As someone who has worked in the nuclear power industry, I recognize nuclear power as essential to an affordable clean energy energy portfolio as we look to mitigate the climate effects of carbon emissions. However, if we are to embrace nuclear power, we need to be completely honest about its risks and costs.
In the early 1990s, I worked at Commonwealth Edison in Chicago. At that time, the company operated the Zion Nuclear Power Station, the second-largest nuclear energy producing plant in the U.S. At ComEd, we publicly touted the safety and cost-effectiveness of the Zion operation. Privately, there was constant company angst over the problem of toxic nuclear waste — what to do with high-level radioactive materials that will take tens of thousands of years to decay before they are harmless to humans and other life on our planet.
Zion Station was retired in 1998. Since then, there has been an ongoing and complicated series of activities to deal with spent toxic fuel rods and other contaminated materials, with cleanup costs in the billions. Those costs were never factored into the “low-cost energy” narratives we promoted to the Chicago public…