The True Costs of NUCLEAR POWER

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Taxpayer subsidies for high-risk nuclear power plants should be redirected to promote alternative energy.

By Mark Hertsgaard

During a July 2005 lecture in San Francisco, Jared Diamond, author of the best-selling book Guns, Germs and Steel, became the latest and most prominent environmental intellectual to endorse nuclear power as a necessary response to global warming.

Addressing an overflow crowd at the Cowell Theater about why some societies fail and others dont (the theme of his most recent book, Collapse), Diamond three times cited global warming as a threat that could ruin modern civilization. During the question period, Diamond was asked if he agrees with Stewart Brand, whose Long Now Foundation sponsored the lecture, that global warming poses such a grave threat that humanity should embrace nuclear power. It was a delicate moment, because Brand the former editor of The Whole Earth Catalog was on stage with Diamond.

I did not know that Stewart Brand said that, Diamond replied. But yes, to deal with our energy problems we need everything available to us, including nuclear power. Nuclear power, he added, should simply be done carefully, like they do in France, where there have been no accidents.

I did not expect that answer, Brand said. Neither, it seemed, did much of the audience. Overwhelmingly white and affluent, most audience members had nodded reverentially at everything Diamond had said thus far about the self-destructiveness of ancient civilizations that leveled forests (Easter Island) or eroded soils (the Mayans) in pursuit of short-term gain; and about the need for the United States to rethink its core value of consumerism if it hopes to survive. They had clapped when Diamond mocked President Bushs see-no-evil approach to environmental protection. Yet now Diamond was urging an expansion of nuclear power, a technology most environmentalists regard as irredeemably evil.

Deal with it, crowed Brand as the crowd sat in stunned silence.

It was smug but useful advice, for this debate is bound to intensify. The Bush administration and much of Congress are pushing hard to revive the nuclear industry, which currently provides 20 percent of Americas electricity.

In June 2005, Bush became the first president in 26 years to visit a nuclear power plant, specifically the Calvert Cliffs facility near Washington, D.C., where he endorsed nuclear as an environmentally friendly energy source. His administrations 2006 budget increased nuclear power funding by 5 percent, even as it cut overall renewable energy funding.