Richard Rhodes

Prepared Testimony before the Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, Committee on Science, U.S. House of Representatives,

25 July 2000

Chairman Calvert; members of the Subcommittee: My name is Richard Rhodes. I’m an independent journalist and historian, the author of eighteen books and many articles for national magazines. One of my books, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction. Since 1970 I have written extensively about nuclear power. I’ve investigated its problems and prospects not only in the United States but also in France, Japan, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Bulgaria. In January of this year I published an article in the journal Foreign Affairs entitled "The Need for Nuclear Power," coauthored with Los Alamos nuclear engineer Denis Beller. I’m not a scientist or an engineer but simply an informed citizen. I have no financial or professional connection with the nuclear power industry. I do have three young grandchildren, however, and I would like to see them grow up in a less polluted America.

Energy security means more than securing the U.S. energy supply. Two billion people worldwide currently lack even access to electricity. Development depends on energy, and the alternative to development is suffering: poverty, disease and death. Such conditions create instability and the potential for

widespread violence. Leading the way to improved production of clean energy not only in the United States but also in the developing world is and will be vital to our national security.

Shocking as the statement may sound after all the years of misrepresentation, nuclear power is demonstrably the greenest form of large‑scale energy generation at hand. France, by generating 80 percent of its electricity with nuclear power, has reduced its air pollution by a factor of five. The U.S. nuclear power industry, by improving capacity and performance alone, has already made the largest contribution of any American industry to meeting the U.S. Kyoto commitment to limiting CO₂ releases into the atmosphere.

The fundamental advantage of nuclear power is its ability to wrest enormous energy from a small volume of fuel. One metric ton of nuclear fuel produces energy equivalent to 2 to 3 million tonnes of fossil fuel. Thus, one kilogram of coal generates 3 kilowatt‑hours of electricity, but one kilogram of nuclear fuel generates 400,000 kilowatt‑hours. This remarkable difference in fuel volume between nuclear and fossil fuels results in vastly different environmental impacts. Running a thousand‑megawatt‑electric power plant for a year requires 2,000 train cars of coal or 10 supertankers of oil but only 12 cubic meters of natural uranium. The pollutants that result are equally diversely scaled: from the nuclear power plant, about 20 cubic meters of spent fuel and low‑ and intermediate‑level waste, a volume so small (roughly the volume of two automobiles) that it can be and is meticulously sequestered from the environment; but from the fossil‑fuel plant, thousands of tonnes of greenhouse and noxious gases, particulates, heavy‑metal‑bearing (and radioactive) ash and solid hazardous waste, far too much to allow for sequestration even with the most stringent pollution controls. A plant burning coal produces up to 500,000 tonnes of sulfur annually, for example; a plant burning oil more than 300,000 tonnes, and 200,000 tonnes of sulfur even burning natural gas. The Harvard School of Public Health estimates that pollution from coal‑burning alone causes about 15,000 premature deaths annually in the United States. And because coal contains uranium and thorium, a thousand‑megawatt coal plant releases about 100 times as much radioactivity into the environment annually as a comparable nuclear plant. Coal‑fired power plants are in fact the world’s major sources of radioactive releases into the environment.

What about renewables? New, commercially untested technologies tend to be idealized. In the 1920s, people seriously believed that the development of radio broadcasting would lead to world peace. In the 1950s, Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis L. Strauss forecast an era when energy from thermonuclear fusion would make electricity "too cheap to meter." The same wishful thinking continues to obscure the potential environmental impact of technologies such as solar electricity and wind power, although environmentalists have begun to acknowledge the impact of hydropower (which includes not only flooding land for reservoirs but also generating significant volumes of methane, a worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, from drowned and rotting vegetation). Until such a time as someone invents a perpetual‑motion machine, all schemes for generating energy in the real world will have environmental consequences and require environmental trade‑offs.

Several weeks ago in the New York Times a consortium of environmental organizations published a full‑page advertisement attacking the Internet. Among other things, the environmentalists argued that the manufacture of semiconductor chips polluted large quantities of fresh water and generated large volumes of toxic waste. Well, photovoltaic cells used to collect solar energy are large semiconductors, and as with computer chips, their manufacture requires considerable quantities of fresh water and produces a waste stream of highly toxic metals and solvents — about 7,000 tonnes of hazardous waste from metals processing alone for a thousand megawatts annually over a thirty‑year lifetime.

Renewables are unattractive as baseload sources because they collect dispersed energy and are thus inherently inefficient, with high capital investment costs and low (because intermittent) capacity. A wind farm equivalent to a thousand megawatt fossil fuel or nuclear plant would deploy more than 4,000 wind turbines, occupy up to 1,000 square miles of land and require the processing of millions of pounds of concrete and steel to build, with resulting waste streams and greenhouse gas generation. In the case of a solar plant, such materials processing would consume up to 30 percent of the total electricity that would be generated across the plant’s lifetime. The best sites for solar power plants are the very deserts that environmentalists campaign to protect. Building and maintaining the long‑distance transmission systems that large wind and solar installations would require would add further to the burden of pollution and environmental damage.

On the other hand, there is a large and untapped potential for solar thermal heating of homes and hot water which would significantly reduce energy demand and which Congress could encourage, as it did twenty years ago, with tax subsidies. The Japanese have promoted solar thermal hot water even as they have continued to develop nuclear power.

I have not discussed accidents or waste disposal. These issues are addressed in my Foreign Affairs article, which I have appended to my written testimony. The U.S. nuclear power industry has an extraordinary record of safe operation across the past forty years, and I would submit to you that disposal of civilian nuclear waste is a political, not a technical, problem. Nuclear power is much safer than fossil‑fuel systems in terms of industrial accidents, environmental damage, health effects and long‑term risk. Renewables are cleaner than fossil‑fuel systems, but they are not pristine. Because diversity and redundancy are important for safety and security, renewable energy systems ought to increase their share of energy generation in the century to come. Conservation is also important. But nuclear power deserves Congressional encouragement as a major component of baseload generation, as it is in France and Japan. It is environmentally safe, practical and affordable. It is not the problem; it is one of the best solutions.

Thank you.