Gwyneth Cravens is a New Yorkbased journalist and author. She has published five novels and has written for publications such as The New Yorker, The Nation, Harper’s, and The New York Times. Her latest book, Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy, provides an in depth look at the nuclear power industry, from uranium mining to nuclear waste storage. She exchanged emails with Robert Bryce in early June.

ET: You are an unlikely champion of nuclear power. Your writing background is as a novelist and science writer, not as an advocate. Further, you make it clear that you opposed nuclear power for much of your life. And yet your book makes it obvious that you believe nuclear power is the only logical way forward in a world that is concerned about greenhouse gas emissions. Are you surprised at how completely your views on energy issues have changed?

GC: Yes – I am surprised, given that I once petitioned to prevent a nuclear plant from operating on Long Island. But learning to separate myth from fact has been a good experience, especially when myths could prevent a very workable, safe technology from being more widely applied to what is now a climatechange crisis. I don’t think nuclear power is the sole solution – there are other interventions necessary as well. But if we want to replace largescale fossil fuel combustion, nuclear is going to be the main player.

Since childhood I’ve always been impressed by the clarity and precision of the scientific method – one of humanity’s greatest and most artistic inventions. A good novelist in effect follows the scientific method, starting with a question, doing research, making observations, constructing a hypothesis, testing it, discarding it in favor of a new one if the original one doesn’t work, and reporting on the results. Niels Bohr has described the relentless goal of science as the gradual removal of prejudice. I believe it’s also the goal of art.

I had many wrong assumptions, etched in my brain mainly by the popular press and Hollywood and sustained by my abiding opposition to nuclear weapons. Wrong information supported my antinuclear power prejudices. I began to examine these because of a chance – and startling – conversation with a scientist who strictly adheres to the rigor of the scientific method, D. Richard Anderson. He’s a theoretical chemist, chemical oceanographer, expert on risk assessment and environmental nuclear health and safety, and founder of a wildlife sanctuary in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

He’d led several big multidisciplinary projects at Sandia National Laboratories. A born skeptic, he’d establish a subgroup of the best brains available to do all it could to invalidate a project’s hypothesis. This approach proved very fruitful. In the case of one project, his method led to the E.P.A. certification of the first successful longterm nuclearwaste repository in the U.S. He became my guide through the nuclear world. After interviewing him and many other scientists and engineers and doing plenty of reading of peerreviewed, respected literature from sources like the National Academy of Sciences and the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, I reached a turning point. These were the mindchangers:

We can’t continue to extract carbon from the earth’s crust and put it into the atmosphere without suffering devastating consequences from global warming and ocean acidification. These are already occurring. Human contribution is shown by data supplied by scientists from many different disciplines around the world.

Electricity production is responsible for about 40 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions in this country. The world’s annual net carbon increase: 3 to 4 gigatons. By 2030, electricity demand is expected to double.

Renewables, though important as adjunct sources of electricity, can’t supply baseload, have a huge environmental footprint per kWh, are costlier than other energy sources, and for many decades will only be able to make a small contribution to the grid despite heavy corporate and government subsidies. Of course all energy is, and should be, subsidized.

To meet baseload demand in the U.S. requires using fossil fuels, mainly coal, and nuclear power. Nuclear plants, which provide about 20 percent to the grid, now supply 73 percent of the nation’s emissionsfree electricity. That’s the equivalent of taking 100 million cars off the road every year.

Uranium fuel for nuclear plants is about a million times more energy dense than coal. One uranium fuel pellet weighing the same as three pennies contains the energy equivalent of nearly a ton of coal. The volume of waste from nuclear electricity is extremely small and the whole fuel cycle truly is manageable – with fuel always shielded and isolated. A typical reactor core could fit in your kitchen with room to spare.

Fine particulates caused by coal combustion kill 24,000 Americans a year and cause hundreds of thousands of cases of lung and heart disease. Zero deaths have befallen the public from the operation of commercial nuclear plants in the U.S. People who are worried about the lowdose radioactivity coming from power plants should know that waste from coalfired plants emits 100 to 400 times more radiation than a nuclear plant. Some antinuclear power people think that every time a nuclear plant is shut down an angel gets its wings and renewables then supply the necessary electricity. But in fact, coalfired plants inevitably replace reactors – at Three Mile Island, in Germany, and elsewhere.

