The Indian Point Energy Center in Westchester County produces 2,000 megawatts of electricity – about one-third of the metro area’s needs. It powers Metro-North and the subway system, which transport an average weekday ridership of 5.1 million. Like the circus strongman at the base of a human pyramid, Indian Point supports the statewide grid of high-voltage transmission lines that protects against power failures. An economic engine for the state, Indian Point directly provides about 2,500 jobs. Unlike the fossil fuel plants that produce most U.S. energy, Indian Point emits no air pollution, and it keeps the lights on at a low cost.

So why does Gov.-elect Andrew Cuomo want to shut it down? He says it’s unsafe, a target for terrorists and that replacement power can be found without short- or long-term consequences.

These claims are untrue.

Letting real science and clear facts refute Cuomo’s claims, they point out real problems that closing the facility would cause.

Closing the twin reactors means more illnesses and deaths thanks to increases in ozone and smog from additional fossil fuel combustion as well as more electricity-supply problems – brownouts and blackouts that would affect services like transportation and life-sustaining air conditioning during heat waves. Oh, and your electric bill will soar.

Check out the whole piece on the daily’s site.

As I looked out the window, and I saw the sun coming up and the curvature of the Earth, I thought, “Wow. The Earth is round.” But when I saw it with my own eyes, it meant something different to me. And looking at the Earth’s atmosphere and seeing how thin it is, you realize the Earth is a very fragile planet.
—Eileen Collins, space-shuttle commander

In a microcosm, Earth Day, 1970, had the effect of creating a community out of a New York City block full of isolated strangers. All over the country similar small miracles occurred. What had been an ignored commons was transformed and so, for a time, were we. Now it’s more evident than ever that what happens to the atmosphere or the ice caps and glaciers on one part of the globe becomes everyone’s problem. The increasing droughts in some areas due to temperature rise are putting dust in the lungs of children thousands of miles away. China’s smog drifts to California. We can’t survive as isolated, self-regarding entities. We’re linked to the destiny of all humans and the destiny of the earth, as Stewart Brand foresaw when he searched for a visual way to express that truth. Our personal destinies, and the destinies of our children, grandchildren, and remote descendants are intimately linked to choices we make today.

Special Guest Blogger Gweneth Cravens

When I began my nuclear journey I didn’t know about base-load electricity—the steady flow that reliably meets the minimum demand at all times. I thought we could get all the power we needed from wind, sunlight, conservation and efficiency. These all are useful, but the fact is that base-load comes from only a few sources: fossil fuel combustion (about 75%), hydroelectric dams (about 6%), and nuclear power (20%). Of these, nuclear power is the only clean, readily expandable resource and has the smallest environmental footprint. To reduce carbon emissions, fossil fuel plants must be replaced whenever possible with nuclear plants. We’re accustomed to thinking of them as gigantic, but in fact reactors actually come in a variety of sizes and can be adapted to a variety of needs. (The Nuclear Navy has demonstrated the flexibility of reactors. After the earthquake in Haiti, a nuclear aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Carl Vinson, came to the rescue. Process heat from the ship’s reactor enabled the desalination of 400,000 gallons of seawater a day to keep people alive.)

Climate scientists use probabilistic risk assessment methodology to analyze climate change. Reactor scientists use the same methodology to determine reactor and fuel-cycle safety. So why do some people in the technical community remain skeptical of climate-change science, which is derived from a vast body of data and which is supported by nearly 100% of climatologists? And why do those in the environmental community who are convinced of climate change because of the science want to limit or obliterate nuclear power? There are good reasons that high-profile climatologists like James Hansen campaign for more nuclear plants.

No matter what our opinions, we all are participating in the huge release of carbon into the atmosphere with every keystroke, every flip of the switch in our households, every purchase of a doodad from China. Ocean acidification, destroyer of oxygen-producing marine life, and the rapid rise in the average global temperature will not wait while we argue about which side is right. It’s time to drop all that and become more conscious of our shared destiny.

We need to listen to one another. I look forward to a time when nuclear engineers routinely participate in Earth Day and understand that they in fact comprise the leading edge of the environmental movement. Because of my own experience about prejudices I harbored because of wrong information, I’d like to see every anti-nuclear activist tour a nuclear plant and learn about the extraordinary scientific, humanitarian, earth-friendly feat occurring within its sturdy walls. I encourage people on both sides of the debate to examine their biases and to help others make the transition from myth to science-based fact.

The power to save the world does not like in rocks, rivers, wind, or sunshine. It lies in each of us.

