Fundamentals of Sustainable Business. Matthew Tueth

expanding demand for clean and healthy energy and material systems.

2.10Cutting Our Nuclear Power Losses

      A broad-based commercial and residential commitment to the continued refinement of solar, wind, geothermal, and ocean power technology to generate electricity will help dissolve the lingering consideration for either commissioning new commercial nuclear power plants or refurbishing worn-out units. The current high consumer demand for electrical power in developed nations can be mitigated by significant mechanical efficiency improvements in all sectors of the market as well as stabilizing population growth rates. The savings in electric bills from a lowered demand can help finance the research and development needed for further efficiency gains. Even at the current PV and wind power technology levels and disregarding the serious and long-lasting public safety issues of high-level nuclear waste, the high cost of nuclear power production has effectively priced itself out of the western energy market. Further advances in PV and wind technology will provide even more economic, environmental, and social incentives for sun-powered sources of energy. Some state governments are furthering this effort by adapting aggressive energy portfolio standards that target a specific percentage of commercial energy to be generated by renewable sources, which does include solar and wind power.

      Unfortunately, our 60-year ill-advised history of commercial nuclear power now requires an over $70 billion consumer outlay for high-level nuclear waste transportation and storage from our 110 commercial nuclear power plants to the permanent storage facility at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. At least four generations of Americans must also assume the considerable risk involved in moving the thousands of tons of this waste across the nation over the next 75 years. And after this monumental logistical task is completed, hundreds of future generations of U.S. citizens must monitor and guard the persistently dangerous radioactive material for tens of thousands of years.

      Commercial nuclear power plants have always been a bad idea, particularly considering the risk and life cycle costs that are passed on to posterity. The argument that continued investment in nuclear power is now a necessary part of a climate change avoidance strategy is also flawed and shortsighted. This approach would reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the expense of transferring a large portion of the cost of nuclear power to future generations, as well as making us vulnerable to terrorism, sabotage, and accidents. Transportation and storage costs for the high-level nuclear waste, along with the inevitable decommissioning costs of the power plants themselves, are causing the nuclear power industry to collapse under its own weight. Citizens throughout time are much better served by moving away from commercial nuclear power and fossil fuels and turning to a safe, abundant, clean, durable, and reliable distributed energy. Our only affordable and safe nuclear reactor is the Sun, and its continuous fusion reaction provides more than ample opportunity to meet the energy needs for all the millions of species on Earth for the next few billion years without perpetual risk and exorbitant expense.

2.11The Advantages of Local Energy Production

      Another valuable energy lesson the natural world offers us involves the theme of locally captured and distributed energy. As noted earlier, life on Earth is made possible by green plants capturing and storing a small portion of local incoming solar energy in the form of simple sugars. This chemical energy is eventually passed on to all other biota along food webs that end with the detritus feeders consuming the dead plant and animal materials and their waste products. Although the preponderance of natural world energy is procured and distributed locally, this local power concept has not been mirrored in our developed world. On the contrary, large centralized commercial power plants rely on coal, natural gas, and enriched uranium from distant sources, and utilities maintain expansive and expensive electrical grid distribution systems that supply millions of scattered industrial, commercial, and residential customers throughout the developed world. The state of the antiquated U.S. electrical grid system is poor, as illustrated by the series of regional brownouts and complete power failures experienced in the recent past. Transitioning to locally distributed power production makes much more sense in the long run when compared with efforts to maintain a design-flawed and outdated centralized power infrastructure.