Allison Macfarlane is currently an Associate Professor of Environmental Science and Policy at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA. She is also an affiliate of the Program in Science, Technology and Society at MIT and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. She has also held a faculty position at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, GA. She received her PhD in geology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992. She has held fellowships at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, the Center for International Security and Arms Control at Stanford University, and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. From 1998-2000 she was a Social Science Research Council-MacArthur Foundation fellow in International Peace and Security. She is currently and has served in the past on National Academy of Sciences panels on nuclear energy and nuclear weapons issues. She currently serves on the Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Her research focuses on international security and environmental policy issues associated with nuclear weapons and nuclear energy. MIT Press has just published her book, Uncertainty Underground: Yucca Mountain and the Nation’s High-Level Nuclear Waste, which explores the unresolved technical issues for nuclear waste disposal at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.
energy.ca.gov/2007_energypolicy/documents/.../Allison_Macfarlane.pdf
Allison Macfarlane casts a skeptical eye on the concept of expanded nuclear power as key in the short term to addressing climate change. It costs too much and takes too long to build new plants, she says -- why wouldn’t investors rather plunk their money down for natural gas plants, which are a fraction the cost and take just two years to build? Macfarlane’s larger concerns involve the vast amounts of waste produced by current light water reactors. Thirty to forty tons of spent fuel sits in pools at reactors, she says, vulnerable to tampering. As for Yucca Mountain, Macfarlane notes, “There is no waste repository for spent fuel or high level nuclear waste open. This is in an industry that’s been around for 50 years, and that should give us pause.” The waste problem simply isn’t very tractable from a political or technical perspective. If there’s a large nuclear power expansion, Macfarlane believes, it won’t happen here or in Europe, but in Asia and other developing countries, which means a proliferation issue, since “the nuclear energy and nuclear weapons atom are basically the same.”
MIT World : The Future of Nuclear Energy
06-12-2008, 12:31 PM
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