Nuclear Power & Offshore Drilling May Help Keep Oil Prices High

CafeSentido.com :: With gasoline prices at record highs, and the strain on a weak American economy already at an extreme, Pres. Bush is pushing Congress to hold an “up-or-down vote” on renewed exploration of the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) before its August recess. Opponents protest that none of any oil found there would be available for production for 10 to 15 years, and the OCS plan is an attempt to deliver oil firms an otherwise unjustifiable gift, taking advantage of the pressurized situation of exorbitant prices.

The Energy Information Agency (EIA) evaluating the OCS strategy have found that opening offshore sites in the Pacific, the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico would still not be producing enough oil and natural gas to have a significant effect on domestic reserves, even as far out as the year 2030. CNN today reported that Democratic members of Congress say a preliminary investigation attributes more than 50% of the soaring prices to speculation, while traders say OPEC has deliberately held production low in order to drive prices up.

We must also face the increasingly clear economic reality that carbon emissions are not just destructive to the health of our natural environment, but that they have real economic costs not directly related to ecosystem resilience, such as human health, and the cost of industrial activity related to clean-up and to the obsolescence of devices running on combustible fuels. So devoting increasing amounts of our energy economy to combustible fuels at a time when prices are soaring has a multiple-negative economic effect.

The key to understanding what is happening that makes recourse to nuclear and carbon-based fuels potentially counterproductive is to understand that we are no longer living in a traditional industrial energy economy. We are now dealing with the consequences of that economy’s exploration and combustion burden. The “carbon footprint” is not merely an environmental ethics concern, but a serious economic factor potentially mitigating future productivity, or added long-term costs.

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Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), the Republican nominee for president, has proposed building 45 new nuclear plants across the country in order to bring down energy prices overall. While the vice president has long been close to the nuclear lobby, and nuclear energy was included as part of his initial proposals for a new national energy policy, no plants have been built in the US in three decades, and environmental and cost concerns, including pending court rulings, make the strategy unlikely to be implemented.

The state of California —on its own the world’s 5th largest economy— has only two nuclear plants, so the amount of energy sought in producing 45 plants is more than ambitious, especially when compared to the promise of new alternative fuel and energy-production options. The entire nation has only 104 nuclear reactors, so the commitment to new nuclear power plants would be serious, even as new options become available.

What’s more, the history of accidents and near accidents is widely unknown among the public. We know the word “Chernobyl”, but most people don’t know that the V.I. Lenin Memorial Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station had four reactors, only one of which exploded in the cataclismic disaster of 1986. The other three reactors were finally shut down only years afterward, in 1991, 1996 and 2000, respectively. And, the Ukraine’s largest nuclear plant, also Europe’s largest, at Zaporizhzhia, has six pressurized light-water reactors.

We have heard of the serious nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, in March 1979, in which partial core meltdown in one reactor led to the release of 43,000 curies of radioactive krypton (1.59 PBq), and 20 curies (740 GBq), considered a relatively small amount of the especially dangerous iodine-131 isotope, into the surrounding environment. But few people are aware of the major explosion, following core meltdown, in January 1961, at the National Reactor Testing Station in the Idaho desert.

All three people working the plant during the explosion were killed and the radioactivity levels were so intense, they were required to be buried in lead coffins. The massive 890 square-mile complex, now known as the Idaho National Laboratory, was the site of the first success in producing electricity from nuclear reactions, and is in part a national historic landmark. But among its 52 reactors, only three are currently operational, and there are reported to be plans to use at least one to produce plutonium-238 for classified national security purposes.

Now, given the intense security concerns related to nuclear power, rapid construction is literally impossible. Federal public health and environmental laws also require fastidious attention to detail, which has intensified since the last plant was constructed 3 decades ago. Failure to meet with absolute precision all the security requirements can result in catastrophic accidents and/or major cost-overruns in relation to federal regulatory fines and/or takeovers.

This means that entirely new systems for construction need to be designed and tested before even the first construction of any new plant can begin. So there is no way that new nuclear plants can affect current gas prices. The timeline here has also been pushed back as far as 2030 for any significant shift on percentage of national energy production derived from nuclear power, if the massive new construction project were undertaken.

With both offshore drilling and new nuclear construction likely to delay the infusion of new supply into the domestic energy economy, the real economic result of committing to these strategies for expanding domestic energy production may actually be the increase in prices for oil and automotive gasoline, as it becomes clear that overall supply depends heavily on these resources for the foreseeable future.

Everyone is generally talking about the need for funding the broad expansion of national infrastructure for renewable resources, like wind and solar power, though it is fair to say that given the revolutionary advances in cost-effective construction and comparable end-user cost for renewable resources, there has not been enough attention given to the potential for rapid infrastructure development that could bring new sources of energy production online within 2 to 3 years.