No to Nukes: Nuclear power isn’t cost-effective, no matter how you do the math.

When Barack Obama was just a baby, nuclear energy was touted as the technology that would finally provide pollution-free, limitless electricity for all. In its famous 1962 Port Huron Statement, the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society gushed about how “our monster cities…might now be humanized” thanks to nuclear power. Like so many predictions about the future, that one rather dramatically missed the mark.

Surprising as it may seem, the United States still generates around 20 percent of its electricity from nuclear power plants. This despite the fact that no new facilities have been built since the notorious Three Mile Island accident of 1979, which released small amounts of radioactive gases and iodine into the environment after a partial meltdown at a nuclear power plant in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. Public opinion has remained steadfast against the technology ever since. In February The Economist reported that 64 percent of Americans opposed building new reactors. Disputes over waste disposal have never been resolved, and the Fukushima reactor meltdown in March 2011 cast further doubt on the idea that nuclear power will ever be a long-term clean-energy solution in the United States.

All of this has not stopped the Obama administration from betting on nukes. Even though the president prefers talking up more fashionable (and less economically viable) technologies such as wind and solar, in February his Nuclear Regulatory Commission quietly approved construction of what would be the first two new nuclear reactors in two generations. In 2010 Secretary of Energy Steven Chu touted the White House’s commitment to “restarting the American nuclear industry and creating thousands of new jobs and export opportunities in the process.”

But jump-starting nuclear power is not just bad politics. It’s awful economics.

The nuclear energy industry in the United States is powered by corporate welfare on plutonium. What is in theory a wonderful technology is in practice an economic white elephant. The data accumulated during the last 30 years suggest strongly that nuclear plants will never be able to cover their operating costs, let alone recoup the billions it costs to build them.

A 2009 Massachusetts Institute of Technology study led by physicist Ernest J. Moniz and engineer Mujid S. Kazimi showed that nuclear energy costs 14 percent more than gas and 30 percent more than coal. And that’s after taking into account a baked-in taxpayer subsidy that artificially lowers nuclear plants’ operating costs.

A 2010 study by the U.S. Energy Information Administration projected that nuclear power will remain more expensive to produce than other conventional sources of electricity in 2016 (see chart). Based on this analysis, nuclear power is also more expensive than wind power, although cheaper than solar and clean coal.

While the nuclear industry in the United States has seen continued improvement in operating performance over time, it remains uncompetitive with coal and natural gas on price. This cost differential is primarily driven by high capital costs and long construction times, often more than 10 years.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, nuclear power plants, on average, wind up costing three times more to build than original estimates suggest. Inflation, especially in the more nuclear-powered 1970s, played some role in the problem of ballooning costs. But when a project takes more than a decade to complete, labor and capital costs can grow in unexpected ways as well.

Historically, nuclear energy has flourished only in countries, such as France and Japan, where governments have stepped in with heavy subsidies. Yet dating back to at least the Reagan years, many conservatives have argued that if it weren’t for the regulatory costs and other barriers imposed by the federal government, nuclear energy would be competitive in the United States as well. While these conservatives rarely have a kind word for a nation of cheese-eating surrender monkeys, they don’t hesitate to point to France—which gets about 75 percent of its electricity from nuclear power and has never suffered a large-scale disaster—as demonstrable proof that nuclear power can be affordable and safe if companies are given the opportunity to build plants.

But producing nuclear energy in France is not magically cheaper than elsewhere. French citizens are forced to pay inflated costs to support grand government schemes, such as the decision made 30 years ago to go nuclear at any cost after the first oil shock in 1974.

In a 2010 paper published by the Institute for Energy and the Environment, Vermont Law School economist Mark Cooper found that the overall cost of generating nuclear power in France is similar to that in the United States. The price range for the two countries (after adjusting for purchasing power) overlap, despite the fact that the U.S. has a relatively strict regulatory regime and France has a relatively loose one: France’s estimated cost for a kilowatt of power is between $4,500 and $5,000; the estimated cost in the U.S. is between $4,000 and $6,000. Those figures remain stubbornly high, despite decades of efforts to get them down to manageable levels.

The main reason no new nuclear power plants have been built in the United States in 30 years is that they have proven to be poor investments, producing far more expensive electricity than originally promised. Giving the thumbs up to start work now on two new nuclear plants is an act of desperation by a president who has realized he is running out of other options.

Contributing Editor Veronique de Rugy is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

The fuel is not that cheap; it’s getting more expensive due to market forces.

Considering that (effectively) the government (i.e., us) insures the nuclear industry from company-ending accidents, and that “accidents” are going to take more than a call to Servicemaster to clean up, we have a great interest in regulating them.

