Authors: Matt Liu, University of Wyoming Director of Debate, and Josh Mitchell, University of Wyoming debater The March PF topic is: Resolved: The United States should increase its use of nuclear energy for commercial energy production. Almost all energy debates are fantastic. US energy policy is situated at the intersection of the environment and the economy, a juncture that regularly produces great debates and great topic literature. Nuclear power is no exception. The PF Topic Committee is doing excellent work. We hope you're as excited to debate this topic as we were to write about it. We have 8 thoughts about debating this topic: Section One: Pro Ground 1. Climate Change Climate change is the most clear pro ground on this topic. That’s not a bad thing! We’d argue it's easily some of the best pro ground on this topic. Nuclear power produces zero carbon emissions and the ancillary emissions produced from input factors like uranium mining are less than ancillary emissions involved in the production of a renewable energy like solar. The impacts of climate change are massive and set up good impact weighing for your rebuttals. Climate change connects to natural disasters, biodiversity collapse, ocean acidification, mass migration, resource wars, and more. Impact calculus for climate change is simple: if you win the climate impact and win that extinction is the most important impact you should win the round. Even for judges who are skeptical of extinction impacts, winning that climate change is an impact unparalleled in scale should not be difficult. There’s no silly leaps here: this is an energy topic, and energy production is the #1 factor in climate change. These arguments are logically, intuitively, and persuasively intrinsic to the topic at hand. Nuanced link arguments will be important though. Nuclear power is zero carbon is a great start, but you’d benefit from a more complex and cohesive link story. Arguments about US global leadership, technology spillover, and creating a bridge to transition to renewables will all help you better access your environmental impacts. You might not win climate change if you only win that the US reduces emissions, so you should have links that go bigger and talk about energy production on a global scale. 2. Energy Price Volatility You’ve probably seen this billboard that proffers the idea that solar energy is only useful when the sun is shining and wind power is useless when the wind isn’t blowing. While that’s far from the truth, there are some arguments that renewables don’t provide a baseload energy supply: that they lend themselves to price volatility. Luckily for the aff, this argument is actually true of the real alternative to nuclear: natural gas. One very common defense of nuclear is that it’s a baseload energy: it provides stable and consistent energy. There are at least three good impacts to this argument. First, energy price volatility is not great for the economy. Second, it also causes energy poverty: the lack of access to modern energy services. This can get you to a very good poverty / injustice impact. Finally, it’s destabilizing to the power grid, which has a whole host of impacts. One reason this advantage area is strategic is that it builds in answers to natural gas and renewables good. They can’t solve energy price volatility or energy poverty, because they’re causing it. 3. US Nuclear Leadership Good There are lots and lots and lots of articles calling for the US to lead the next revolution in nuclear power. There are good impacts that US leadership in nuclear power is key to US leadership more broadly or US economic leadership; however, there are also great impacts that US leadership is key to create a safe and secure model for the expansion of nuclear power. This is a highly strategic advantage for two reasons: first, it has a fantastic built-in non-unique to every negative argument: global nuclear renaissance is inevitable, and that makes nuclear power bad offense non-unique. It’s just a question of whether the US should develop more nuclear power. Second, it link turns intuitive negative offense. The first place con teams will go for nuclear power bad arguments are accidents, waste, and nuclear security (dirty bombs, loose nukes, proliferation, terrorism). The US leadership advantage turns all of those arguments because it says growing global nuclear power makes those impacts inevitable, but US leadership is a model that sets safety and security standards and solves them. The downside is that you need to couple it with another US key contention (perhaps an energy price volatility advantage specific to the US with an econ impact, or perhaps some very, very good US key to climate cards). 4. Other Energies are Worse (Coal, Natural Gas) Another argument the pro can make is that the alternative options are just plain worse than nuclear. The heart of any energy topic is tradeoffs. If we’re using more of one energy source, we’re using less of another. Nuclear power competes with coal, natural gas, and renewables. That gives the affirmative great arguments that coal and natural gas are bad, and should be replaced with nuclear power. Coal not only produces carbon emissions, but other toxic pollutants that contribute to air pollution and lung diseases. The production of coal also involves things like mountain-top removal which can be devastating for the environment. You’ll want to get on top of answering arguments about clean coal (and sorry Wyomingites, but clean coal is just fake news). Natural gas has been touted as a more environmentally friendly option, but it also has pollution problems and arguments about natural gas as a bridge fuel are greatly exaggerated. Natural gas contributes to methane leaks which are absurdly bad for the environment, and that's great pro ground. You’ve probably also seen evidence connecting fracking for natural gas to earthquakes and water supplies being lit on fire. The tradeoff between different energies is both extremely important, pertinent to the topic at hand, and capable of producing the most unexpected impacts to catch your opponents off guard. However, you will need to make sure you control the link. You don’t want to spend a bunch of time winning natural gas is bad only for your opponents to win nuclear trades off with renewables, not gas. This debate largely comes down to the cost-effectiveness of natural gas vs renewables. In the short to medium term, the link probably favors natural gas. Check out this article for some pretty great pro link evidence. Section Two: Con Ground 5. Nuclear is Bad: Accidents, Waste, and Prolif, oh my The first place con teams will likely go for neg args is nuclear power bad. There are of course a host of issues people have with nuclear power. I’ll talk about three: accidents, waste disposal, and security-related concerns. The risk of an accident or meltdown at a nuclear plant dominates the literature against nuclear power. Commercial nuclear energy lives in the shadow of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. The fear here is that an expansion of nuclear power will make a meltdown more likely, putting at risk at risk communities near the plant if not the Earth’s entire fragile biosphere. Pictured: actual nuclear power plant saftey officer. The second argument is that America doesn’t have (and couldn’t agree to even if we did) a solution for where to store nuclear waste. There are a couple of implications to this argument: first, it can pour sand in the gears of developing a nuclear expansion in the first place. If we don’t have somewhere to put the waste, how can we build the plants? There are also plenty of arguments that waste disposal will disproportionately impact marginalized communities. Finally, waste disposal is linked to our last argument in this area: security-related concerns.
