Why is nuclear power considered to be a “clean” energy source when its waste is so contaminating/dangerous?

Question

Like. Nuclear waste/disasters contaminate areas for thousands of years and cause cancer. Why is that “clean”?

In: 9

Answer 1

You’re asking that question in a pretty loaded way. The answer is that your estimation of the risk of nuclear waste is not in tune with the reality of the risk.

I’m assuming you’re looking for a comparison to other “clean” energy sources like hydro-electric, solar and wind.

Hydro comes with all kinds of significant environmental impacts. Dams are far more ecologically destructive than we realized 100 years ago when we were putting them up everywhere. You end up with things like the Salton Sea, with an estimated impact of about $70B (compared to say, the famous Exxon-Valdez spill at a cost of $7B). Or the destruction of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands, primarily from effects of levies on the Mississippi. You don’t get any more “meddling with forces we don’t understand” than dams.

Solar runs into similar issues. It’s only viable on a large scale in certain areas and in those areas, it completely destroys the natural habitat, threatening endangered species in a variety of ways. Since solar is unreliable in terms of timing (i.e. you don’t just increase and decrease the power levels based on end usage), it requires a LOT of battery storage, and those batteries involve toxic heavy metals and the safety risks there can be just as problematic as with nuclear. It’s an acceptable backup, but it sucks as a primary source of electricity.

Wind turbines likewise are destructive to natural habitats, also take massive footprints to produce reasonable amounts of energy, and require all the batteries that solar does, with the accompanying metals mining, disposal and safety risks.

There is no such thing as energy production that has no environmental impact. There are just relative levels of impact, and relatively speaking, nuclear is low impact. The waste is compact and the energy density is through the roof. Unlike other methods of energy generation which are guaranteed to come with significant deleterious effects on the environment, negative effects only occur when someone screws up. That means that theoretically, nuclear is the cleanest form of energy that we can harness.