Posted on 05/16/2005 10:01:10 PM PDT by neverdem
The great taboo against nuclear power seems to be over in Washington. This is a mixed blessing.
The subject had been off limits to environmentally correct politicians since the spring of 1979, when the Three Mile Island accident inspired the Woodstock of the antinuke movement. More than 65,000 protesters marched on the Capitol to hear energy experts like Jackson Browne and Benjamin Spock - and, of course, Jane Fonda, an authority because of her role in the "The China Syndrome."
Celebrities and politicians, warning of meltdowns and cancer epidemics, demanded the shutdown of all nuclear plants. Protesters dressed as mushrooms chanted, "Two, four, six, eight, we don't want to radiate." I went to the rally sympathetic to the movement but left unsure of which was scarier, nuclear power or its enemies.
Now some prominent environmentalists are having second thoughts, as Felicity Barringer reported in Sunday's Times. Given the threat of global warming, they say, encouraging new nuclear power plants may be necessary. And Congress is about to take up proposals to reinvigorate the industry.
On the one hand, this risk-benefit analysis is a refreshing improvement over the doomsday speeches and the chanting mushrooms. But by looking to Congress to chart a grand new energy policy, environmentalists are making the same mistake they made when they helped create the nuclear industry.
Environmentalists originally supported nuclear power because of its obvious benefits: no dirty air from smokestacks, no need to strip the ground for coal or dig for oil. Economic benefits, however, were not so obvious to investors, who were leery of the plants' costs and new problems, like accidents and waste disposal.
But Washington decided that nuclear power was so good for the environment and national security - how would America cope with the crisis when fossil fuels ran out? - that it should be subsidized. The federal government exempted the industry from full liability for accidents and took responsibility for waste disposal.
If Washington hadn't acted, nuclear power plants wouldn't have been built so fast, maybe not at all. But if the industry had been forced to deal with the costs and the risks on its own, it might have developed cheaper, simpler, more reliable plants.
Instead, it built unwieldy plants that were prone to problems, making them costly to operate and also inciting public fears. Even though the fears about the American industry were overblown, they led to tighter regulations and more expense.
Some proponents of nuclear power argue that the U.S. industry was killed by too much regulation; others say it simply lost out to the fossil fuels we were supposed to be running out of. Whatever the reason, investors looking for a profit lost interest long ago in building nuclear plants in America.
But now, just as in the 1950's, some environmentalists and politicians are seeing something that investors don't. They think that uranium could once again be the fuel of the future - with their guidance. Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman are working on a plan in which conservatives would support limits on fossil fuel emissions if liberals agreed to subsidies for corporations working on new nuclear technologies.
The rationale is the new environmental crisis, global warming, which may turn out to be more real than the 1950's crisis of vanishing fossil fuels. But even if environmentalists and politicians are right this time about the problem, there's little reason to trust them to figure out which form of energy will be the solution.
Starting with nuclear power, they've backed one loser after another for the past half-century. They promised that their subsidies would move us beyond fossil fuels and produce electricity from vast solar arrays, solar towers, geothermal heat, ocean waves, sugar beets, corn, manure and something called biogas (you don't want to know). But when the subsidies ran out, the electricity stopped.
If politicians are determined to combat global warming, their best bet is to try something they understand: imposing taxes. A tax on carbon emissions would make investors take into account the risks of global warming. I don't know if it would make them want to build new nuclear power plants, but I trust them to figure it out better than anyone in Washington who claims to see the energy future. And at least they don't dress up as mushrooms.
Mmmm.... More taxes. I feel all warm and fuzzy now. Thank you.
America needs fifty, maybe a hundred in the next twenty years.
My advice is to follow the French (gasp): pick one design, build many many copies. And recycle spent fuel.
This is the only way to tell the Saudis to go to hell. This is the only way to fuel the Hydrogen Economy. This is the only way to desalinate ocean water.
Lazy writing. Bad science, bad facts, horrible conclusions. So what else is new from the liberal vaccum of intelligence?
A liberal's solution to everything: TAX IT!
[...pick one design, build many many copies. And recycle spent fuel.]
This is 100% correct.
Leave it to the Times to use a real "expert" on nuclear physics to lay the issue out for everyone using good hard science and facts.
Carbon tax. Yeah, tax THIS you POS.
And what's wrong with biodiesel? It only costs on average $0.60/gallon vs. the $2.50+/gallon for commercial diesel.
Does any Freeper know how long it would take and how much it would cost to build a nuke power plant today?
I'm no expert, but my 2 cents is that we should concentrate on superconduction. Then we could make huge nuclear plants out in the dessert where nobody cares, and conduct (superconduct) electricity all over the country.
The author, John Tierney, is no liberal from what I've read in his OpEd columns since he started writing them a month ago. He's conservative on some issues, and libertarian on others. While I don't agree with the carbon dioxide emission tax, what's the bad science, bad facts? While I'm not convinced that recently observed global warming is due mostly to manmade greenhouse gases, nobody who has seen a double beam infrared spectrophotometer work argues that carbon dioxide doesn't work like a heat sink in the infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.
I've posted most, if not all of his articles. I posted "Laura Bush Talks Naughty", but it was yanked because of prudes who over-reacted. Just about all the others have been posted by me here at FR, so if you want to read them, you don't have to pay the Times for the privilege.
Clean, safe nuclear power is a gift from the Creator.
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