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At the eastern edge of Death Valley, where the barren desert crosses from California and into Nevada, lies a testament to the current state of nuclear power in the United States and much of the world. A twenty-five-foot-wide tunnel gapes into the sun, a train track emerging from its mouth. The tunnel bores in a U-shape 5 miles into the heart of Yucca Mountain. Here, until recently, the United States planned to store the radioactive waste produced by its 104 operating nuclear reactors. It now seems likely that day will never come. After years of construction, widespread opposition in Nevada led President Obama to shut down the project in 2009. Six thousand miles west of Yucca Mountain lies the symbolic other half of the story: the devastated Fukushima Daiichi plant in northern Japan, the site where the Tohoku tsunami set off the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, flooding television stations and websites around the world with images of blown off roofs, twisted pipes, devastated buildings, and radioactive steam being released into the air. One of the technologies environmentalists and the general public fear most is nuclear energy. While in 2010 there was talk of a “nuclear renaissance,” the disaster at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant brought much of that talk to a halt. Within months, the governments around the world announced plans to halt the construction of new nuclear power plants, or to decommission existing ones. The response was understandable. Nuclear catastrophes strike fear deep into our hearts. Watching the steam rising from the reactors at Fukushima; tuning into the news each day to hear of more explosions, radioactive leaks, and increased contamination of the already devastated countryside; contemplating the potential sacrifice the “Fukushima Fifty,” the workers struggling to get the reactors back under control, were making—all of this made a deep emotional impression on viewers, including me. sixteen the unthinkable here there be dragons 223 T h e U n t h i n k a b l e : H e r e T h e r e B e D r a g o n s Given those challenges, it’d be tempting to rule nuclear power out. But doing so would be turning our back on a tremendously powerful energy source. There’s enough uranium in known deposits to provide all of humanity ’s electrical needs for centuries. And unlike wind power and solar power, nuclear power can be delivered 24/7, with no regard for whether the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. We might not need nuclear power. Innovation in other areas might eventually make it completely unnecessary. If energy storage technology moves forward quickly enough, providing cheap high-capacity storage for wind and solar, we’d have a way to provide zero carbon energy overnight. But it’s never safe to bet on just one option. No investor puts all his or her money down on a single stock, or even a single industry. The more options we have for the future, the better. Nuclear power, if it could be made safe and kept affordable, would be a huge asset for humanity. Today nuclear reactors supply 20 percent of the electricity used in the United States and 14 percent of the electricity used in the world. The world’s on-land uranium reserves could fuel those reactors for at least another 200 years, and possibly as much as 500 years with small improvements to how the uranium is processed. Yet conventional nuclear reactors use only a small fraction of the energy in uranium. Breeder reactors, which consume most of the fuel rather than leaving it as waste, could match today’s nuclear output using known uranium supplies for an estimated 30,000 years. The on-land supplies of uranium, though, are dwarfed by the amount dissolved in sea water. The world’s oceans contain more than 100 times as much uranium as the deposits known to exist on land. Harvesting uranium from the seas would allow breeder reactors to provide the current level of electricity for millions of years, and to supply 100 percent of humanity’s present electricity needs for at least hundreds of thousands of years.1 Aside from the power of the sun, and the as-yet-unrealized dream of practical nuclear fusion, there is no energy source that we have access to that amounts to even 1 percent of the total energy of nuclear fission. And all the electricity produced by nuclear power...

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