"Emissions Free" They are not.

 After seeing the headline, “Nuclear power reduces emissions: Study” I had to respond. The title is misleading. 

When a nuclear power plant of any size is operating, it is true that carbon dioxide is not released, however, nuclear power is not emissions-free. All nuclear power plants emit radioactive hydrogen into the atmosphere; they also contaminate albeit minutely with strontium-90, caesium-137 and iodine-131 simply because they cannot contain their entire production cycle.

 

During the mining, milling, transportation and enriching of fuel as well as the construction there is so much carbon pollution that one researcher came up with the equivalence of natural gas. The enriching process requires the energy of small city - and is done at only one location in the US. Fuel for the SMNRs would have to travel a long way back and forth. The decommissioning, mothballing and clean-up with no place to store the waste is never included in the life cycle.

 

Nuclear power has been looking for a satisfactory waste repository for over fifty years and almost a billion Canadian dollars. This is not simply a NIMBY situation. Nuclear waste Is unlike any waste that we have ever dealt with. It kills people, either quickly if accidentally exposed to it coming out of a reactor or slowly by wearing down cellular structures. We cannot even get close to it. It destroys the mechanics of robots. It cannot simply be buried; the time lines required for it to disintegrate are beyond human comprehension because even the pyramids are only 4000 years old.

 

SMNR’s are not a “next generation”; they are actually a rebirth of an older technology that was discarded because it was too expensive and considered too dangerous. Too dangerous? Yes, because it “manufactures” plutonium, the stuff of nuclear bombs. The concept of “recycling” or “reprocessing” was around in the 1960’s and 70’s and has not changed; it involves dissolving the waste in acid, separating out the potential fuel - uranium-235 and plutonium-249 - and discarding the now highly radioactive acidic waste. 

(The industry claims that “pyroprocessing”, currently an experimental process, will solve the problem with acid dissolution but, just as "cheap, reliable and emissions-free" has never come to fruition, I doubt that pyroprocessing will either.)

 

Moe should be congratulated for merely giving the industry money “to explore” the possibilities. The nuclear salespeople are very good at what they do - they sell - they talk as if SMNRs really exist and operate. To read articles about SMNRs, you would think that there were dozens of them in a warehouse just waiting to be plopped down in needy communities to deliver electricity. NONE of the current generation have been built and NONE have even reached the design stage where they can be built. 

 

Discussions around energy fail to address energy conservation, more efficient hydro energy, and geothermal, to name a few known possibilities. 

We already have the grid; we could use Moe's research money to find better technologies for it, technologies that won't leave us with hundreds of years of more radioactive waste. (Saskatchewan still has not dealt with decommissioning the tailings from already closed mines in the North.)

If we can rise to the challenge, it will be through multiple means and many people putting their best ideas forward.