Nuclear is Not an Option

Now that the Regime has finally stopped denying the reality of global warming, the debate in Washington is shifting to doing something about the problem. Congress made a modest start by passing the first increase in vehicle fuel economy standards in 30 years in response to great public pressure to do something. However, the Regime is still willing to fight tooth and nail to prevent more aggressive actions such as endorsing the Kyoto Accord's mandatory carbon caps or allowing California to blaze the trail toward even tougher greenhouse gas emission standards for automobiles.

That is the Regime's position unless there is a buck to be made on alleged solutions to the climate crisis. The nuclear power lobby and it's political handmaidens are resurrecting the myth that nuclear energy is both clean and inexpensive. Neither is true. Nuclear power was sold to the American public in the sixties as a method of producing electricity that was "too cheap to meter". Experience with nuclear power generation over four decades has demonstrated that when all relevant costs--including decommissioning--are considered, it is the most expensive way to produce electricity. Nuclear power generation is only marginally less expensive than burning coal (see chart) if you consider only operating and fuel costs. The fact that no new nuclear power facilities have been built recently is testament enough to the huge capital cost of building complex pressurized water reactors. Public safety has always been a secondary consideration to the nuclear power business. The last nuclear power plant to be built, Watts Bar-1, went on line in 1996 and took twenty four years to complete. Portland General Electric demolished it's defunct Trojan Nuclear Plant's cooling tower in 2006. The plant had been idle since 1993 when it's steam turbines developed problems too expensive to fix. Many environmentalists in the Northwest hailed the spectacle as the symbolic end of a misguided era of environmental abuse and energy extravagance.

But the energy industry does not think that. They see the public's demand to reduce our greenhouse emissions as an opportunity to resell nuclear power. There is still no viable solution to the huge problem of safe disposal of high level radioactive fuel wastes. The Yucca Mountain facility was built by the federal government to be the national repository for nuclear fuel wastes, but it is mired in NIMBY law suits and scientific doubts that the underground depository can safely store dangerously radioactive materials for half a millennium without leaking. For now the national collection of spent fuel rods slowly grows submerged in on-site holding tanks awaiting a permanent storage solution. Until the nuclear fuel cycle can be contained in an environmentally benign manner, nuclear power generation cannot be considered clean or very safe.

Why the power industry continues to push nuclear power despite these negative externalities is probably explained by a relatively simple calculation. Regulated utilities collect revenues based on the size of their rate base or the total cost of infrastructure used to produce energy for it's customers. Building a nuclear plant that costs billions instead of a wind turbine farm, a geothermal facility or even a coal burning plant with CO2 capture technology that costs only millions increases a utility's rate base proportionately and makes it easier to justify increasing electrical rates for customers before public utility commissions. Real green energy generation such as solar, wind, biomass, and geothermal account for less than 3% of the US power capacity. Nuclear power plants are owned by increasingly fewer companies. It does not take a rocket scientist to know that a diversified power portfolio would be good for America, but that goal is not necessarily good for the corporate bottom line.