Nuclear, oil, gas or coal? Pick your energy poison
When officials in charge of a badly damaged nuclear power plant consider trying to cool hot fuel rods by spraying them with water from a helicopter, the situation is either out of control or frighteningly close. That's where matters stood late Tuesday at Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, as workers fought another fire and struggled to keep the plant's reactors from releasing catastrophic amounts of radiation.
The disaster that has unfolded at the plant since Friday's magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami has to make even strong supporters of nuclear power, including us, wonder just how vulnerable U.S. plants are, and whether building more makes sense.
No one knows how this will end, and the middle of a crisis is the worst time to make long-term policy. But Japan's nightmare has already been a sobering reminder that even a technology meticulously engineered to have backups of backups can be unraveled by an improbable chain of events.
In Japan, everyone anticipated earthquakes, and plants are designed to resist them. They also expected tsunamis and built sea walls to protect against them. But they did not anticipate an event so devastating that it would leave the plant without electric power for so long that its redundant systems would fail.
Are there similar risks for the 104 U.S. nuclear reactors? Japan's experience has revealed one possible weakness at American facilities, where emergency batteries are typically designed to supply backup power for just four hours. At Fukushima, batteries were designed to provide power for eight hours, not nearly long enough to restore electricity to the reactors' cooling pumps because the room housing vital electric connections was flooded.
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Then there's the question of whether U.S. earthquake protection is adequate. At least eight reactors are in seismically active areas in Arizona, California and Washington. It's reassuring that California's Diablo Canyon plant rode right through a magnitude 6.5 quake in 2003, less so to know that the plant is designed to survive only a magnitude 7.5 quake.
The reality is, the United States doesn't have the option to walk away from nuclear power, which supplies almost 9% of the nation's energy and about 20% of its electricity. The industry has posted such a strong safety record in the 32 years since the accident at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island that many environmentalists have embraced the idea of building new plants — which offer huge amounts of 24/7 power with virtually no carbon emissions.
Nuclear energy's drawbacks are glaring at the moment, but it's worth remembering that no major source of energy the United States is using comes without a heavy cost:
•Oil provides the single largest share of American energy — more than a third. Last summer's BP well blowout and spill in the Gulf of Mexico were reminders of the environmental price the nation pays for the aggressive oil exploration necessary to keep domestic supplies from declining. Even so, the U.S. imports more than half its oil, making it reliant on a volatile world market that enriches U.S. adversaries such as Venezuela and Iran.
•Natural gas provides about a quarter of U.S. energy, and the good news is that supplies are enormous. The bad news is that drawing that gas from tight rock formations means using a controversial technique called " fracking" that fractures rock deep underground so the gas can flow. The Environmental Protection Agency is studying whether fracking has contaminated drinking water and groundwater.
•Coal supplies about a fifth of U.S. energy and almost half the nation's electricity. Again, the good news is that America's supplies are huge. But underground coal mining routinely injures and kills miners, surface mining scars vast tracts of land in Appalachia and the West, and coal is a major contributor to air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.
Wind and solar power have fewer drawbacks, but their contributions to the nation's energy production are small — less than 1% combined. That will change, but getting to the point where solar or wind equal the output from oil, coal, natural gas or even nuclear power will probably take decades.
Until then, the best approach to energy disasters is the same one applied to air crashes: Study the causes carefully, learn from the mistakes, and adopt changes to make the systems as safe as humanly possible.