Defining Energies: Greenwashing by the European Union

 

      Waste at Union Carbide Uranium Processing Plant, 

on a tributary of the Colorado River, 1972 

Courtesy of the US National Archives

The EU has decided that burning natural gas and atomic power plants are "transitional" green energies. This is nonsense. 

Take gas first. Natural gas drilling is anything but a green activity. with large amounts of gas escaping into the atmosphere. Methane is a worse greenhouse gas than CO2. Vast sums are also required to build and maintain the infrastructure of gas pipelines and storage facilities. Cost estimates vary, but it requires about $3.5 million to build one mile of pipeline. To put this in perspective, for $3.5 million one could erect a 2-3 megawatt windmill. A one hundred mile gas pipeline would cost as much as windmills with c. 250 megawtt capacity. And if one factors in the cost of gas exploration, drilling, storage, and all the rest of the expenses, building gas infrastructure is a stupid investment. Calling it transitional means that the plan is to spend all that money and then shut the system down in one generation. But that would not really happen. Once a massive infrastructure is built, it acquires technological momentum, and it is difficult to shut down.

But gas is a winner compared to nuclear power. The big problem with it lies in the waste, which is a very long term deferred cost imposed on generations to come. The EU tasks individual national governments with the costs of nuclear waste, but this is a very large and expensive can to kick down the road to the future. An American example may be helpful here. The US has generated a lot of nuclear waste, and most states and localities fiercely resist becoming the depositories. I devote chapter eight of Conflicted American Landscapes to the mining and refining of uranium, its transformation into plutonium, and the vast amount of waste generated at every step of the process. 

Consider the effects of mining. In the words of the US Environmental Protection Agency: “From 1944 to 1986, nearly 30 million tons of uranium ore were extracted from Navajo lands under leases with the Navajo Nation. Many Navajo people worked the mines, often living and raising families in close proximity to the mines and mills.” This left, “a legacy of uranium contamination” at more than 500 abandoned mines, “as well as homes and drinking water sources with elevated levels of radiation. Potential health effects include lung cancer from inhalation of radioactive particles, as well as bone cancer and impaired kidney function from exposure to radionuclides in drinking water.” Thousands of uranium mine workers and their families developed cancer and whole communities were devastated.

The EU produces almost no uranium, so this highly polluting activity is off-loaded on other nations. That hidden environmental destruction is not discussed by the EU administrators who want to call nuclear power "green." But the waste is created in Europe, and it will remain radioactive for not just centuries but for thousand of years. 

To get a sense of what this means, consider this American example. The US government built a massive underground facility to contain radioactive materials inside Yucca Mountain, Nevada. But it remains empty, because Nevada refused to be the nuclear dump for the rest of the country. Instead, at scattered sites nuclear waste is stored “temporarily,” including 40,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel in above-ground tanks in Utah on the Goshute Tribe’s reservation. 

Other nuclear waste has been embedded in a thick layer of salt at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, New Mexico, in man-made caverns 2,150 feet underground. What began in uranium mines ends as the reverse of mining, in a labyrinth of man-made caves, each as long as a football field and one third as wide. These chambers cover three square miles and they can hold 850,000 barrels of “lightly contaminated items” When waste shipments are packed into these salt formation until every cranny is full, the entrance will be closed and covered with earth. The facility is to last for 10,000 years, but the materials entombed will decline in radioactivity for 240,000 years. Twenty-ton granite markers, a bit smaller than the vertical stones at Stonehenge, will warn away future generations in seven languages. Long before the site is safe, these languages will be incomprehensible to all but a few linguists and historians, so there will also be warnings in pictographs.

Our descendants will need to avoid these waste sites for as far into the future as we have a written history stretching back into the past. Indeed, 10,000 years is not long enough. The areas where this waste are stored will be "sacrifice zones" that no one can live in or farm. They will require protection for more than 100 generations. How can anyone think that this waste storage is "transitional" or "green" or good policy?