In her new book, Power to Save the World, Gwyneth Cravens argues that nothing less than the fate of the Earth depends on switching from coal to nuclear power, as quickly as possible.
Publisher: Knopf * Author Gwyneth Cravens has a simple, if controversial argument: The only way we can save our electricity-hungry world from the ravages of fossil-fuel-burning, particularly coal-fired, power plants is to switch to nuclear energy as fast as we can.
In her new book,
Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy, Cravens, a former anti-nuclear power protester herself, is escorted through facilities representing the entire life cycle of nuclear power, from uranium mine to power station to waste facility. Her guide is a friend, Richard "Rip" Anderson, who just happens to be one of the country's leading experts on nuclear safety and waste disposal, and who convinces her that atomic power is in fact safe enough to use -- and that we'd be crazy not to do so. In this short excerpt, they're visiting New Mexico's Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP, the only active long-term nuclear-waste-burial facility in the country:
*Thus fortified against every possible misfortune, we went outside. Hansen led us past tall rectangular towers, each housing a mine shaft. Behind the salt-handling shaft were neatly scalloped mounds, each of a different color: white, lavender, and pink -- just like those expensive sea salts that gourmet stores sell. We entered a tall, corrugated-steel structure and passed through two air locks. Hansen opened a massive tornadoproof door and ushered us to the personnel elevator, which he described as the best conveyance of its kind anywhere. The ride was lurch-free, with the cables evenly humming.
The operator asked if we wanted to experience total darkness, and briefly turned off the light. Far above our heads hovered a tiny shard of brightness -- the top of the shaft. We plunged into the black void, down and down at the rate of about four hundred feet a minute and backward through geological time. It took us over a minute to drop through layers of dune sand and alluvium. We next passed that stratum of cementlike caliche. Then we passed through limestone formed from skeletons of marine organisms, reddish-brown sandstone, mudstone, and siltstone. The rock bounced the noise of the cables back at us until about a thousand feet down, when the racket abruptly became muted, absorbed by the crystalline structure of extremely dry, nearly pure rock salt. We’d entered the Salado formation and kept going until we reached its center. After about six minutes, the journey concluded.
About half a mile underground, we emerged from the cage into a hushed, warm, dimly lit, shadowless, high-ceilinged room: a man-made cavern. A fresh salt breeze blew, thanks to gigantic fans. Hansen assured us that the repository was well ventilated and the air was filtered before it was cycled back to the surface. "The site is set up to start clean and stay clean," Hansen said. He added that some of the electricity to run all this equipment came from wind turbines; the DOE has mandated that its facilities get 7.5 percent of their energy from renewables.
The air was so much drier than the desert that our lips and hands became parched. Despite safety glasses, our eyes were gently stung by fine salt dust. Adding to the uncanny impression that we were near the ocean was the taste of salt on our lips. In fact, a quarter of a billion years ago this had been the tidal flats of the Permian Sea, which had lapped here for so long that layers upon layers of salt had been deposited. They were eventually compressed into rock into which tunnels and chambers had now been carved by gigantic drill bits studded with monster teeth that left deep, sparkling concentric grooves. Our footfalls on the scoured floor were silent; the sounds from a group of men and equipment in the middle distance were muffled and echoless, despite the volume of air and the hard, glassy appearance of the walls. Vanishing perspectives and the large scale of the chambers toyed with the senses. Here there were no straight lines: the plasticity of the salt caused walls to bulge, floors to hump, ceilings to bow. The fluorescent lighting cast no shadows. The curved designs along walls and ceilings fooled the eye into seeing sculpted columns, vaults, niches, bas-reliefs -- as in an ancient temple. That level band of rose-orange that Rip had described ran along the wall at shoulder height (it continued for thirty miles). This non-Euclidean labyrinth, something out of a myth, seemed endless but actually covered a little less than a square mile.
When I got my bearings, I noticed a sign: WELCOME TO THE WIPP UNDERGROUND.
YOU HAVE JUST ENTERED AN ENVIRONMENT COMMITTED TO SAFETY.
We walked toward a high-ceilinged tunnel with mining machines parked along corridors, ready to do more work when needed. They could never be brought back to the surface again, because they'd promptly rust. Ever-present salt dust, making rainbow halos around the light fixtures, corrodes everything the instant the slightest amount of humidity comes into contact with it. But the environment here is so very dry that the corrosion only occurs when equipment is taken back to the surface. DOE cameras remain here, too, because aboveground their salt-dusted innards would attract moisture and disintegrate, even in the arid desert. I'd been warned not to wear a watch for that reason, but I'd forgotten and thought it would be safe in a zippered pocket. Some months later it stopped working and the repairman who replaced the rusted gears asked me if I'd worn it in the ocean.
Salt does not permit right angles to last long. The miners keep scraping the floors flat and planing the walls, but inevitably all such efforts are obliterated, and surfaces bulge and bow. Like the red clay of the midplate seabed, salt under pressure becomes plastic. And it never sleeps. From the point of view of the salt bed, the mine is a hole that has to be filled in. "The earth tries to heal itself, growing back together again the way a wound in the body does," Rip said.
Hansen pointed upward. "Salt creeps." We saw mesh covering the ceiling and a system of bolts and metal plates that automatically adjust to the continuous pressure exerted by the salt as it seeks to fill any empty space it encounters. At a predictable rate, the floors of the tunnels are always growing upward, the ceiling downward, and the walls closing in. WIPP opponents have claimed that this tendency indicates just how "unstable" the mine is. But it’s this very characteristic that secures the waste. The warmer the temperature, the more quickly salt creeps, filling in fissures and smoothing out surfaces, making it an ideal medium for isolating nuclear waste, which, stored in barrels and placed in a chamber in the salt bed, will eventually be enclosed by the salt, entombed in this virtually impermeable medium where it will remain for millions of years.
Excerpted from Power to Save the World, by Gwyneth Cravens. Copyright © 2007 by Gwyneth Cravens. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House Inc.
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