Long Term Consequenses of Nuclear Power

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I was born in Colorado Springs Colorado. The reason my family lived there was my father worked for a government contractor to the US Air Force. My father was in the US Air Force and had been educated through a master in Math, California Berkley, by the US Air Force. When he graduated, in the late 1940s he was initially stationed at an Air Force base in the desert, I don’t know the name of it, but around Roswell, where he worked on the hardening of electronic equipment to withstand the Electro Magnetic Pulse EMP of the explosion of a nuclear bomb. My father was present during some of the first nuclear bomb test conducted by the US and had the skin cancer to prove it.

He later went on to be an expert in the worldwide nuclear arsenal and if was alive today, would probably be part of the US inventorying and tracking of nuclear weapons. I say all of this to give some back ground to my relationship to nuclear energy. Nuclear power has been part of my life my entire life, although unknowingly as my father had double secret military clearances and NEVER spoke of these things to me. I only really found out about his career after I graduated from college and went to work for a Government contractor where colleagues of my father impressed upon me what an expert he was in the field and offered me some insight into what he had done all those years. My father was an unsung hero of the cold war of which so many go nameless.

I started Zenergy Bio Fuel, LLC in 2005 for one reason. I wanted to create new economies in developing nations for people living in extreme poverty through the expansion of energy crops. I really was naive when entered into the Energy business, but I had confidence from a previous IT related startup and figured I’d find my way. Many wonderful things have happened as a part of starting Zenergy, mostly that I have put myself to the test in learning the systems of energy, how they work, what they cost and how they impact our world. I love being in the conversation of energy and will always have a passion for it. For it is the fundamental foundation of our modern world. EVERYTHING is built on our ability to tap into planet earth’s and the universes energy.

When it comes down to it, we really aren’t as far along as I had hoped. Fire, boiling water and the wheel are the three fundamental scientific breakthroughs that man uses to power our lives. There are many more things on top of that around metallurgy, building engines, building boilers, building turbines etc., but fundamental Fire, Water and the Wheel are what has us have automobiles and electricity.

One of the things I love most about myself, is my willingness and ability to step back from an argument, walk around it, check it out, look it up one side and down the other and then see how the two opposing sides the argument are usually out for the same intention, just different paths. In my opinion, really everybody wants the same things, water, food, education, opportunity, peace, safety, to make a difference, to be loved and find their place in the world and hopefully enjoy some prosperity. It’s a matter of how those things are generated where humanity continues tripping over ourselves.

Eventually, hopefully, the world conscientiousness will develop enough that we can take a more holistic view in our approach to problem solving. For now, we mostly create a two sided debate or look to next quarters earnings and go to work fighting for our side or cause, which is so limited in scope and has been one of the greatest disappointments of my coming of age and being an adult. I first learned of this structure of thinking inside Evangelical Christianity which is mostly based around debate and proving points.

Even though we see through a dark glass dimly as Paul wrote I Corinthian 13 translated from original Greek - “Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror”, Humanity barely knows ourselves. For me, it is sad that the comfort of thinking we know something can justify destructive actions and separation between people. Creationism vs. Evolution is a primary example of this to me. Truth is, we don’t know where or how we came into being and somehow someone thinking we do means something. Everything regarding our origins is a theory with mass agreement for or against, PERIOD. Agreement amongst humans, however large the scale, has absolutely nothing to do with the truth. Why I am hopeful and Stand with our President to be a leader of inclusion, to bridge the gap of anger and fear that exists in current US politics and consciousness. One can always hope!

One of the things that I continually come up against in the energy business is a lack of willingness to consider the full picture or long term consequences, accept where they are useful in garnering agreement. I use to think that something was wrong, but now I understand that we are SO YOUNG in relationship to our ability to create our world. It seems too much for people to handle to take the time and energy to consider the broader view or consequences. Unfortunately, our structures for preserving wisdom between generations and having high regard for it, has been VERY limited. As related to energy, it was 1882 when the first hydroelectric power station came online in the US in Niagra Falls. It has only been 128yrs since American’s enjoyed the benefit of electricity. Such a short time and far we have come.

I would put global warming/climate change as a prime example of this human condition. What a heated debate that isn’t about the reality of scientific evidence, but is more about our best guess as to what that means. Fear from entrenched systems, businesses of energy, system of governments and money don’t like change. Will this new thinking possibly put them out of business? If the social conscientiousness changes in regard to this seemly impending issues, if we don’t adapt, it just may redefine humanities relationship to itself, which isn’t good for existing systems. Our currently energy infrastructure is fundamental to our modern life and is highly threatened when asked to change or adapt from its current sources of heat.

I think of this as related to IBM and the PC. The future was right in front of IBMs noses, but they didn’t have the vision to adapt.  So, it will probably take outside forces to create new energy, even if the current energy companies are the inventor of it, like IBM was with the PC. The general population is barraged with propaganda from both sides which I would suggest has created a stale mate that keeps business as usual, which perpetuates the current systems.  People mostly just want their car to work, their lights to come on and at a rate that they can afford.

Depending how far down the rabbit hole you want to go, you can see that our monetary system and energy systems are directly linked and sometimes to save the other, one must appear broken as a distraction from the other. Try it out in your mind and see how that makes you go hmmm…

I have a hard time saying the way it is, is OK, because we are all in this together, and for me, it’s a social responsibility to think past ourselves and for the future. And believe me; I understand that this stuff takes serious contemplation. It will bend your brain and challenge everything you know if you allow it too.

