that stopped short of linking the material […]
Daniel Farber | October 29, 2009
Cross-posted from Legal Planet. Both the NY Times and the Washington Post had lead stories Wednesday on the politics of climate change legislation. The Post’s story centered on the increasing focus of the debate on the economic impact of climate legislation and on the difficulty of establishing the facts: In anticipation, groups on the left […]
Ben Somberg | October 27, 2009
Super Freakonomics, which came out last week, has been critiqued thoroughly (UCS has a good library of their own critiques and links to others) for its embrace of geoengineering as the cheap fix to that problem called global warming, and the book’s methods generally have also been critiqued as lacking. But yesterday brought a new […]
Catherine O'Neill | October 26, 2009
Three recent developments in the saga of efforts to regulate mercury emissions from coal-fired utilities are significant. Early last week, Michigan became the twenty-third state to require coal-fired utilities within its jurisdiction to reduce their mercury emissions. Michigan’s regulation requires these sources to cut mercury emissions by 90% by 2015. Then, on Thursday, the EPA […]
Shana Campbell Jones | October 23, 2009
As climate change legislation awaits action in the Senate, serious and complicated legal and policy questions about the tools designed to reduce carbon emissions remain. Truly, the climate change debate operates in two distinct worlds. The first is becoming increasingly hysterical, consisting of sensational and camera-ready protests and attacks underwritten by groups such as the […]