This doesn’t mean I’m against nuclear power. I’ve been in favor of it since it was going to be so cheap you wouldn’t even have a meter on your house. A lot of mistakes were made; if we “reboot” the industry, I wish they would settle on:

1. A “standard” , repeatable, modular design
2. Alternative fuel cycles (including thorium, we have lots, so does India, and they are going into this full-boat)

Fusion power, hot and cold, has been mentioned; this has been 20 years away for the last 50 years. It’s still worth perusing, but I wouldn’t bank on it.

"Considering that 25,000 some odd were killed by the tsunami and earthquake, and that several nuclear workers got enough exposure to match eating one more banana in a year.

Just guessing that like me, you donmeaker, have seen “scholarly” position papers like the this from people with exotic names, like Amory, before. One doesn't need to know much about nuclear power or technology to recognize the activist at work.

Of course nuclear plants cost more. It took 15 years from granting of a first phase site license to generate any power from Seabrook in New Hampshire. During those fifteen years (more or less - probably more), New Hampshire taxpayers and private investors were servicing the debt on the loan. The original utility became insolvent and another consortium picked up the loans, which cost New Hampshire residents as they now pay another utility to purchase the electricity they once owned part of. For fifteen years lawyers, working for the US Govt. for Natural Resources Defense Council's legal corporation, and for the utility owners, were being very well paid. Nothing significant was changed by the lawsuits. Seabrook, right on the Atlantic Ocean, has run at around 95% of capacity for almost forty years, and significantly increased the fish population in the bay near the reactor (which already had great fishing, was and is a great place to go for dinner).

The author, clearly not an environmentalist, doesn't mention that no commercial reactor has ever contributed to “greenhouse” gases, or air pollution. She didn't note, as you did, that there has never been so safe an energy technology, or that no one was hurt at Three Mile Island or Fukushima. Thousands were killed in one hydro damn failure, over a thousand when a liquid natural gas shipping facility blew up in Louisiana, and thousands have died falling off of roofs as they tried to fix the leaks caused by plumbing penetrating their residential roofs, or fix their own solar collectors, whether electric or for pre-heating water. Even if nuclear weren't as economically attractive as coal, a small premium for not having to dispose of one train cars of slag for each 1000 Megawatt plant each day, would be well woth it. Ask those who live in Bejing how they feel about living in a soot cloud for hundreds of days each year.

She also ignores the enormous number of reactors, three of which are already on line, planned for construction in China, which has mostly coal, and terrible problems with air pollution. The plan, announced ith 2007, was for 125 new reactors by 2025 (it may have been earlier, but the target will have been dependent upon the economy, which is very much tied to efficient manufacturing). The first three plants are at full power, and were a variant of the original Westinghouse Nuclear design, since sold to Toshiba. The US couldn't manufacture a pressure vessel today, but could buy one from China or Japan, and perhaps Russia.

John Holdren, our presidential science adviser and well known contributor to Ramparts, the premier Marxist journal of the 70s and 80s, and his acolyte, Amory Lovins, both beholden to E.F. Shumacher, and to “Population Bomb” Ehrlich, could have written the article. Perhaps they collaborated? Holdren taught at UC Berkeley before Therea Kerry brought him to the throne-room at Harvard's Kennedy School. Holdren brought the glib Lovins to help him execute the Obama plan.

Don't bother with the numbers. It used to be sport to show how propaganda is constructed and from what nonsense numbers are cited so that the naive will assume there is substance. After all, there probably are citations. When the perfect safety record and complete lack of air pollution of commercial nuclear technology is ignored, anyone should realize that the time spent taking apart the faulty economic analysis is time wasted. It's like pointing at the reduction in deep water drilling in the Caribbean and claiming oil is subsidized or there would have been more, and claiming that we are therefore running out of it. A nuclear plants pays for its construction cost in a few years (pick a number, say 10 cents/kilowatt hour. What is the gross revenue generated by a million kilowatt plant over 8760 hours?) Government regulators will always find cause to skim more money from the operation. And like all natural resources, Uranium is less expensive now than it was thirty years ago, and there is more of it.

Every University has its activists. Berkeley had Holdren, who brought Lovins on board for a year or two, and John Gofman, who was a darling of the antinuclear activists, though his scientific hypotheses about nuclear health effects were palpable nonesense. The antinuclear activists were also the antiwar activists and the women's rights activists and the pro-abortion actives .... they were professional activists. But Berkeley had Edward Teller and Bruce Aimes and one of the real specialist in thin film solar technology, Marshall Merriam. Holdren never did any science while Merriam and Teller and Aimes were all wonderful scientists. Too bad for George Mason, which also has Walter Williams, who would make a wonderful treasury secretary.

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