It is difficult to take Bernie Sanders’s vision for a carbon-free energy future seriously when he vehemently rejects the technology that does the most to achieve such a goal.
Nuclear power composes 19.7% of the United States’s electricity generation. It is also America’s largest source of low-carbon energy, providing more than 55% of carbon-free electricity.
Sanders’s energy plan calls for, among other things, a stop to the construction of new nuclear power plants and a moratorium on license renewals for existing nuclear power plants. As part of his broader plan to decarbonize energy production fully and achieve 100% “sustainable energy,” this plank is illogical. Nuclear power is currently the largest low-carbon energy source in the U.S. To get rid of it is at odds with his big-picture goal.
Additionally, to put a moratorium on license renewals for existing plants would stop the production of energy for which almost all costs, both financial and environmental, have already been borne. The plants have already been constructed, and all of the resource use, disruption, and overhead required to build them have already occurred. Capitalizing on the capacity of plants that already exist is common sense.
A near-term transition to a fully carbon-free energy economy is a long shot, but to have such a vision while rejecting effective existing technology shows a serious divorce from reality at best and a deep-seated hypocrisy at worst.
Sanders focuses on fear in his rhetoric on nuclear power, emphasizing the danger of accidents and waste while ignoring comparable dangers in other areas.
Nuclear power is safe, and much of the fear surrounding it is unscientific. In a cumulative 17,000 operating years across 33 countries, there have been only three major nuclear accidents — Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. Only Chernobyl resulted in any deaths from radiation.
These big events register far more heavily in the collective consciousness than do more deadly but less newsworthy events in other areas. This association creates fear. People aren’t aware of the actual chances of another Chernobyl-style accident. It is often wrongly assumed that any reactor may experience the same sort of accident as the Soviet RBMK reactor design. But it is not so: American reactors are quite different — and much safer.
Nuclear energy is among the safest and most reliable energies available. Every type of energy has externalities, and nuclear is no different, but it does not create the sort of threat that nuclear weapons do — an association that has been hard for many people to break.
Socialist and green parties in Europe, with whom Sanders broadly aligns on issues from healthcare to taxation and fossil fuels, also have a long history of opposing nuclear power. These parties, like the Green and Social Democrat parties in Germany, have done serious damage to their country’s nuclear policy, especially in the wake of the Japanese earthquake and subsequent tsunami that caused the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011.
Many countries quickly changed course on nuclear power, mostly due to widespread public fear. Germany will close its last nuclear power plant in 2022 even though a post-Fukushima inspection found that “German facilities appear to be better prepared than the Fukushima power plant.” The decision to shut down Germany’s plants was informed by the same sort of anti-science fearmongering that informs Sanders’s nuclear policy.
One of Sanders’s main complaints, the issue of nuclear waste, could be dramatically ameliorated were the U.S. to emulate France’s waste reprocessing practices. The methods used there result in less waste and require fewer uranium inputs while maintaining high safety standards. The French process recovers 96% of the spent fuel’s reusable material and requires 17% less uranium. We don’t use these methods here in part because of nonproliferation fears — a relic of the cold war.
Fearmongering around nuclear power has been an issue for about as long as there has been nuclear power. But what makes it particularly alarming in the case of Sanders is how fundamentally at odds that fear is with the reality of his other policy aims in the energy area.
Sanders’s positions on nuclear power aren’t particularly useful to accomplish the goal of carbon emissions reduction, and he should be honest about that.
Paige Lambermont is a policy associate at the Institute for Energy Research.
