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It Does Not Add Up

by Richard

Sunday, June 21, 2009 at 09:03 PM EDT

cooling towers by christian.senger

This is from the Republican energy plan. It is a very long document and , as often happens, the short summary leaves out some very important things.

We can discuss policy differences and whether doubling the number of nuclear power plants will really be effective at all. Those are the sorts of policy discussions that separate out the different sides and helps, at least in theory, in getting to a working solution. At least in theory.

But some of the numbers underlying their rationales do not hold up. This undercuts their desire for more nuclear power plants as a measure to gain energy independence.

The Act’s purpose is “To increase energy independence and job creation by increasing safe American energy production, encouraging the development of alternative and renewable energy, and promoting greater efficiencies and conservation for a cleaner environment.” The numbers I find in the Act do not seem to support the ability of nuclear power plants to achieve these goals, at least as proposed in the Act.

First, the document has some very odd definitions. In fact, they claim that nuclear is a renewable energy source (which it is not), just like wind and solar. Renewable resources are ones based either on energy from outside our planet (solar, wind, tidal) or on energy sources from inside (geothermal). Relying on non-renewable natural resources to provide energy (oil, gas, uranium) is simply not sustainable using the GOP’s approaches. By calling it a renewable resource, they can include it when talking about alternative energy sources like wind and solar, confusing the issues.

The fact is that shifting to nuclear simply means that we get our energy from other places than the Middle East, such as Russia or Kazakhstan. The plan discusses current uranium sources. The 104 plants presently in use required about 53 million pounds of uranium in 2008. Adding 100 more plants in 20 years (something I think may be extremely difficult to accomplish), would then double that to about 100 million pounds.

The plan estimates that Arizona has about 375 million pounds that represents 40% of our nation’s total. This results in about 940 million pounds total in the US. Let’s round that up to 1 billion pounds total.

That means that the entire Nation’s uranium resources would be used up in 10 years if this plan is followed! But it would be faster than that because we would be using some during the 20 years it would take to get to 200 nuclear plants.

The plan states “Development of these resources would prevent the United States from being over reliant on less stable foreign sources of uranium.” How is that possible when we would use up all of our resources in such a short time?

Uranium is not a renewable resource by any definition that would impact our energy needs. We are not going to renew that 1 billion pounds of uranium. Maybe it they had included using NASA to explore for uranium on the moon we might see this as a more plausible means to energy independence.

Of course, there are other things to deal with such as disposal of the waste, nuclear proliferation, the siting of these 100 new plants, the huge amounts of water that are required for running them, the technical know how to build 5 new plants a year every year for 20 years, the production of containment vessels for the reactor, and the huge capital investment needed.

In addition, it requires us to continue to use the 100 plants we still have. These plants were licensed for 40 years. Most will require new licenses to continue running. Issuing new licenses for them is not a foregone conclusion (here, here, here).

But the main thing from crunching the numbers on nuclear power is that we would use up all of our Nation’s resources very rapidly and be left back where we are now – relying on unstable supplies from other countries.

Nuclear power at the rates the plan discusses does not seem like a route to energy independence.

This article originally appeared on A Man With A Ph.D..