Our Environment, Animal Tips & the Great Outdoors

Nooooo! A thousand times, no. Not here!

Yes, of course, the knee-jerk response to any mention of nuclear power is to scream with the fury of seven tornadoes during an early Sunday-morning earthquake. Everyone has a position, certainly, but how about we set politics to the side and start with a clean slate here, shall we? Assuming we are now settled enough to, without provoking a barroom brawl, look into whether nuclear power deserves a seat at the table when it comes to providing electrical energy to our homes and businesses, let’s take a swing at it.

A history lesson

It was in the year 1904 that British physicist Ernest Rutherford, bootstrapping on the work of ancient Greek philosophers and 18th and 19th century scientists, wrote, “If it were ever possible to control at will the rate of disintegration of the radio elements, an enormous amount of energy could be obtained from a small amount of matter.”  

A year later, Albert Einstein developed his theory of the relationship between mass and energy. In 1939, physicist Enrico Fermi, who had earlier proved that neutrons could split many kinds of atoms, confirmed the discovery of the fission process and sought to attain a nuclear chain reaction. A decade-plus later, the first nuclear reactors in the United States and the UK had begun to produce electrical power.

How?

“Nuclear power plants generate electricity like any other steam-electric power plant,” the Department of Energy informs us. “Water is heated, and steam from the boiling water turns turbines and generates electricity. The main difference in the various types of steam-electric plants is the heat source. Heat from a self-sustaining chain reaction boils the water in a nuclear power plant. Coal, oil, or gas is burned in other power plants to heat the water.”

In 2023, according to the US Energy Information Administration, 38% of energy production in the United States was in natural gas; 34% in petroleum; 11% coal; 8% in renewables; and 8% in nuclear electrical power. There was a time when a savvy gambler may well have wagered that those natural gas and nuclear energy numbers occupied the others’ position, while optimism ran wild that nuclear energy would provide us all with free, limitless energy. The populace goes wild with glee.

Atomic installation in … Chatham?

For instance, let’s make our way back to 1963 northern Columbia County, a time when The Chatham Courier announced in a front-page headline, “Claim Chatham Gets Priority For New Atomic Installation.” In 2025, one would expect the next sound to be that previously referenced “Nooooo!” to bounce off the hills and scurry through the valleys. But in 1963? Meh, just about covers it. Yes, there was some small bit of opposition, but overall, nothing to match the squawking that arose in various locales as the Taconic State Parkway wended its way north in fits and starts during the 1950s.

It was during July of that year that a New York State Electric & Gas representative would say, “Today 125 electric companies, in cooperation with the Atomic Energy Commission and equipment manufacturers, are participating in one or more of 25 projects aimed at making atomic energy a practical, economic source of electric power. … To meet the future power needs of New York State at economical costs, some new fuel source will be necessary in the years ahead.” 

Further, when the Godiva Project (its actual name, which referred to the type of reactor design) first sprouted wings in late fall of 1962, the same story noted that the state Office of Atomic Development “made clear one point, however, that it would not make any assurance that Columbia County would be the final site selected. ‘If we even hinted this, you could expect to see land values soar to astronomic proportions [italics added] and we aren’t going to be responsible for that’.” Zippity doo dah. Sounds rather silly these days, no?

Today’s approach

Sixty-plus years later, NYSE&G appears to have adopted a somewhat different approach, as an interesting phenomenon has developed over the past couple years. Nearly every month, NYSE&G ever-so-sweetly sends along a missive, complete with a colorful chart and tips on how I might rectify my behavior, detailing how I’m consuming far more electrical power than my neighbors while not-so-subtly pointing out I need to straighten up and fly right. Eeeeeemediately, if not sooner! I wonder if they thought friends and neighbors wouldn’t talk. 

Turns out, many friends and most neighbors continue to receive identical notices and isn’t it remarkable, but we all seem to be above average. I am no kind of mathematician, but I did pay enough attention in school (seriously, I really was listening, Mr. Benson) to know that kind of arithmetic doesn’t add up.

