Nuclear: The Best Potential Energy

The world has gone nuclear! The threat of two superpowers annihilating one another with nuclear weapons gripped the world for decades until the Cold War ended. Now the threat of countries attaining weapons has caused the United States to declare war. The prospect of a nuclear war is a scary one that has obviously garnered a lot of attention. It has gained so much attention, however, that other uses for nuclear power have been overlooked, such as energy.

On Feb. 16, President Obama announced an increase in federal loan guarantees to build and operate a pair of new nuclear reactors in Burke County, GA.  Southern Co., the company that will build and operate these reactors, says that it will create 3,000 constructions and supply 850 permanent jobs. They also say it will provide power for 1.4 million people.  This program is obviously beneficial for the economy and could help curb unemployment, to provide cleaner, greener energy (nuclear power produces zero carbon emissions) and help us not to rely on the oil of countries that are not very nice.
However, all this should not outweigh very real security and environmental concerns. Nuclear energy is cheaper, more efficient, and greener. The problem lies in the radioactive waste that is acquired after this energy is generated. We have no idea what to do with it! This problem is not a new one. The last available data from the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management of the Department of Energy shows that from 1968-2002 over 47,000 metric tons of uranium (MTU) have accumulated with the vast majority stored at the reactor sites.  That number will surely grow when the numbers up till 2009 are released later this year.

Those that are not stored at the reactor sites are stored in facilities such as steel-lined pools or giant steel and concrete casks around the country. Not only is it environmentally unfriendly to have all of this waste without any way to dispose of it, but it is eventually going to cause a problem. If more and more nuclear reactors are built, more and more waste will accumulate. If we have no idea what to do with the waste we will have to keep finding new facilities to store it in, which means we could potentially be spending millions or billions for years to come on costs to staff these facilities, security measures,  the costs of the land and buildings themselves, and, ironically, energy costs.
Congress has tried to act on this problem before, and you have probably heard of Yucca Mountain, Nev. It is located 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas and was selected by the 1987 Congress as the leading contender of a place to “bury” the nuclear waste. Some environmental concerns have been voiced, such as the fact that the  water supply that runs through Yucca Mountain could become contaminated. It is also wildly politically unpopular in Nevada. President Obama has cut most of the funding for this project in his proposed budget with signals to abandon the project altogether. This would essentially waste the 10.4 million dollars spent since 1983 to find a place to dispose of nuclear waste. Although, I do agree with this decision, as Yucca was never selected based on a scientific basis but rather because Congress felt it was dry and flat enough.
President Obama has instead called for a bipartisan commission of leaders and nuclear experts to study a way to safely store nuclear waste. He has also claimed the power plants will be held to the highest safety standards.

It is an embarrassment and potentially dangerous that we have not addressed the issue of radioactive waste removal since nuclear reactors became functional in 1968. In the days where homegrown terrorists fly planes into an IRS building and when foreign terrorists try to blow up a plane over Detroit, we should be concerned with safety. Nuclear reactors and facilities that store radioactive waste are potentially very good sites for terrorism. If we can reduce that threat, or the impact if one occurs, we should.
It seems like the commission is happening a little late in the game. No more reactors should be built until we know how to get rid of the waste. That should be objective number one! I am all for green energy, but do not tout being environmentally-friendly with nuclear energy when we are producing so much waste we do not know what to do with it.