The True Costs of Nuclear Power

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Congress did likewise in its 2005 energy bill. Besides giving the nuclear power industry $7 billion in research, development and construction subsidies and $7.3 billion in tax breaks, the bill contains guarantees for unlimited taxpayer-backed loans and insurance protection for new reactors.

Diamond may not agree with Bush about much, but their shared support for nuclear power hints at the other factor that will drive the future debate. As the United States experiences more of the killer heat waves and hurricanes that have struck the Midwestern and Southeastern states, more and more Americans will at last recognize what the rest of the world has long accepted: Global warming is here, it will get worse before it gets better, and the economic and human costs will be enormous.

As we cast about for alternatives to the carbon-based fuels coal, oil and natural gas that are cooking our planet, nuclear power seems an obvious answer. After all, as Vice President Cheney observed in 2001 when defending the Bush administrations energy plan which urged constructing hundreds of new nuclear plants nuclear fission produces no greenhouse gases.

But the truth is that nuclear power is a global warming weakling. Investing in a nuclear revival would make our global warming predicament worse, not better. The reasons have little to do with nuclear safety and more to do with economics, which may be why environmentalists tend to overlook them.

Environmentalists center their critique of nuclear energy on safety concerns: Nuclear reactors can suffer meltdowns from malfunctions or terrorist attacks; radioactivity is released in all phases of the nuclear production cycle, from uranium mining through fission; the problem of waste disposal still hasnt been solved; civilian nuclear programs can spur weapons proliferation. But absent a new Chernobyl-scale disaster, such arguments may not prove decisive. In an atmosphere of desperation over how to keep our TVs, computers and refrigerators humming in a globally warmed world, economic considerations will dominate. This is especially so when dissident greens such as Diamond and Brand are saying that nuclear safety is a solvable problem.

The dissidents have an arguable case. Diamond is correct that France has generated most of its electricity from nuclear power for decades without a major mishap. Likewise, its unfair to tar Western companies with the brush of Chernobyl. Incredibly, the Soviet-designed Chernobyl reactor lacked a containment vessel, a flaw that would never be allowed in the West.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print