Back to the Nuclear Power Future?

"Fight two big threats with one energy plan," reads the headline of a recent op-ed piece by former National Security Council member Daniel Poneman, published in The Baltimore Sun on May 14, 2007. The column proposes that we in this increasingly "global" world need to create new policy by which to monitor and control a much-needed proliferation of nuclear power generating plants around the planet.

(Since the column at the Sun website will cost money to retrieve after 14 days, check it out at the Forum for International Policy website by clicking on the title or the leadoff hotlink of this post.)

Why are nuclear reactors the way to go today, energy-wise, despite the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl in the recent past? Two words: global warming.

Global warming is the increase in the average temperature of the Earth's near-surface air and oceans in recent decades that is projected to continue in the foreseeable future. If the planet's atmosphere and oceans warm too much for too long, sea levels will rise and inundate coastlines as polar icecaps melt. There will be undesirable changes in the amount and pattern of precipitation, possibly with unprecedented floods and droughts. There may also be changes in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events like hurricanes. Other effects may include changes in agricultural yields, glacier retreat, reduced summer stream flows, species extinctions, and increases in the ranges of disease vectors, exposing more of us to killer infectious diseases.

In other words, if we allow global warming to go on unchecked, many scientists think we are playing with fire.

Conservatives accuse such "liberal" scientists of inventing the global-warming scare out of shoddy evidence, overplaying it, and/or falsely attributing it to human activity, particularly the burning of carbon-based fuels that spew "greenhouse gases" into the atmosphere. oldstyleliberal thinks the conservatives are wrong to make light of this threat. He believes global warming needs to be taken seriously — which means we need to find alternatives to carbon-based energy.

Such as, for instance, a reinvigorated nuclear power program, on a global scale.


We also need to get on board with the idea of a "carbon tax." Libertarian-minded Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman recently weighed in on the issue with "Saving the Earth sensibly," a column in which he preferred taxing carbon emissions to "a lot of command-and-control programs that micromanage various industries on the assumption that the government knows best" — an assumption he finds especially ludicrous with respect to environmental protection initiatives.

A carbon tax is is a tax on energy sources which emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, since CO₂ is the principal greenhouse-gas culprit in man-made global climate change. It would consist of a levy on the burning of fossil fuels — coal, petroleum products such as gasoline and aviation fuel, and natural gas — in proportion to their carbon content. Since coal has more carbon by weight than petroleum or natural gas, the tax on coal would be higher than than on the other two. Economic forces would then move us away from coal, and to a lesser extent away from oil and gas, toward alternative sources of energy.

Such as, again, nuclear power.


The Poneman article points out the dangers here, the principal one being the proliferation of nuclear arms.

You cannot engage in nuclear power generation without the creation of highly enriched uranium to serve as fuel for the reactors, and later of plutonium that is destined to be separated out of the spent fuel and reprocessed. Both can be diverted into the making of bombs.

The enriched uranium in nuclear fuel is not itself concentrated enough to build a practical nuclear bomb, but the same plants and technology used to enrich uranium for power generation can be used to make the highly enriched uranium needed to build a bomb.

Moreover, the plutonium produced in power-generating reactors, if concentrated through reprocessing, can be used for a bomb, or, if a reactor is operated on very short fueling cycles, bomb-grade plutonium can be produced by the reactor itself.

We currently fear North Korea, Iran, and other countries intend to develop a nuclear-weapons capability, under the cover of fostering a "peaceful" nuclear power industry. "How can we preserve the ability of nuclear energy to reduce global warming," asks Poneman, "without sparking a nuclear arms race?"


There are basically two approaches, Poneman indicates: the one he opposes, and the one he proposes.

The one he rejects is to continue to rely on individual governments' unilateral "ability to cut off nuclear fuel services on political grounds, such as human rights abuses or other valid concerns about another government's conduct."

He says that

[U]ranium enrichment and plutonium separation technologies are complex and expensive. So nations that seek nuclear energy but not weapons may opt to buy or lease nuclear fuel rather than building their own plants, just as most have opted to buy or lease (rather than build) their own commercial airliners.

Such "nuclear fuel services" represent a pipeline, not for oil but for nuclear fuel, whose "tap" may at present be cut off by, say, the United States government acting unilaterally. If Iran or North Korea misbehave, turn off the tap. That kind of thing.

Poneman opposes that sort of policy-waging on the grounds that it only forces the more antisocial regimes on the world scene to go it alone. That would be counterproductive. Better, Poneman says, to put the matter in the hands of the International Atomic Energy Agency: "guarantees could be backed by the [IAEA], which can serve as the supplier of last resort as well as the appropriate authority to judge whether a material breach has occurred."

The IAEA would thus guarantee that, say, Country X, absent "a material breach of their nonproliferation obligations," would have a reliable supply of nuclear fuel for its civilian reactors. If individual countries such as the U.S. try to cut X off, nuclearly speaking, IAEA would undertake to fill the gap — again, absent "a material breach" of X's "nonproliferation obligations."

Who would serve as "the appropriate authority to judge whether a material breach has occurred"? Again, the IAEA.


Some might react to Poneman's proposal as internationalism run amok. oldstyleliberal thinks it might work ... particularly if the U.S. can sign on the dotted line along with the United Kingdom, the European Union, Russia, China, and other global bigshots. It's destabilizing to keep on with the present order of things, in which, when a country like Iran seems (maybe) bent on diverting civilian nuclear materials/technology into a weapons program, policy wonks in the U.S. start talking about bombing the hell out of the country as a prophylactic gesture.

Better to encourage countries that are truly committed to peaceable nuclear power uses to tap into the global pipeline in full confidence that as long as they stay peaceable, the valve will not be shut off.