My good friends and activist colleagues Pete Litster and Eileen McCabe-Olsen wrote a repsonse to the amendment to HB46 for nuclear energy research by Representative Mike Noel. Pete is the Executive Director and Eileen the Associate Director of Shundahai Network in Salt Lake City, an organization dedicated to breaking the nuclear chain through its lobbying and direct action efforts. Shundahai specifically works with indigenous groups to provide a voice against the ongoing development of nuclear projects.
Noel is wrong about nuclear energy’s safety
By Eileen McCabe-Olsen and Pete Litster
We were appalled to learn that Rep. Mike Noel’s amendment specifically advocating research into nuclear energy has been attached to HB46. While it is commendable that the House wants to explore alternative energies, nuclear power is not a credible alternative energy source. It is an immature technology that should be discontinued, not expanded in commercial use.
Noel cites that “nuclear energy is clean and it is safe.” Neither is true. While nuclear power production does not emit greenhouse gases during its generation, it produces tons of toxic waste, for which there is still no acceptable storage or detoxification solution. Further, unlike coal, which is readily usable after being mined, uranium must be processed through several steps — milling, conversion to uranium hexafluoride, enrichment and fuel rod assembly — before it can be used in a reactor. All of these steps consume energy produced by conventional sources that do emit greenhouse gases.
Shundahai Network seeks to educate the public about all of the links in the nuclear chain, including their impacts on the health and safety of our communities and environment. Power generation is one of those links. Our media research has revealed that, in just the past 60 days, multiple situations of leaks from cooling pools have contaminated local wells near U.S. nuclear plants with the hazardous radionuclide tritium. Further, there has been admission of falsified safety inspections, including one that contributed to the near explosion of the reactor at Davis-Besse in Ohio. Other incidents have led to multiple reactor shutdowns.
It’s certainly true that safety violations and accidents may happen with any kind of power production. However, nuclear power is unique in that accidents at other sources usually do not pose an immediate catastrophic risk to the lives of hundreds of thousands of people living near to or downwind or downstream from the vicinity. Building nuclear power plants does nothing to reduce our need for oil in either the short or long term. Nuclear plants do not fuel automobiles, the single greatest user of oil. Building nuclear power plants will do little to mitigate global warming, as the emissions from overall electricity production make up a tiny percentage of greenhouse gas emissions. Most of these emissions come from automobile exhaust and domestic power use. Nor is nuclear power a quick or expedient technology. Nuclear power plants take, on average, 10 years to plan, license and build, and billions of dollars. We do not have this kind of time or capital.
Noel has commented on uranium availability as a selling point for nuclear power generation in Utah. We would still need to purchase the uranium from private interests, some of them foreign, and would still need to ship the uranium to one of a handful of federal facilities for enrichment. Much of the uranium is located on Navajo lands, and the Navajo Nation has recently declared a moratorium on all uranium mining. Indeed, uranium mining has already imposed a disproportional burden on Navajo people, in terms of the health and safety. This goes for many other Native American communities.
We agree that we need mitigation solutions to greenhouse gas emissions and to our oil addiction. These solutions should draw on resources that are locally and regionally available. Utah is already a beneficiary of the Blue Sky initiative, the windmill array in Wyoming, through Utah Power. Infrastructure already exists for wind power generation and transmission. Wind farms have already been proposed for locations within Utah. Given the statistics available on sunlight in Utah, our state is also an ideal location for solar arrays. Indeed, Japan plans to generate a full half of its electricity from the sun by 2030.
The sun is the only nuclear reactor we need.
Certainly, nuclear research should continue. But it should focus on phasing itself out and mitigating the harms already produced. Future nuclear research should work to protect the health of our communities and our environment by developing processes to neutralize the radioactivity of existing nuclear waste instead of adding additional burden and risk through encouraging production.
In the end, if Utah were to move down the nuclear path, we have one question: Where would we ship our own high-level nuclear waste?
Eileen McCabe-Olsen is associate director and Pete Litster is executive director of Shundahai Network.
Deanna Dee-Dee Taylor 