We evolved in a bath of natural radiation. Some parts of the world are naturally more radioactive, but populations living on these geological formations do not have higher rates of radiologicallyinduced cancers our DNA knows how to deal with lowdose radiation. People who moved to Denver from the Chernobyl region would actually be increasing their exposure to radiation. Only a fraction of 1 percent of our total radiation exposure can be attributed to nuclear power. You get more exposure from eating a single banana it contains an isotope, potassium40 than you would living for a year next to a nuclear plant. The source of our greatest per capita exposure to manmade radiation in the U.S.? Medical diagnostic and therapeutic radiation, which saves millions of lives. Our average annual exposure from medical sources equals that of natural background radiation in the U.S. – about 300 millirem.

ET: How has your book been received? Have you been pleased at the reaction?
GC: When I began working on the book I assumed that only a few people would want to read about such an unpopular topic. My concerns about global warming and what we can do to slow it down kept me going. The book has been well received and is now in its fourth printing. Polls show that people under the age of 30 are quite pronuclear power. When I give talks to younger audiences I find them eager to learn more. People in the technical community tell me that they give the book to people who don’t understand how nuclear power works. Moms, vegetarians, organic gardeners, yogis, and former hippies worried about global warming tell me that the book has changed their thinking. I get emails via my Web site http://cravenspowertosavetheworld.com/from formerly antinuclear environmentalists who now understand baseload demand and how we must work to replace fossilfuel plants with nuclear ones whenever possible – while of course practicing conservation, improving efficiency, and expanding renewables.

ET: Where has the harshest criticism of the book come from?

GC: Oddly enough, there’s been very little. Some snark has come from people who are committed to a rigid ideological position and see every nuclear plant as an atomic bomb waiting to go off. And then there are those who are in general antiscience and are misled by claims that are often so wrong as to be preposterous. I’m reminded of the futile debate between Darwinists and creationists. It’s evident that most of these critics have not read the book.

ET: One aspect of nuclear power that you don’t discuss much in your book is the issue of cost. Some of the new reactors now being discussed for construction here in the U.S. may cost as much as $18 billion. Olkiluoto3, the nuclear plant now being built in Finland by the French firm Areva, is behind schedule and far over budget. How much do cost issues concern you?

GC: That $18 billion you cite must be the estimate for that tworeactor project in Florida. Various factors have caused the estimates for new reactors to increase. The assumption I heard from people in the industry six months ago [was] that a wellmanaged project for a typical reactor would cost around $6 billion to $7 billion, but now the figure is more like $9 billion, given uncertainties about financing, regulatory requirements, availability of raw materials and components, the effect of new nuclear plant construction abroad, and time elapsed between groundbreaking and first watt generated.

However, the International Energy Agency has just issued a report calling for a prompt transformation of technology and recommending that during the next 50 years as much as $45 trillion should be invested in preventing greenhouse gas emissions and fuel shortages. The I.E.A. wants to see the building of 32 new nuclear reactors a year.

Research in Finland and elsewhere indicates that taxing carbon emissions automatically makes nuclear power the cheapest option….Finland, which has high per capita electricity consumption, must import electricity and fuels. But the country has some energy independence, in that homegrown nuclear power provides 25 percent of its electricity. The government’s decision to add a new reactor, Olkiluoto3, to an existing plant was inspired by a wish to meet rising electricity demand, mitigate greenhouse gases, and escape drops in electricity supply due to droughts that affect hydropower output. Opponents to new nuclear reactors wanted instead to import huge amounts of natural gas from Russia. Finnish analysts found that capital costs for construction and startup of the reactor would be three times greater than for a gas plant, but because the price of uranium is relatively low, the Finns concluded that in the long run nuclear power was the cheapest, environmentally cleanest, most efficient, and most energysecure option. This is the case elsewhere: gas plants are cheaper to build but more expensive to run and their capacity factor is lower than that of nuclear plants. In the U.S. in 2007, nuclear plants outdid themselves in terms of efficiency and productivity, running at about 92 percent capacity on average no other electricity source has a capacity factor this high. Coal: 70 percent natural gas: 14 to 50 percent wind and solar: 20 to 30 percent.

