Vermont's Energy Future is Nuclear

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on April 10, 2008.

Vermont's Energy Future is Nuclear

Recently, I've been shopping around for a new car. It's been five years since I've done serious research into cars, and I fully expected that I'd find many environmentally-friendly choices out there.

I was woefully wrong. Hybrid technology seems to be stuck in a rut. A typical example: for $5000, a Nissan hybrid will buy you an underwhelming two highway MPG. They can also be hard to find. Saturn touts its hybrid SUVs in TV ads, but the local dealer expected to get two - two! - this year.

Toyota has the best hybrid out there, the Prius, and my father owns one. He loves it, and when I brought up my search at a family gathering on Easter Day, he bragged about getting over 50 MPG on trips to and from Rutland. Talk then moved from hybrids on a winding path to nuclear power plants in France.

Surely you've had those family discussions where one topic leads to another, and to another, and you end up on a path littered with discarded tangential conversations. Our detritus included hybrids, batteries, electric cars, electric heat and hot water, windmills, and Vermont Yankee.

We were all for reducing our carbon footprints, and we all agreed that going all-electric was a means to that end. But where would all that extra electricity come from? Only from new power plants. But no one wanted plants that burn gas, oil, or (evilest of evils) coal. Sadly, alternatives are scarce.

Solar has great potential, but annually, Burlington only gets 49% sunshine. Solar works, but only when the sun shines. Another problem is efficiency - right now, the best we can get is 30% efficiency from solar cells, and usually far less.

Wind also has great potential, but building wind farms in Vermont is problematic at best. I think the sight of several dozen wind turbines on top of surrounding mountains would be in keeping with Vermont's image. Many don't share this view and blanch at the thought of giant rotors marring their vistas. Here, too, we're at the mercy of nature. No wind, no power.

Hydro is a great alternative, but in Vermont, we have nothing of the potential of, say, the Hoover or Grand Coulee dams. Instead, more dams are being torn down than are being built.

So, wind and solar are too dependent on nature and NIMBY; hydro seems like a non-starter; we want to avoid gas-, coal-, and oil-fired plants; others, like geothermal and biomass, can't come close to our needs; and while there is a lot of room for improvement in efficiency, the trend seems to be an increase in electricity usage, not a decrease.

The only current technology left is nuclear. Vermont Yankee currently generates 35% of Vermont's power needs. Talk of decommissioning the plant is, frankly, absurd. If we lost Yankee, our statewide carbon footprint would skyrocket.

What we, as a state and a nation, should so is build more nuclear plants. I know this opinion puts me at odds with many of my liberal friends, but it is the only thing that makes sense.

There are valid concerns about safety, but let's face it, Yankee has operated safely for 35 years. Despite my complaints about the lack of progress in other areas, nuclear power technology has advanced substantially since Yankee came on line.

The U.S. currently gets 20% of its power from nuclear. There's potential for a lot more. France has embraced nuclear in a big way, with 80% of its power coming from nuclear plants. In Japan, nuclear accounts for a third of that nation's needs.

No new plants have been brought on line in the U.S. in a dozen years. We need more plants, and using the lessons France and Japan have learned, we can build plants that are safe, recycle used nuclear fuel to reduce waste, and supply us with clean power to charge those electric cars and heat our water.

The holy grail of power generation is fusion. Scientists are working on that but power plants may be 20 years away, if not more. Until then, nuclear is our best overall option.

In my best-case scenario, we all use CFLs in every socket; we have 85% efficient solar panels coating our roofs; we erect single-home windmills in our back yards and wind farms on our mountain ranges; and state-of-the-art nuclear plants are there to back it all up.