Professors at MIT have referred to the San Onofre nuclear power plant as a “Chernobyl waiting to happen”. The San Onofre nuclear power plant is full of nuclear waste and is located along the coast of southern California on “Earthquake bay.

Eventually, in 2013 the plant was shut down after a radioactive leak was discovered. Now, Orange county is left with canisters of nuclear waste with no permanent place to send them to.

If this nuclear waste does end up being transported it will likely just end up in New Mexico or Texas in disenfranchised communities lacking resources to properly store or dispose of the waste.

Nuclear plant leakage is such a common problem that when reading up on the history of different nuclear plants, Wikipedia has an “incident” page where you can view past nuclear leaks.

Recommended: How to Eliminate IBS, IBD, Leaky Gut 

The decision of what to do with this nuclear waste is obviously a big one, yet ther person who decides what happens to the nuclear waste is a judge in an urban courthouse who ran unopposed in his last election.

Permanent compositories, canisters only last 200-300 years clock ticking, why should communities have to store nuclear waste when there’s no guarantee it will be moved.

To learn more about the problems with nuclear waste storage check out the video below.

A new study compared the carbon emissions of nuclear power versus renewable energy and finds that renewables resulted in a more serious reduction of national carbon emissions. Scientists analyzed data from 123 countries from the years of 1999 to 2014. Not only did nuclear power not show a significant reduction in carbon emissions, it even showed increases in carbon emissions in some developing countries.

The evidence clearly points to nuclear being the least effective of the two broad carbon emissions abatement strategies, and coupled with its tendency not to co-exist well with its renewable alternative, this raises serious doubts about the wisdom of prioritising investment in nuclear over renewable energy…”

Benjamin Sovacool, a professor of energy policy at the University of Sussex

Nuclear power has been sold as a solid, more environmentally friendly alternative to fossil fuels, and there have been advances in nuclear technology since 2014, the last year that this study was examined. In addition to that, many of the nuclear plants analyzed were older and needed more energy to be maintained. Even with those caveats, it’s clear that nuclear power won’t benefit the environment the way a strategy consisting of renewable energies like wind and solar would.

The holy grail of clean energy is fusion power. Researchers at MIT have just received $50 million in funding to help make it happen. MIT has joined forces with a startup called Commonwealth Fusion Systems, and together they paln to have a pilot fusion power plant in 15 years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zjl4T6nISao

If we succeed, the world’s energy systems will be transformed. An entirely new industry may be seeded potentially with New England as its hub.” – Maria Zuber Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor

Nuclear Fusion vs. Nuclear Fission

Nuclear fusion is the energy source that powers the sun, the stars, and hydrogen bombs. Not to be confused with nuclear fission, which is what’s used in nuclear power plants. Fission splits atoms to release energy, and this produces long-lived and deadly radioactive waste products. As of now, there are zero fusion reactors. Nuclear fission isn’t that difficult, but fusion, on the other hand, is very difficult (more on fission and fusion or see the video below).

Most of us don’t want more nuculear power plants. Many argue that nuclear fission is cleaner than the burning of fossil fuels, but there is the issue of the byproduct of radioactive waste and the infamous incidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima.

Nuclear fusion occurs when 2 light isotopes are combined to create a single heavier isotope. The fusion process releases helium and almost unfathomable amounts of energy, without the nuclear waste that results from nuclear fission. But efforts to use nuclear fusion have often petered out, leading to the joke that nuclear fusion is the energy of the future — and always will be.

Clean energy brings to mind wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal. Hydro and geothermal are reliable energy, but they are location specific. You either have access to it or you don’t. Another type of clean energy that looks very promising is wave, or ocean energy, but it’s yet to be cost-effectively harnessed. For solar there’s photovoltaic solar energy and solar hot water. And we have wind energy of course. The sun must be shining or the wind must be blowing, so until the battery revolution gets further along, we cannot rely on them as a primary power source. The right breakthroughs in energy storage mean that wind and solar systems are on their way to usurping the dominance of fossil fuels.

But fusion could do better if we can harness it. But the problem with fusion is the extremely high temperatures and pressures involved. We’re talking about star power here. In order to successfully create a fusion reactor, we first need to heat and pressurize plasma to sun-like conditions. Challenging, to say the least. But well worth it if we can pull it off.

This commercial investment success will benefit humanity by providing carbon-free power at scale in time to mitigate the deleterious effects of global warming.” – Maria Zuber

What’s New With Fusion? SPARC

A new superconducting compound dubbed YBCO, for yttrium-barium-copper oxide will be used to coat steel tape, creating much smaller but also much more powerful magnets than are currently available. These magnets should generate four times as strong a magnetic field and tenfold the power output of any existing fusion experiment, the team beleives.

By putting the magnet development up front we think that this gives you a really solid answer in three years, and gives you a great amount of confidence moving forward that you’re giving yourself the best possible chance of answering the key question, which is: Can you make net energy from a magnetically confined plasma?” – Dennis Whyte, director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center

Sources:

• MIT joins with private company to make fusion power happen soon – Digital Journal
• MIT Is Building The World’s Most Powerful Superconducting Magnets For an Amazing Cause – Science Alert
• The New Atomic Age Nuclear Fusion And Beyond – Oilprice.com
• MIT Aims To Bring Nuclear Fusion To The Market In 10 Years – WBUR

I have never understood why anyone would buy into the belief system that nuclear energy is clean, unless invisible but deadly contamination doesn’t count.

Before recent events in Japan reminded us of the global threat of radiation due to a meltdown or any other release of radioactive material into the atmosphere, we knew nuclear energy wasn’t green or clean. How could it be when radioactive waste takes tens of thousands of years to decay to safe levels?

Now, with the crisis in Japan, Americans are once again speaking out about the safety of nuclear energy. And the White House is talking back.

White House spokesman, Jay Carney made it clear that President Obama, who has proposed $36 billion in loan guarantees for nuclear power, has no plans to change his policy.

We find it ludicrous that low CO2 emissions and clean nuclear energy are synonymous when talking about nuclear energy.

Alex Flint of the Nuclear Regulatory Agency said in a Fox News interview that the United States is “best in class” at anticipating and preparing for unlikely events, especially since 9/11. While doing his best not to suggest the Japanese were not lax or inept in preparedness, he suggests we are more prepared and will learn from their mistakes as well. But the truth is we currently have 104 nuclear power plants in operation in the United States and many of them are on coastlines or fault lines. When scientists say the San Onofre nuclear power plant in California was built to withstand a 7.0 earthquake, which is sufficient based on their study of the seismic activity in the area, along with its thirty foot tsunami wall, forgive me if I have my doubts that all is well and perfectly safe. I can’t help but think about New Orleans. The levees, built by the Army Corps of Engineers, failed when Katrina, a level 3 hurricane, reached the shore. American superiority? Best in class, my ass.

The Japanese are well trained, well prepared, and they knew they were living on fault lines with the threat of tsunamis. After an earthquake measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale and a massive tsunami, their preparations failed. At the time of this writing, they are facing not one, but possibly three meltdowns. There have been three explosions, which have released radiation into the atmosphere.

And one important consideration to remember is this: once released, that radiation cannot be contained. How many of Japan’s downwind neighbors will be affected by the fallout?