According to the World Nuclear Association, “August 2003 figures put nuclear costs at [€]2.37 c/kWh, coal [at €]2.81 c/kWh, and natural gas at [€]3.23 c/kWh on the basis of 91 percent capacity factor, 5 percent interest rate, 40year plant life. With emission trading [at €]20/t CO2, the electricity prices for coal and gas increase to [€]4.43 and [€]3.92 c/kWh respectively.” Olkiluoto will be exporting electricity to Sweden. [ http://www.worldnuclear.org/info/inf76.html] And the Finns are planning to add even more reactors.

France, which gets about 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear power, is selling electrons to neighboring countries and planning to add more reactors. France has one of the lowest percapita carbon footprints in Europe.

If new coalfired plants are required to capture and sequester carbon emissions, they will then be far more expensive to build. The technology for carbon capture and storage of [that volume of] waste…is in its infancy, so the cost of research and development also has to be considered. If coalfired plants had to pay external costs for the damage they wreak on public health and the environment, they’d become much more expensive.

Extension of reactor lifetimes in the U.S. is making nuclear plants more economically competitive. Some proprietors refer to them as “cash machines.” They’re well run and constantly being upgraded. Though expensive to build, after about eight years the ones that are competently managed earned back their startup costs and now are very profitable, despite having to pay for disposal of the waste and for security measures not required of fossil plants. Companies with a lot of expertise in running nuclear plants have bought them up from companies that had failed to make them successful. This has resulted in increased performance levels. So even though no new plants have been added to the fleet of 104 reactors, the electricity output has risen considerably over the years.

Even though the price of uranium has gone up due to speculation, it’s still a relatively cheap fuel and happens to be mined in democratic, friendly countries like Australia and Canada. The U.S. also has abundant reserves and mining companies, dormant for 20 years or more, are beginning to revive. Furthermore, new reactor designs are safer and simpler and more efficient, and the federal government has offered a financial incentive to the first six applicants for new reactors. In 2007 the South Texas Project filed an application for a construction and operating license for two new reactors. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission expects at least 10 more such applications to arrive before the end of 2008, with more to follow – leading to a grand total of 34 new reactor applications.

Just some of the impacts of global warming in the U.S. the past few years are estimated to cost well over $120 billion by the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, which finds that weatherrelated disasters have quadrupled in the past three decades. These include [Hurricane] Katrina, floods, droughts, and forest fires. The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts further increases in such calamities as electricity demand grows and greenhouse gas emissions grow, trapping more heat. And then there is the specter of mass extinction of species – perhaps up to 50 percent by 2050. Ocean acidification – the ocean being the world’s biggest carbon sink – is also likely to cause extinctions of species that can’t adapt to the rapidly changing chemistry of seawater as it absorbs more and more carbon these dieoffs will dramatically affect the food chain.

So investment in nuclear plants to replace coalfired ones to protect public health today and to make for a safer future for our children and grandchildren seems a wise choice to me.

ET: Do you think public opinion – both here in the U.S. and around the world – is starting to accept the need for nuclear power? If not, why?

GC: The world’s electricity demand is expected to double by 2030. How to meet that cleanly? The shift toward acceptance has been rapid, just in the past three years. Thirtyfour reactors are presently under construction abroad.

Britain, Italy, Switzerland, and Holland are considering new plants, and countries like Sweden that had planned to phase them out are reexamining that notion because doing so would require an increase in fossil fuel plants in a country that boasts a very low carbon footprint. China and India intend to build large numbers of reactors, and several other countries want to add nuclear power to their electricity supply.

In the U.S, polls indicate that since 1986, when people surveyed were evenly divided about nuclear power, approval has shot up. In 2007, one poll found that 68 percent approved and 29 percent disapproved. In April 2008, a poll found that 82 percent considered nuclear energy important and 79 percent approved of tax credits as incentives to expand wind, solar, and nuclear power. Concern about greenhouse gases is a major reason for the shift, though people in the Southeast, where most of nuclear plants are, also like the clean air, the taxes the plants pay to the local communities, and the fact that electric bills have remained low.

