Besides the crowd who rightfully is chanting “drill, baby, drill” when it comes to domestic energy policy, a number of energy advocates call on our nation to resume building nuclear power plants after a hiatus of over thirty years. For example, they point to France as a nation which gets it right in that regard – the vast majority of her electricity comes from nuclear power. Japan is another nation heavily reliant on nuclear power, with 55 plants dotting their landscape.
But the recent drama there obviously raises concerns, with the recent earthquake and resulting tsunami heavily damaging a number of nuclear facilities in the land of the rising sun – one teeters on the edge of a meltdown after an explosion heavily damaged one of its main buildings.
While only small portions of our nation along the Pacific coast and along the Mississippi River have the potential for major earthquakes, the cause of this potential nuclear disaster is one not unlikely in the wake of any number of other natural disasters such as a tornado, hurricane, or fire – an extended power outage which has depleted the plant’s backup cooling system. Certainly nuclear power has been shown as a reasonably reliable source of energy, but critics will point to the Fukushima plant much as they did to the Three Mile Island nuclear facility in Pennsylvania and create another halt to any planned resumption of nuclear power plant construction.
This debate extends to Maryland, where the fate of the Calvert Cliffs facility remains in question. A planned third reactor there is on hold due to the reluctance of Constellation Energy to accept excessive fees as part of a $7.5 billion loan guarantee from the federal government. Given the situation in Japan, one has to ask if Martin O’Malley’s radical environmental backers will convince him to withdraw his support of that project? It’s highly unlikely an earthquake or associated tsunami would overwhelm that bayfront facility, but it would be vulnerable to a hurricane, or, more likely, a tornado.
Still, the risks of such an event are small, and it’s more likely a power outage would occur simply from having a lack of supply or an unrelated catastrophic infrastructure failure like the Northeast Blackout of 2003. All that stimulus money which was supposed to go toward fixing these sorts of problems somehow managed to find its way to local and state governments instead, thus the lingering issues have been unaddressed.
And while nuclear power has this obvious drawback which has created sensational headlines around the globe, bear in mind that any other source of power would have been adversely affected by these conditions as well. In short, this is an extreme circumstance that we should be mindful of in future planning but not overly cautious about.
But those who oppose nuclear power are sure to play the situation up for all it’s worth.
That would be the nuclear power plant in Japan that just underwent what is basically a worst-case scenario and currently shows no signs of having actually caused any real health or environmental hazards? Jumping the gun a bit, aren’t they?
I suppose they prefer having oil refineries and pipelines ruptured and burning and leaking all over.