Nuclear power is our energy future

Chernobyl tragedy won’t happen again

Watching the HBO series “Chernobyl,” about the worst nuclear energy accident in history, has hit home for us. One of us visited Chernobyl on an official trip with Vice President Al Gore in 1997. The other is a nuclear engineer and a veteran of the industry. Yet both of us agree with the show’s creator, Craig Mazin, who has said that its message is not anti-nuclear. Indeed, we believe that Chernobyl was a catastrophe, and that the need for nuclear energy is more urgent than ever.

No one can fly over the abandoned miles of the radioactive exclusion zone, look down at the hundreds of rusting earth-moving machines, take in the sarcophagus that covers the ruined reactor, or walk the crumbling streets of nearby Pripyat, without pondering the scale of this disaster.

“Chernobyl” captures it brilliantly, and makes clear that without the breathtaking sacrifice of thousands of Soviet citizens, the outcome would have been much, much worse: the firefighters who died of horrific radioactive poisoning after battling the initial blaze; the “divers” who waded through radioactive water in pitch darkness to open the valves beneath the reactor, preventing an explosion that could have wiped out much of Ukraine and poisoned the Black Sea; the coal miners who tunneled beneath the reactor to stop the meltdown; the hundreds of thousands of “liquidators” who spent years turning the soil and preparing the exclusion zone. The scale of this disaster was monumental, and the fight to contain it was epic.

But as important as it is to learn these lessons, we must also understand the relative risk of modern nuclear energy. As Mazin’s series reveals, the Chernobyl accident was the result of a cheap, unsafe Soviet-era reactor, and an almost unbelievable confluence of human errors in precisely the order necessary to trigger the explosion.

Chernobyl was a unique disaster

The Chernobyl reactor type was never built again and never existed outside the Soviet Union. Only 10 remain in use, and all have been modified to prevent a Chernobyl-style event. The Soviet design lacked safety features, included on every other commercial power reactor in the world, that would have prevented an accident of this magnitude. And the chain of operator mistakes would be comical if it had not caused tragedy.

So no, we’re not going to experience another Chernobyl. And there has never been another nuclear reactor accident, before or since, that resulted in human death from acute radiation exposure. By contrast, the burning of coal results in about 3,000 deaths in the United States alone every year, according to the Clean Air Task Force. Those are the results of accidents, black lung and other ailments that fell coal miners, as well as lung diseases in the general population caused by particulate emissions from coal. The overall total is down from 30,000 per year in 2000, thanks to a sharp shift away from coal.

Moreover, by far the biggest threat to human safety in power production comes from climate change. We simply must cut greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050 if we are to stave off the worst effects of global warming. To get there, we will need not only the nuclear power we have now but much more. Because nuclear — like wind, solar, hydro (dams) and geothermal — produces no emissions.

Modern nuclear power is safe

Our growing demand for electricity (think of how many devices you plug in every day) and the coming electrification of vehicles mean our power sector must get bigger and greener in a hurry. The only way to do that is to ramp up every source of clean energy. Now, nuclear provides 20% of our electric power, and it accounts for more than half of our emissions-free electricity. (Solar and wind together make up about 20%.) There is no fast path to zero emissions without more nuclear power.

Fortunately, more than 70 advanced nuclear reactor projects are underway in the United States. These designs use new types of fuel or coolant that cannot melt down. They are smaller and can provide electricity in hard-to-reach places, like remote Alaskan villages, which now rely on generators fueled by oil trucked in over dangerous ice roads. And they are flexible — because the wind doesn’t always blow nor the sun always shine, these advanced reactors can fill in the gaps.

The sun still shines on Pripyat, but the people are gone. The Ferris wheel in the city’s decaying amusement park stands in testament to the folly of the corrupt, paranoid and inept Soviet system. Yet as haunting as those images may be, they do not demand that the world abandon nuclear energy. The HBO series gives us the opportunity to honor Chernobyl’s heroes and condemn its villains. But we also should refuse to give in to the lazy conclusion that nuclear energy is dangerous or bad. Because modern nuclear energy is safe, and it can play a huge part in saving us from a global catastrophe of unimaginable scale.

Matt Bennett is a senior VP of Third Way, a Democratic think tank. Ray Rothrock is a nuclear engineer and CEO of RedSeal, a cybersecurity company.