People are upset about the price of oil and hope for energy independence. I look forward to the day when transportation is mainly fueled by electricity coming from nuclear plants. Jesse Ausubel, head of the Department for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University, and a longtime conservationist who helped organize the U.N.’s first conference on global climate change in 1975, considers nuclear power cleaner and greener than any other power source, including renewables.

I think that a lot of the people who still find nuclear power unacceptable are unaware of the facts about baseload electricity supply and about the steadily increasing demand for electricity. They also don’t realize how limited our choices for largescale baseload are, and how wind and solar can’t possibly harvest enough energy to sustain our way of life on their own. And most people have never heard about the annual death toll from coal combustion. Others wrongly assume that nuclear waste is a “vast unsolved problem” that “could make large areas uninhabitable for thousands of years.” And still others erroneously believe that tens of thousands of people died as a result of the Chernobyl accident and that we could have a Chernobyl here in the U.S. But the truth is that the Chernobyl lacked a containment building, and every American reactor has one with walls four to six feet thick, and American power reactors are of a very different design anyway. The accident was due to an experiment that caused a reactor made of graphite to catch fire. That could not happen here. The Chernobyl death toll after 22 years comes to fewer than 60 fatalities, according to several international organizations for more information, see the 2006 report of the Chernobyl Forum: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/index.html.

ET: In Congress, there’s a split between Democrats and Republicans about nuclear power, with Democrats largely opposed and Republicans largely in favor. What accounts for this split?

GC: Going back to the Cold War, political progressives have usually opposed nuclear power, which some tend to conflate with nuclear weapons. But in fact no bomb has ever been built using a commercial nuclear power plant. Uranium enrichment plants and production reactors lead to bombs. Energy corporations, especially those invested in fossil fuels, tend to favor Republican candidates. Of course right now we have two oilmen running the executive branch. New Mexico’s Senator Pete Domenici, [a] Republican, has been a strong supporter of nuclear power, but so has Senator Jeff Bingaman, a New Mexico Democrat. In any case, more and more Democrats are supporting nuclear power. The Progressive Policy Institute, a thinktank allied with the Democratic Leadership Council, issued a report in 2005 advocating nuclear power as a way to cleaner air and to reduced reliance on natural gas. Both Obama and McCain are in agreement about the need for nuclear power to address global warming.

ET: You visited Yucca Mountain, the site in Nevada that is supposed to take radioactive waste from the nuclear industry. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat from Nevada, has sworn that Yucca Mountain won’t ever be used. Why is it so important to have a site for radioactive waste and what will happen if Yucca Mountain continues to be delayed?

GC: Congress and the National Academy of Sciences decided that it was better to isolate spent nuclear fuel and other highlevel nuclear waste in a central, deep geologic repository rather than to leave it at nuclear plants around the country. That way spent fuel could be controlled for the longterm: 10,000 years, by which [time] only a fraction of 1 percent would remain highly radioactive. After the U.S. stopped reprocessing spent fuel it contains 98 percent of its energy after one trip through the reactor and is recycled in other countries, fuel rods began to accumulate in spent fuel pools at the plants. Yucca Mountain was chosen by Congress because it was on federal land the Nevada Test Site, where over 900 atomic explosions were set off, and because the nuclear industry was so eager to have it and to cut off the Energy Department’s exploration of other geological formations that it ran scary ads in The New York Times and The Washington Post about nuclear waste stored at power plants. This of course backfired. Most scientists associated with the Yucca Mountain Project find the site perfectly adequate though geologically more complex than some other options, including the giant subterranean salt bed that extends from New Mexico into Texas and Kansas.
Few people know that in that salt bed there’s already a successfully operating longterm nuclear waste repository, half a mile underground, in New Mexico. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant W.I.P.P. – certified by [the] E.P.A., thanks to the leadership role of Sandia National Laboratories, which shepherded the project from the beginning – has been accepting transuranic defenserelated waste since 1999. W.I.P.P. has an excellent safety and performance record, and is much admired by Carlsbad and other local communities. They want to make the area a nuclear energy center complete with uraniumenrichment [plants] now in progress and reprocessing plants. From a technical viewpoint, W.I.P.P. could take all the spent fuel the only reason it isn’t doing that now is political.

