Post-Debate Reflection

Gordon G
For our debate, I was the moderator and didnt argue either for or against the motion. That
being said, before the debate, I thought that using more nuclear than we are now made good sense.
Nuclear is clean and relatively safe, especially with new features being built in to new reactors. I
definitely think that we need to move away from fossil fuel consumption, and nuclear seemed like a
good alternative. However, after research and debate, Im not so sure that nuclear power is a viable
option, at least not yet.
During the researching process, I learned a lot about nuclear power that encouraged me
to think that nuclear was a good power source. For example, the new passive safety features that new
reactors incorporate, such as gravity activated emergency coolants and electromagnetic control rods,
seem like they are making nuclear much safer than its ever been. With CO
2
concentration in the
atmosphere climbing to an all-time high, it seemed logical to invest in something like nuclear that emits
no CO
2
. When combined, I found these two things to be the strongest supporting pieces of evidence for
our motion. However, once I started doing research for the debate and searching out both supporting
and opposing nuclear power, I started to find problems with nuclear, from mining to waste storage. The
concerns with the mining procedures of uranium are legitimate, but for me, it was the waste that really
changed my mind. We simply cant afford to make more waste if we dont know how to deal with it. I
know that people say that well figure out a way to deal with waste later, but I dont think that we
should move forward with something as dangerous as nuclear until we have the entire process
accounted for. Creating radioactive waste that will be around for several million years is not an option
unless we can figure out how to deal with it permanently. This is certainly the strongest opposing piece
of evidence, and for me, it was the one that decided my perspective.
That being said, I hate to be the person who denies every proposition for energy creation. Every
energy source has its setbacks, and if we only focus on those setbacks, well never get anywhere. With
that in mind, I would like to do more research on the possibility of transitioning to renewables like solar
and wind. These energy sources have their own problems, but in my eyes, they are less serious than
radioactive waste. Doing more research on these other energy sources would give me a more holistic
view of the energy production scene, which would allow me to form a more complete perspective on
energy production.
Its fairly obvious that I have a bias in these issues that would tend towards the side of things
like renewables, so trying to remain neutral during debate was a challenge. I couldnt exactly argue
along with the debaters, but my bias couldve showed itself through the questions I chose to ask during
open debate. Because there are some issues, like waste management, that I am more concerned about
than others, it was tempting to focus all of my questions on that issue and others like it. As it turned out,
I didnt get to ask a whole lot of questions. I think I managed to keep the ones I did ask fairly open ended
and equal. Even so, if I could do one part of the debate over again, it would be the open debate.
Everything went smoothly enough through the opening and closing statements, but open debate was a
little rushed, and I didnt feel like we really touched on all of the points that we should have. Audience
members asked questions and made comments that were related but very lengthy and all fairly similar.
If I could redo open debate, Id either cut off the audience members or kept the debate closed to their
questions entirely. By the time we finished audience questions, we only had time for one last question
before we were out of time. I felt that this detracted from the overall quality of the debate and wouldve
been easily fixed by running the debate slightly differently.
As short as it was, the open debate still greatly influenced my position on the motion greatly,
partially because of my environmental ethic and sense of place. In humanities, I had lots of time to
develop these two things, and it was partially because of them that I was so opposed to the idea of
creating waste that we cant manage. I have a strong connection to the outdoors, and my environmental
ethic originates from that connection. A big part of my environmental ethic that I found to be more
applicable in chemistry than humanities was efficiency. I recognize that we need to use natural
resources for everything from energy to food to shelter, but I think that we dont do so in a way that is
either sustainable or efficient. Nuclear energy could be considered to be efficient because it takes so
little fuel, but with sustainability it starts to run in to problems. Radioactive waste is the opposite of
sustainable; not only is it harmful for the next generation, but also for many generations to come. It
might even outlast the species. Because of this conflict, I have a very hard time endorsing nuclear
power.
During the beginning of open debate, there was a fair amount of discussion about this waste.
One point that some of the debaters discussed was the half-life of spent nuclear fuel. After the debate,
one person mentioned that they had a different number than 500 million years for the half-life of
radioactive waste that was mentioned during the debate. According to Wikipedia, there are many
different fission products, all with different half-lives. The shortest half-lives can be only minutes or
hours, while one of the elements with a longer half-life, iodine-129, has a half-life of 15.7 million years.
This makes sense, as the debaters probably just had the half-lives for different fission products. Another
statement that Ashton made during our debate that I found surprising was his description of the
uranium mining process. He said that we are pumping a combination of sulfuric acid and water in to the
ground, which could contaminate groundwater aquifers with acid, rendering the water un-useable. Id
never heard of this problem before, so I decided to do some more research. At first I found no mention
of the type of mining he was talking about, which is called in-situ leaching, but that may have been
because as far as I can tell, it isnt really used in the US. It does involve pumping a mixture of hydrogen
peroxide, sulfuric acid, and water in to the mine, liquefying the ore, and then extracting the uranium in
much of the same way as is used with other mining methods during the milling process. As for the
concerns about groundwater contamination, the only reference to that that I could find was on
Wikipedia, where they mention that in-situ leaching wells can only be constructed in places where they
wont contaminate groundwater. So while Ashtons concerns were well founded, Im not convinced that
they were relevant to our debate since we were specifically discussing nuclear power in the US.