Gwyneth Cravens is the author of Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy and has written articles on science and other topics for The New Yorker, Harper’s, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other publications.

Yesterday I mentioned some beliefs I once held:

• Manmade radiation is far more dangerous than natural radiation—cosmic radiation, for instance.
• Even a tiny speck of manmade radioactive material can kill you.
• Radiation from a nuclear plant can travel hundreds of miles and kill you.
• Nuclear plants are just ticking atomic time bombs. Without warning they can explode and kill millions and cause cancer, and mutations. The Chernobyl accident killed tens of thousands of people.
• Nuclear plants could easily be taken over by a few gunmen and the fuel in the reactor stolen and turned into an atomic bomb.
• The people who work in the nuclear field are indifferent to humanity and to the environment.
• A coal-fired plant is safer than a nuclear plant any day.
• Nobody knows what to do with nuclear waste. Mountains of it are piling up everywhere. It lasts forever and will turn huge tracts into radioactive wastelands.

Special Guest Blogger Gweneth Cravens

Multiple barriers protect humans from the radiation released by the controlled chain reaction in a reactor. The uranium fuel pellets are jacketed in an alloy and enclosed in rods; the rods are immersed in water (itself a barrier); the water and rods are located within a thick-walled steel vessel which is anchored in bedrock, usually underground, and which is enclosed by a big steel and concrete containment building with walls four to six feet thick. (The Chernobyl reactor, of Soviet design, lacked containment.) On my website there’s a video of what happens to a jet crashing into a wall comparable to that of a containment building. Wall: 1. Jet: 0.

I learned that U.S. power reactors can’t explode atomically (it’s against the laws of physics) and that you can’t just whip up an atomic bomb from the low-enriched uranium in nuclear fuel.

Tours of nuclear plants and research reactor facilities convinced me that they’re more difficult to penetrate than, say, Fort Knox. In Power to Save the World there’s a chapter called “Barriers” that details the exhaustive security precautions, detection systems, and layers of protection at a plant. Even a footfall near a containment building is monitored.

If anyone feels compelled to fret about exposure to low-dose radiation from electricity generation, he or she should focus on coal combustion. Coal-fired plants expose people within a 50-mile radius to 100 to 400 times more radiation than they’d receive from a nuclear plant, and the annual output of coal fly-ash (around 120 million tons) contains enough uranium-235 to run all of our 104 nuclear power reactors. And that solid waste is also laced with toxic heavy metals that never decay. As for nuclear plants being more dangerous than coal-fired plants: their gaseous emissions create fine particulates that studies indicate kill 24,000 Americans a year and cause hundreds of thousands of cases of lung and heart disease. Household natural gas exposes people to 900 times more radiation than they would receive from living next to a nuclear plant, and natural gas pipelines and plants blow up periodically, causing fatalities—recently an explosion at a gas-fired plant in Connecticut killed six people. Not one member of the public has ever died as the result of the operation of our commercial nuclear power plants. (Wind farms and solar arrays supply intermittent power, so must be backed up by steady, base-load electricity that mainly comes from burning coal or gas.)

And the people I met on my journey from myth to fact? Parents and grandparents who do not want any harm to come to their children or their descendants and who take pride in meeting our demand for clean electricity. Workers who live with their families a few miles from the plant. Bird-watchers, hikers, campers, Sierra Club members, home solar-power enthusiasts, climate-change activists, climate-change skeptics, recyclers, organic gardeners. Democrats, Republicans, Independents, volunteers who spend time helping school children, the elderly, and the hospitalized . . . . In brief, many of the people who think nuclear power is such a good idea that they’ve devoted their careers to it are regular human beings who worry about the environment and about human welfare. Several people recited to me a World Health Organization statistic: in lands without electricity, the average lifespan is 43 years; just a few watts per week help people survive longer. Others mentioned nuclear power’s avoidance of about 700 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year in the U.S.—about the same amount as would be avoided if all our passenger cars were taken off the road.

As for nuclear waste: plenty of solutions are being implemented right now. Since uranium is the densest of energy sources, all of the spent fuel generated in the U.S. by five decades of commercial nuclear power could fit in a single big-box store. Studies indicate that the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, which now stores only defense-related waste, or a plant just like it next door in the salt bed, could safely store all of the nation’s spent nuclear fuel. (Incidentally, the citizens in that part of New Mexico like the WIPP so much that they keep inviting other nuclear industries to set up shop.) Less than 1% of all spent fuel contains long-lived radionuclides. Unlike the toxic heavy metals in coal fly ash, radioactive waste will inevitably decay to natural background levels. But most experts consider this material too valuable to bury—it retains over 95% of its energy after one trip through the reactor and can be repeatedly recycled into fresh fuel. The volume of the ultimate residue is tiny—and even that can be burned up in a particular kind of reactor.

