Sierra Club's Nukes by the Number

Here’s a link to one of our favorite anti-nuclear groups, which just came out with some bullet points on Nukes by the Numbers.

Right off the bat they get the first number wrong.

104: Number of commercially operating nuclear power reactors in the United States.

It’s actually 103 commercially operating nuclear reactors. The 104th reactor (Browns Ferry 1) has been shutdown and is expected to come back on line in May 2007. It still holds an operating license; however, it hasn’t been operating since the 1980s. They even link to the source, and the source says:

There are currently 104 licensed to operate nuclear power plants in the United States (69 PWRs and 35 BWRs).

So far we’re 0 for 1. Let’s check out the third bullet:

$2,451,200,000: First-quarter 2006 gross operating profits of Entergy, Exelon, Duke Energy, and Southern Company.

This I find humorous. If you click on their Smart Energy Summer link on the top of their page it will take you here. Check out what the second paragraph says:

Despite once being promised that electricity from nuclear energy would be "too cheap to meter," it is the most expensive way anyone's ever discovered to boil water.

The top four nuclear investor-owned utilities made $2.5 billion in the first quarter of 2006 and yet the Web page says it’s the most expensive way to boil water. Obviously it’s not that expensive if companies are reporting million-dollar earnings each quarter.

300,000: Years that nuclear waste must be stored for it to be considered safe.

Probably not.

0: Number of approved or operating long-term nuclear waste storage facilities in the United States.

Actually, there’s one approved facility and that’s Yucca Mountain, which was approved back in 2002. That was big news. I wonder how Sierra Club missed it.

3 out of 3: Number of federal judges that agreed in 2003 that Yucca Mountain is not safe.

That’s if you believe Nevada’s one win out of the 12 rulings means Yucca Mountain is unsafe. Here’s what really happened:

July 9, 2004 - In a unanimous ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit today affirmed Congress’ 2002 endorsement of the planned Yucca Mountain, Nev., underground repository for used nuclear fuel from nuclear power plants and high-level radioactive waste from U.S. defense programs. Ruling in a group of consolidated cases, the appellate court rejected all but one of the legal challenges raised by the state of Nevada, including a constitutional challenge.

Public Citizen called this one win a victory.

20,000,000: Number of people within 50 miles of the Indian Point nuclear power plant near New York City, which one of the planes hijacked on September 11, 2001, flew directly over.

It’s also probably the number of people who rely on the irreplaceable plant to keep them cool and living healthy, especially in this summer heat wave.

Here are a few of my Nukes by the Numbers:

73: Nuclear’s percentage of U.S. carbon-free electricity (pdf).

One football field six yards deep: The cubic space of all the high-level nuclear waste from U.S. commercial nuclear power plants.

53,000: The total number of people working at U.S. nuclear power plants.

$350 million: The total output to the local community from an average nuclear plant.

700 million metric tons: The amount of carbon dioxide emissions avoided each year by U.S. nuclear plants.

2 billion metric tons: The amount of carbon dioxide emissions avoided each year by all the nuclear plants in the world.

Technorati tags: Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Power, Environment, Energy, Technology, Economics