With all of that background, what this essay is really about is Nuclear Energy. President Obama gave his first state of the union last week, which I watched very intently. He stated in that he believes the US needs to implement nuclear power plants as our response to the CO2 problem of global warming. I spoke out against nuclear power during the Presidential campaign and here I want to outline why I am concerned about the further expansion of nuclear energy.

First off, let’s talk about how nuclear power works. Uranium is the fundamental fuel commodity utilized in nuclear power plants. The last time the DOE did a study on the estimated US reserves of Uranium was in 2003, for more info see: http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/reserves/ures.html Uranium is taken out of the ground by a well, much like an oil well, but much less complicated. So, it’s a LIMITED resource. Many of the numbers I’ve heard floated in the industry is that US Supply will only power approximately 100 years of nuclear power plants, pretty short term in the hopes of the continuation of humanity. However, just as with O&G, new methods of extraction will be discovered, new properties will be tapped etc. The point is that Nuclear Power is a finite resource based on a mineral extracted from the earth. It’s no different from coal or oil in that regard, as it is limited in scope. Even if it gives us 10 times that much time, the consequences MUST be considered by the populous, because they are real and they are scary.

Uranium is processed into nuclear rods and then those rods are utilized in a controlled manner to create a large heating element. That heating element is then used in conjunction with a steam boiler that drive steam turbines that drive generators and wala we have electricity. The only real difference between a coal power plant and a nuclear power plant is the heat source for boiling water. A nuclear rods current usefulness is spent when it can no longer boil water. We may get a few years of use out of a rod, but when we are done with it that is where the real fun begins.  Spent nuclear fuel is what most proponents of Nuclear Power don’t want you to understand or contemplate and from my personal view, I wonder if they actually consider them.

So what makes a spent nuclear rod so dangerous? The long and short of it is that a spent nuclear rod is spewing, at dangerously high rates, X-Rays and Gamma Rays continually. Almost everyone in a developed country has had an X-Ray in their life. Remember that lead blanket they put over you to isolate you from X-Rays? They do that because the human body does not react well to long exposure to X-Rays. Gamma Rays always bring to mind the Incredible Hulk, as that is most people’s relationship to them. Gamma Rays are what turned David Banner into the Hulk when he was exposed to them in the science lab. While that is an interesting creative depiction of Gamma Rays, what they do in actuality is mess with the stability of cells and their membranes which provide the correct conditions for destruction or mutation of cells.

It takes an average 10,000 years for a spent nuclear rod to come to a half life level of X-Rays and Gamma Rays where a human can be exposed without fear of a slow and painful death at the worst and just cancer at the best. Being exposed, results in a condition that is something like the wicked witch of the east melting in The Wizard of OZ, accept it’s real. Human tissue breaks down VERY rapidly in the midst of spent nuclear fuel. It’s VERY scary when we one allows yourself to be with the possibility of it. I’m no expert on nuclear energy, but that is my basic understanding of radioactivity and the effect it has on the human body.

Another interesting tidbit is that the latent radioactive energy inside our atmosphere has greatly increased since the US discovered the Bomb and conducted many above and below ground bomb test, which can probably be directly related to increase in cancer in the general populous.

So what do we currently do with spent nuclear fuel when we can’t boil water with it anymore? Mostly today, it is stored in heavy water at the site of nuclear reactors. However, those pools are filling up. So for many years the US Federal Government has been attempting to create a underground repository for all the spent nuclear fuel, located in the Yucca Mountains in Nevada, about 80 miles north of Las Vegas. That project has been a political hot potato for years, rightly so. Not in my back yard takes on an entire new meaning when its spent nuclear fuel. In 2002 the creation of Yucca Mountain as a geological repository, or said in a more straight manner, an underground storage location for spent nuclear fuel, was signed into law by the President. So, it is being built and eventually will house most of the spent nuclear fuel of the US. Makes you think twice about going to Las Vegas and certainly has create an Achilles heal for US enemies to potentially exploit and is your Tax Dollars at WORK!

So there is the deal, even if we can get 1000 years out of nuclear fuel, we have and are expanding something that takes 10,000yrs to become safe again. From a financial perspective, the building of Yucca Mountain and the management of it for the next 10,000 years is NOT put in those financial models and business plans that say it is one of the cheapest and safest forms of energy. It is NOT, and anyone that is saying it is, is not telling the truth or being holistic in their approach. Currently we have very few uses for spent nuclear fuel. Like our trash, we beery it deep in the ground without regard for future generations and the lovely underground problems we are leaving for them. Put all this together and what can clearly be said about nuclear energy is that it is not sustainable.

Nuclear energy as the solution to global warming makes about as much sense as religious zealots that serve a loving God killing in its name.

Wind, biomass and Solar have none of these long standing consequences. While they are not as efficient as nuclear and will take more jobs and land to make the same amount of energy, from what I can see, we need jobs and we have plenty of land. I implore our President, for our national pride and for our future generations to reconsider these lobbying efforts by energy companies to expand nuclear power in the US. Wind, Biomass and Solar are MUCH better and have so many fewer long term consequences. It is possible that we can stop the insanity?