Perhaps there’s a reason for our above-average status, and it’s surely not that everyone-gets-a-trophy thing. In fact, it has little to do with you or me or our neighbors, none of whom has rapidly doubled or tripled their consumption of electricity over the past five or six years – personally, I have blazing the same two to three lights and radio or TV at night as I did when my electric bill was half its size. What happened right down the road in Buchanan, NY, might well help add some understanding of this calamity.

Fossil fuels to renewables?

Seems to me most of us can agree that a reduction in the use of fossil fuels to be replaced by renewables is a jolly good idea. But to have the idea one instant and implement it the next absent a reasonable plan forward creates a situation fraught with potential boo-boos. A 2021 New York Times story took a look at the shuttering of of the Indian Point nuclear facility in Buchanan and at least a partial replacement of its energy with, for instance, a wind farm in the Atlantic Ocean off Long Island, and noted, “After one of Indian Point’s two working reactors was permanently shut down last summer, the share of the state’s power that came from gas­-fired generators jumped in 2020 to about 40 percent, from about 36 percent in 2019, federal data show.” Ask me, it’s no real coincidence that electric bills began to skyrocket.

According to the US Department of Energy in 2024, “Nuclear is the largest source of clean power in the United States. It generates nearly 775 billion kilowatt hours of electricity each year and produces nearly half of the nation’s emissions-free electricity. This avoids more than 471 million metric tons of carbon each year, which is the equivalent of removing 100 million cars off of the road.”

But, what about an incident?

So what’s the big deal? Well, okay.

When one hears the phrase nuclear power, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? That may well be the Three Mile Island disaster in 1979, if not the 1986 Chernobyl accident or Fukushima in 2011. Let’s look close to home at the Three Mile Island situation for a moment, an event supercharged by the near-simultaneous release of the movie “The China Syndrome,” which envisioned a nuclear power plant accident and subsequent meltdown that wouldn’t stop until it ate its way clear through to China. Any hope of a clear-eyed, sustained approach to the development of nuclear power in the United States essentially was swallowed up by that mythical hole and has remained there ever since.

What’s one thing tying these three together? “All three severe accidents … had their root causes in system deficiencies indicative of poor safety management and poor safety culture in both the nuclear industry and government authorities,” notes the NIH’s National Center for Biotechnology Information. In other words, none of the three were sailing along just fine one instant and exploding the next, not when humans and/or an earthquake/tsunami were behind these accidents.

Let’s start with the stipulation that what can go haywire with a nuclear plant can go seriously haywire – we’re not talking a major, lengthy tire fire or even an upended railroad car loaded with such true delights as vinyl chloride, ethyl acrylate, and isobutylene. Bad news, yes, but bad news raising hell in a relatively confined location, unlike a nuclear plant catastrophe with the propensity to render a large area uninhabitable for way, way more years than you or I have left on this planet. No question there. 

Then there’s the waste…

Although no one asked me, I’d venture that the real sand in the nuclear power ointment is in waste disposal. 

In the United States, the DOE oversees the disposal of nuclear waste. I’d be willing to bet that nuclear waste will outlive us all, as in the human race in its current role as the dominant planetary species. At the same time, I’d be willing to bet that fossil fuels have a fair-to-middlin’ chance to wreck the place to the extent no one wants to stick around, anyway.

“The nation has over 90,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel from commercial nuclear power plants,” according to the US Government Accountability Office. “DOE is responsible for disposing of this high-level waste in a permanent geologic repository but has yet to build such a facility because policymakers have been at an impasse over what to do with this spent fuel since 2010. As a result, the amount of spent nuclear fuel stored at nuclear power plants across the country continues to grow by about 2,000 metric tons a year.” 

At a time when Rolls-Royce is busy developing a lunar module nuclear reactor for use on, yes, the moon, maybe it’s time to take a look at what this might mean for future energy needs.

After all, Rolls-Royce points out, “The potential applications of Rolls-Royce micro-reactor technology are wide-ranging and could support commercial and defense use cases in addition to those in space. The aim is to create a world-leading power and propulsion capability for multiple markets and operator needs, which also supports global net zero targets.”

Stand by. •