The third argument against nuclear power is that there’s no good, clear way to separate civilian/commercial nuclear energy and nuclear weapons potential. Fissile material stolen from a nuclear power plant could be used to manufacture a dirty bomb, or a nuclear power facility itself might become a target for a terrorist attack (physically or through a cyber-attack). This opens doors to arguments about both proliferation and terrorism. I can’t say I’m sold on this genre of negative arguments. The literature is certainly there, but the aff evidence in response seems much more persuasive. Not to mention the way the arguments explained above about US leadership interact with this genre of negative arguments in a way that's not so great for the con. If you’re looking for a spicier take on negative ground, I’ve seen some literature on nuclear power in the US creating energy dependence vis-a-vis uranium imports. There’s definitely some potential for a Russia debate here. One advantage of this strategy is it would be a US nuclear bad strategy, not just nuclear bad- that would dodge uniqueness arguments about the global resurgence of nuclear power. 6. Other Energies are Better (Natural Gas, Renewables) We already talked about energy tradeoffs above. The flipside of the pro arguments about energy tradeoffs is the con argument that other energy sources are better. There are many ways to defend natural gas. There is tons of evidence that natural gas is key to the US economy, to US competitiveness, that it’s a bridge fuel to a carbon-free future, and that it’s key to US energy independence. You could even make arguments about the importance of coal to local economies (Wyoming) and defend clean coal. You can also argue that nuclear power will trade off with renewables and that renewables are much better for the environment. Nuclear power’s biggest opponents are, after all, environmentalists. The renewables DA is a great way to link turn the climate advantage. Energy tradeoffs are a key part of the topic, because there are intrinsically winners and losers in the zero-sum production of energy. An expansion of nuclear power comes at the cost of some other energy source, and the supplier of that energy will be hurt by that. So where is natural gas produced and by whom? Because that area/country is going to be hurt by an expansion of nuclear power, and that’s fertile con ground. This logic applies to every energy tradeoff scenario. 7. Case Defense Don’t underestimate the importance of defense on this topic. You need offense to win, but on this topic, where there are clearly 1 or 2 impacts that the pro will always run to, you should be able to very easily leverage the argument that “the pro can’t solve.” A lot of teams will run climate, and this is very good for the con as the neg literature base is just as deep as the pro lit base. You should be ready with defensive arguments like: (1) Climate change will be solved in the status quo and therefore there is no need for nuclear. This might be true because of renewable energy, carbon capture, clean coal, or international agreements like the Paris accords. (2) Alternatively (or even simultaneously) you can argue climate change is inevitable, we’ve already passed the tipping points where, for example, melting permafrost is going to lock in feedback cycles that make catastrophic climate change inevitable. (3) The US is not key: you can make arguments that even if we radically reduce emissions, rising emissions in China, India, and the developing world makes climate change inevitable. The evidence specific to nuclear power being insufficient to solve climate change is also great. There is a lively and deep debate on this subject. You can argue that nuclear won’t reduce carbon enough or that construction of nuclear power plants will increase carbon emissions. Make sure you invest time in case defense -- and not just “warming isn’t real,” but real arguments specific to the aff’s solvency mechanism and internal links. Section Three: Concluding Thoughts I mentioned before I was skeptical of the most direct critiques of nuclear power. That’s partly informed by a belief that a lot of evidence produced in that area of the topic is written by folks who are fear-mongering. The nuclear pessimists often write good cards, but they are rarely peer-reviewed or informed by the historical record. That said, another phenomenon you will encounter on this topic is nuclear optimists: folks overwhelmingly committed to the idea that new nuclear technology will resolve every problem with nuclear reactors and that new nuclear tech is right around the corner. The problem with these nuclear optimists is that according to them new nuclear tech has been right around the corner for as long as I can remember. The nuclear optimists are generally gripped by three new ideas for nuclear power: Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), thorium-processing nuclear power plants, and High Temperature Gas-cooled Reactors (HTGRs). You’ll inevitably debate teams that say one or more of these three new types of reactors will resolve every concern the con has with nuclear. I’d advise you to find some folks skeptical of those claims while you do your topic research. Both the nuclear optimists and the nuclear pessimists have their biases, and the best debaters will identify those biases while showing how your contention and evidence avoids them.
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