The New Nuclear Revolution (WSJ Opinion by Bob Metcalfe)

After the Internet, the next big thing will be cheap and clean energy. Coal, oil and gas pollute and are increasingly expensive: We need alternatives. Because nuclear energy (stored among particles inside atoms) is millions of times more dense than chemical energy (stored among atoms in molecules), nuclear reactors belong high on our long list of energy alternatives.

Nuclear energy is released during fission and fusion. During fission, large elements like uranium are split into smaller elements. During fusion, small elements like hydrogen are combined into larger elements. These two processes have occurred naturally since the beginning of time -- 13.7 billion years. The Earth is warmed naturally by its own nuclear fission reactors within and also by the sun, that big nuclear fusion reactor.

Today, 20% of our electricity is provided by 104 nuclear energy plants in the United States. These are already cheaper and cleaner than burning coal, oil and gas with all their pollutants, especially CO2. But these plants are all run on big old nuclear reactors, which nobody but the utility companies likes very much.

Alas, we had to pass. The problem with their business plans weren't their designs, but the high costs and astronomical risks of designing nuclear reactors for certification in Washington.

The start-ups estimate that it will cost each of them roughly $100 million and five years to get their small reactor designs certified by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. About $50 million of each $100 million would go to the commission itself. That's a lot of risk capital for any venture-backed start-up, especially considering that not one new commercial nuclear reactor design has been approved and built in the United States for 30 years.

They are high maintenance and heavily subsidized.

And exactly what subsidies are you talking about? Where the Feds get involved it tends to be in adding costs, like funds for Yucca Flats, or escrow funds for decommissioning.

It's been a long time since I was involved in calculating the cost/maintenance effects of various types of generation for production cost planning for a utility, but at the time, nukes had the best outage profile (they tended to be down only for refueling) and the lowest cost/BTU. I dcoubt that it's changed much. Except that the nukes are old enough now that there might not be as much depreciation to factor in.

The only 'subsidies' I ever heard claimed was the limit on insurance that the utilities had to buy. The other side of that was that the luddites were insisting on huge coverage levels, which have been proven ludicrous by the safety record of the nuke power plants.

In fairness, the entire energy industry is a labyrinth of tax incentives, rebates and subsidies. Most of the subsidies to nuclear power have been front loaded in the area of R&D and construction over the last 50 years. Operating nuclear power plants do have some low cost/kwh numbers. But those numbers do not always include the up front costs of building the plants (even though all the current plants were built 25+ years ago) or the cost of spent fuel disposal or recovery.

After getting out of the Navy I wrote several assignment papers on nuclear power in college. I figured with my background it would be easy. Boy was I wrong. The mess that is government interference in the energy industry made it one of the hardest topics I ever had to research.

I will gladly defer to your background actually working in the civilian power industry. Mea Culpa if required.

I believe that if you go back and read the posts COMPLETELY neither one of us gave any indication of being in favor of electric cars.

Electric cars will not be practical for the population as a whole until the battery weight, capacity and disposal issues are overcome. In fairness, however, electric vehicles have advanced to the state where thousands of people use them for commuter vehicles every day, which I’m all for since it gives me a lot more room to park my full sized truck with a V-8 in those little tiny parking spots in the city.

Gov't R&D might have started the commercial nuke power industry, but that's also true of thingsk like computer chips, or GPS systems. But then even things like the USA steel industry (what's left of it) could be said to be dependent on the R&D done in Great Britain in the Industrial Revolution. All progress builds on what went before. It's not like we ask every new computer to have to pay back NASA for what it invested in chip design way back when.

I'm more interested in what current specific subsidies might be involved. Most of the power sources have something that can be considered a subsidy. Oil has a 'depletion allowance', which seems to me to be a silly thing, in that you give somebody a tax deduction because they sold a bit of oil, and don't have that bit of oil to sell anymore. I doubt nuclear power gets any more subsidy than any other source of power, but it's possible.

What I dealt in was in operations cost, I didn't have to get into anything having to do with how the fuel was paid for (i.e. subsidized or not), so the numbers I worked with were post-subsidy, and post-construction.

However, in the 70s, the utilities still viewed nuclear plants as the cheapest base load plant. Up until the legal costs to site and permit the plants skyrocketed, that is.

So, you could still be right, that government inteference gives a running nuclear plant an advantage. But considering the last 30 years of anti-nuke political propaganda, I'd doubt it, and want to see a reference to the specific subsidy.

And I think some of the government support might have been costly. One of the nuke engineers I knew suggested that the reason the industry didn't look to safer fuels like thorium (doesn't generate plutonium) was that Defense insisted on having lots of uranium plants around to generate bomb material. Then, they figured out how to target better, needing smaller bombs and learned how to use less plutonium per megaton of power. So, we end up with a lot of nuke waste with plutonium that we aren't allowed to recycle.

My best guess is that the good and bad of government support for the nuke industry is a wash, except for starting it. But it's only a guess. If you dug into the rules, you probably have a better viewpoint. My sympathies for having had to dig into the rules.

I do think that the nuke subsidies were never as great as the current and planned subsidies for wind, solar or ethanol These are going to be immense.

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