Here’s another anecdote from my book, Terrestrial Energy. 

One of the things I did was visit the Zimmer Power Station in Moscow, Ohio. This is an 810-megawatt coal plant that serves Cincinnati andsouthwestern Ohio. Zimmer significant in American energy history because in 1985 it was 95 percent completed as anuclear power plant when Cincinnati Gas & Electric realized it would neverbe able to open – the Nuclear Regulatory Commission rulemaking and public opposition would make it impossible. So they switched it entirely to a coal plant and it opened without a whisper of opposition.

In this way it is symbolic of the whole era because without all the anti-nuclear effort we would have built many more reactors whereas instead we substituted coal and, after 1990, natural gas.  The result is that we now burn twice as much coal - a billion tons as opposed to half a billion in 1976 – and that is one of one world’s prime contributors to global warming. 

My tour guide for the visit was a plant supervisor named Ron Frey. He was a middle-aged guy, soft-spoken, no tone to carry on a rant. He showed me through the plant and then we retired to his office to talk. I asked him what he thought of nuclear. He leaned over to me, very confidentially, and said, “Look, I’m a nuclear engineer originally. I hate working in a place like this.  Look at your hands.” We had been walking around the plant for about half an hour and, sure enough, my hands were covered with find black coal dust. “You can’t get away from this stuff,” he said. “It’s everywhere. And if it’s getting all over your hands, it’s getting down in your lungs as well.”

Then he told me his story. He had been on the original Zimmer project when it was a nuclear reactor. Then it got cancelled and turned into a coal plant. He went down to Georgia for ten years to work at the Edward I. Hatch reactor, but his wife finally made him move back. “All her family was up here in Cincinnati and you could never get away from the bugs down there. It was awful.” So he reluctantly came back and took the job at Zimmer. "If I had a chance to go back to nuclear, though, I'd take it in a heartbeat." 

“Areactor is a totally different animal,” he went on. “There’s a sense of pride and professionalism. Everything is kept clean and shipshape. Sure it’s a more complex technology but there’s a tremendous camaraderie because you know you’re doing something that’s important and you’re working with the best. Here’s you’re just shoveling dirt.”

Gwyneth Cravens had the same experience in writing her book, Power to Save the World, published in 2007.  (www.cravenspowertosavetheworld.com). Rip Anderson, a Los Alamos scientist, took her on a tour of energy facilities all around the country and she said the worst experience they had was visiting a coal plant. They’re just plain dirtyin a way that can’t be improved. 

One of the things they’ve discovered about risks is that people much prefer greater risks that are familiar and known to lesser risks that are unfamiliar and unknown. This is what we have with coal and nuclear power. It’s amazing what coal gets away with. People talk about “nuclear waste,” but every coal plant with sulfur scrubbers has a constant stream of dump trucks carting off the sulfur sludge and dumping it in some hole in the ground somewhere. Nuclear reactors are regulated on their emissions releases down to 5 millirems per year – about 1/70th what you absorb from natural background. Yet coal exhausts spew out almost twice as much radiation from the uranium and thorium in the coal and they aren’t even regulated.  (Not that this radiation does anybody any harm - the whole phobia about small amounts of radioactivity is one of the grand illusions about nuclear power.)

The real tragedy is that opponents of nuclear power simply will not acknowledge that all they’re accomplishing by blocking reactor construction is assuring that we will remain more and more reliant on coal. We still get 50 percent of our electricity from coal and only 20 percent from nuclear power. If we could reverse those proportions our environment would be remarkably cleaner and we wouldn’t have to worry aboutglobal warming as well.