After nearly a decade of excursions with Rip and Marcia through the nuclear world, and dozens of encounters with members of the technical community, I had to agree with Rip: nuclear power must play an important role in addressing the multifaceted challenge of global warming.

But no one group or method can do the job alone. We who are concerned about the challenges of energy and the environment have to cooperate and collaborate. Not much is going to happen until we can get past the mindset of Us-versus-Them.

To be continued . . .

Gwyneth Cravens is the author of “Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy” and has written articles on science and other topics for The New Yorker, Harper’s, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other publications.

The first Earth Day was proclaimed in 1970, and where I was living, in New York City on the Upper West Side, it was the first warm, sunny day in weeks. My neighbors and I and our children rather spontaneously crept out of our brownstone apartments, actually exchanged pleasantries, and swept the sidewalks and picked up litter. We felt better about ourselves and our neighborhood—and about the earth. Something momentous was occurring that fit right in with the optimistic social revolution that was underway. I’d read in the Village Voice about ecologist Stewart Brand’s insistent question: “Why haven’t we seen a picture of the whole earth?” Thanks to his campaign and his inspirational writings, we now have that beautiful icon to remind us to think globally while acting locally.
​

Special Guest Blogger Gwyneth Cravens

Fast forward to the late 1990s, and an encounter with a scientist, Dr. D. (Rip) Richard Anderson, who patiently led me to understand that it was only by looking at the whole picture regarding energy and the environment that we could begin to understand what’s at stake and what actions are needed to protect the only home in the universe that we have. Rip is an oceanographer, a chemist, and an expert in probabilistic risk assessment who has led several big projects for Sandia National Laboratories, and he’s also an organic gardener, a beekeeper, and an environmental activist alongside his wife, Marcia Fernández. They campaign on behalf of clean air, clean water, and open land in New Mexico, where they reside. Rip began to explain to me the alarming consequences of the human race’s transfer of vast quantities of carbon from underground into the atmosphere. Drawing on a paper napkin, he connected accelerated global warming and ocean acidification, which he considers the greater threat, to the choices we’ve made about the energy we use to run our world civilization.

“What should we do?” I asked. “Keep extracting oil and gas and coal and burning them until the planet becomes a living hell? Build a lot of wind turbines and solar arrays?”

“As soon as people’s beer gets warm,” he replied, “I expect they’ll choose nuclear power.”

I tried to mask my surprise and annoyance. No way could nuclear power be good for the environment. Having grown up during the cold war in New Mexico, where bomb scientists and engineers worked around the clock to win the arms race, I’d developed an aversion to anything nuclear and while in college there and in grad school in New York had participated in ban-the-bomb and Mothers for Peace events.

Here’s what my environmentally inclined, anti-nuclear, us-versus-them friends and I thought we knew about nuclear energy:

• Manmade radiation is far more dangerous than natural radiation—cosmic radiation, for instance.
• Even a tiny speck of manmade radioactive material can kill you.
• Radiation from a nuclear plant can travel hundreds of miles and kill you.
• Nuclear plants are just ticking atomic time bombs. Without warning they can explode and kill millions and cause cancer, and mutations. The Chernobyl accident killed tens of thousands of people.
• Nuclear plants could easily be taken over by a few gunmen and the fuel in the reactor stolen and turned into an atomic bomb.
• The people who work in the nuclear field are indifferent to humanity and to the environment.
• A coal-fired plant is safer than a nuclear plant any day.
• Nobody knows what to do with nuclear waste. Mountains of it are piling up everywhere. It lasts forever and will turn huge tracts into radioactive wastelands.

To be continued . . . .

Gwyneth Cravens is the author of “Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy” and has written articles on science and other topics for The New Yorker, Harper’s, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other publications.

Nuclear has about the same carbon footprint as wind but is astronomically more compact and efficient and operates at 90 percent capacity (coal: 53 percent capacity; wind: 34 percent). Nuclear waste is therefore tiny in volume. The world’s entire annual inventory could fit in one large townhouse. Nuclear waste recycling, done abroad, drastically reduces volume, radioactivity, and the need for long-term disposal. Civilian nuclear plants have never produced atomic bombs.