Nuclear power is not ‘green’

The Special to The Times op-ed “Next-generation nukes for a clean-energy future” [Opinion, April 20] was completely one-sided. Nuclear power is not “green.”

The mining and enriching of nuclear fuel is highly energy-intensive and when this cost is factored in, nuclear power produces a carbon equivalent approaching that of natural gas.

Uranium mining in Canada has left behind 200 million tons of radioactive tailings, fine as flour, which blow in the wind and flow downstream. Typically 5 percent of energy production from a nuclear plant is expended containing and cooling nuclear reactions.

A new reactor typically costs $4 billion and cost overruns are common. It has taken from eight to 24 years to complete nuclear power plants in the United States. The same billions spent to build solar arrays, windmills, microbial fermenters, tidal and wave farms, as well as many other alternative technologies could yield results more quickly and supply all the power we need.

Each nuclear power plant and storage site is an obvious terrorist target. If the United States builds hundreds of nuclear plants, other countries would build thousands. Perfect security is impossible to achieve.

The technology involved in building nuclear power plants is a steppingstone to the technology for building nuclear weapons. If the United States had not encouraged Iran to build nuclear power plants in the 1950s, perhaps Iran would not be building nuclear weapons now. Promoting nuclear energy as a worldwide solution to energy needs is like giving children loaded guns to play with.

Each nuclear power plant is bankrupt from the day it is built —the energy produced over its 40-year life can never cover the cost of storing nuclear waste for tens of thousands of years.

— James Robert Deal, Lynnwood