Asking a nuclear engineering professor “Is radiation bad?” is like asking Charlie Sheen “Is cocaine bad?”

On “Morning Edition” today, 3/30/11, Renee Montagne did just that when she interviewed Professor Peter Caracappa, a member of the faculty of the nuclear engineering department of RPI (Interview / nuclear engineering at RPI). As is typically the case, what was left out of the conversation could have been more interesting than what was in the conversation. My questions for Professor Caracappa are below:

1. According to Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education, there were 715 nuclear engineering graduates in the US in 2009.  B.S.: 395, M.S.233, PhD: 87 (Press Release / ORISE Report). Is this enough young and good nuclear engineers to design, build and manage a new fleet of reactors?
2. How much has background radiation increased since the 1940’s, when we started doing nuclear weapons testing?
3. We burn a lot of coal each day. When coal is mined, processed, and burned we release radon, uranium, and thorium into the biosphere. Since we are careful to manage the radioactive particles in nuclear power plant waste, shouldn’t we be careful to manage the radioactive particles in coal?
4. What are the costs of managing radioactive wastes? And how do we pay those costs? Are they factored into the price of electricity from nuclear power or are they paid by the taxpayer? And if paid by the taxpayer in the budgets of the DoE, NRC, and state and local government agencies, what would they amount to if added to the cost of electricity? This should be fairly easy to calculate we know the output of any given nuclear power plant. We take the output, say 20 gigawatt hours, which is 20 million kwh, and divide that into the costs of regulation for that plant, which could be say $2 million. The result, if I did the math correctly, is $0.10 per kwh. That’s not much – what can you buy for a dime in the U. S. today? Penny candy? But that $0.10 increases the cost of the electricity dramatically – by about 100%.

My final question:

Wind and water turbines, geothermal systems, and photovoltaic solar modules produce power without burning fuel. While there are resource footprints in the manufacture, installation, and maintenance of these facilities, there are no mines, no wells, no wastes to manage in their ongoing operation.  Shouldn’t we be asking “How do we get utility scale base load power from wind and sun?” Shouldn’t we be figuring out “How to shift from a fuel-based energy paradigm to a sustainable paradigm?”