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It’s time to go nuclear
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Sometimes the nuclear option is the best way to go. I’m not suggesting that we obliterate Ahmadinejad’s weapons industry with atomic warheads, but referring to a problem much closer to home – energy. America’s use of energy is increasing, despite conservation efforts.
According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), in the past fifteen years annual energy consumption has skyrocketed from 84 quadrillion BTUs to 99 quadrillion. Increased efficiency won’t stop the energy crisis. Crude oil prices spiral ever upward due to demand in China and India. Millions of new immigrants each year – both legal and illegal – consume previously unneeded energy.
Ever-increasing numbers of energy-using electronic devices dominate every sector of American life, from SUVs to MRI machines to iPhones. We live in a plugged-in and powered-on world – and the energy must come from somewhere.
Last year 79 percent of the energy used in America was derived from burning the pollutant-emitting fossil fuels coal, oil, and natural gas, dirtying American skies and ensuring dependence on foreign oil sources hostile to US interests.
Hydropower currently provides Idaho with a source of clean, renewable energy, but hydropower exploration across the nation ended years ago.
There simply aren’t that many rivers left to dam up. Solar and wind power are prohibitively expensive, consume large swaths of landscape, and lack the reliability needed to provide energy base load – that critical amount of energy needed to power the core of civilization. America can’t simply come to a halt on cloudy or windless days. What’s left but nuclear power, which safely generates 35 percent of Europe’s electricity from 196 nuclear plants across the continent?
The proposed Idaho Energy Complex (IEC) near Grand View in Owyhee County would begin to bring Idaho and America back into a realistic 21st century energy policy. The 1600 megawatt reactor would produce twenty percent more electricity than all of Idaho’s 136 hydroelectric dams combined, providing enough power for two-thirds of the state.
In addition, excess heat from the reactor would power a biofuels plant where cattle manure and agricultural waste would be converted into biomethane and ethanol, meaning that Idaho drivers would have access to environmentally friendly vehicle fuels. Alternative Energy Holdings Inc., the parent company of IEC, has begun forming a cooperative with local dairies in the Magic Valley.
Some opponents of nuclear power have pointed to a need for cooling water as a drawback to IEC, but its third-generation UniStar Nuclear Areva EPR reactor is a new “dry” design, using 600 times less cooling water than conventional reactors, so the new power plant won’t have a detrimental effect on Idaho’s water supply. Some also cry wolf, claiming that transportation and storage of spent nuclear fuel will lead to radioactive contamination across the state.
However, shipping nuclear fuel is incredibly regulated with a spectacular safety record. According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), over the past thirty years and thousands of shipments of spent nuclear waste across the US, there has not been a single accident that resulted in a radioactive release.
Under the federal government’s new Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, which is currently in development at the Idaho National Laboratory, US nuclear plants are adopting nuclear fuel rod reprocessing technologies already in use by other nuclear-powered countries. This will reduce the amount of nuclear waste generated by as much as a thousand times.
The proposed nuclear/biofuels plant, one of 14 in America currently awaiting construction approval by the NRC, is gaining support across the state and nation. Leaders who have pledged their support range from the Owyhee County Commission, to Steven Pursley, the tribal leader of the Shoshone-Paiute Duck Valley Indian Reservation, to Patrick Moore, the founder of Greenpeace.
The 3.5 billion dollar plant would create hundreds of high-paying jobs, purchase cattle and agricultural waste from local farmers and ranchers, provide clean-burning ethanol and biodiesel to Idaho drivers and greatly reduce Idaho’s dependence on the pollutant-emitting imported fossil fuels, which currently provides eighty percent of our energy.
If you believe in energy independence, a cleaner environment, reductions in greenhouse gases, good jobs for Idahoans, affordable power and renewable energy, then support the development of the Idaho Energy Complex.
JONATHAN SAWMILLER
Opinion Writer