Meanwhile, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has just received the Yucca Mountain Project’s licensing application. After years of delay, the program appears finally to be on track, thanks to the Energy Department’s appointment of Sandia National Laboratories as the lead lab. Until 2006 the Y.M.P. had lacked a lead lab to oversee the science. It will take [the] N.R.C. several years to review the huge application. If it’s approved it will take more years to excavate the storage chambers and construct the multiple barriers – casks of corrosionresistant alloy, etc. – to enclose and immobilize the waste.

At plant sites today, spent fuel is being transferred from pools to dry storage in secure, thickwalled concrete silos. The spent fuel can remain in this interim storage for up to 100 years with no problem. So if the central repository doesn’t get built, nothing significant will happen. We’re talking about 55,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel that have accumulated in the past four decades or so after generating about 18 trillion kilowatthours of electricity and that could all fit in one WalMart. By comparison, annually Americans discard 179,000 tons of batteries, which mostly wind up in landfills and over time will release their toxic heavy metals into the soil and water.

Many people in the nuclear world think that spent fuel should not be called waste and that it should be recycled. The final residue after repeated trips through reactors would be small in volume, and after some time in interim storage to cool down, could be safely placed in W.I.P.P. The technical problems really have been solved, so how commercial nuclear waste will actually be dealt with ultimately gets down to politics.

Obama has said he would establish a commission to review Yucca Mountain to determine whether it will work. McCain has said he wants to establish an international repository that would obviate the need for Yucca Mountain. How well informed either candidate is on the topic is unclear. Many independent panels have already examined Yucca Mountain and concluded that its risks are extremely small. A study of the feasibility of an international nuclear waste repository underneath the deep ocean seabed was stopped by the D.O.E. when Yucca Mountain was chosen in the mid1980s. Though determined by an international group of scientists to be a good solution, politics intervened and the program was derailed in the mid1980s. Maybe that’s what McCain is thinking about.

ET: Your book is a clear effort to change people’s minds about nuclear power. What else needs to be done to have an open, honest debate about nuclear power?

GC: 1. More accurate media coverage. It’s getting better. But for a long time the press has been notoriously biased. In the effort to be “balanced” a newspaper story will give equal weight to the remarks of a nuclear scientist and to a political activist who is ignorant of even the basic facts about radiation or reactors. The reader is left with what may be fearmongering remarks that are without scientific basis and that obscure the accurate observations of the scientist. It’s important, given the controversy about nuclear power, to look to respectable, peerreviewed studies.

2. More outreach on the part of the technical community and more willingness on the part of the environmental community to look at the big picture and get past the myths about nuclear power. There’s an attitude of “Us versus Them” on both sides that’s highly unproductive.

I understand why the technocrats are huffy about the huge amount of misinformation out there about nuclear power – even in some of the more respectable media – and why they hate being misquoted and misunderstood and so have retreated to their labs. And I understand why the enviros like me and concerned mothers like me have been horrified by radiological accidents Chernobyl is the only significant one associated with nuclear power generation. But if the technocrats would make an effort to correct misinformation as it’s published and talk to their neighbors in a clear way, and if enviros would compare the risks and benefits of different energy sources and check out the science, and if both groups would take a look at the longterm and the big picture, and grasp the magnitude of the consequences of climate change and the cost to human health, to life in general, and to civilization, prejudices might shrink and there might be more real dialogue and problemsolving behavior.

3. Better science education, starting in first grade and going through college. Jon D. Miller, director of the Center for Biomedical Communications at Northwestern University, is a political scientist who conducts research about public knowledge of science. He’s found that 1 in 5 Americans thinks that the sun revolves around the earth and that only 1 in 10 knows what radiation is. If school boards would become more supportive of real science, and if scientists would make a point of going to schools and Scout troops and science fairs, and encouraging kids to learn science, then eventually we would have a more informed public.

Brian Greene, the physicist who wrote The Elegant Universe, commented in a recent oped in The New York Times:

Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that’s precise, predictive, and reliable – a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and emotional. To be able to think through and grasp explanations – for everything from why the sky is blue to how life formed on earth – not because they are declared dogma but rather because they reveal patterns confirmed by experiment and observation, is one of the most precious of human experiences.