The True Costs of Nuclear Power

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Dissident greens concede there are risks with nuclear power, as with any technology. But those risks, they say, are less than those of the alternatives. Coal, the worlds major electricity source, kills thousands of people a year through air pollution and mining accidents. Coal also is the main driver of climate change, which is on track to kill millions of people in the 21st century not in a sudden bang of radioactive explosions, but in a gradual whimper of environmental collapse as soaring temperatures and rising seas submerge cities, parch farmlands, crash ecosystems and spread disease and chaos worldwide.

Fear of such an apocalypse led the scientist James Lovelock to become the first prominent environmentalist to endorse nuclear power as a global warming remedy. Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace (who left the group a decade ago), soon echoed Lovelocks apostasy, as did Hugh Montefiore, a board member of Friends of the Earth. All three were criticized by fellow greens.

But environmentalists on both sides of this argument are overlooking the strongest objection to nuclear power, even as the nuclear industry is hoping no one notices it.

The best case against nuclear power as a global warming remedy begins with the fact that nuclear-generated electricity is very expensive. Despite more than $150 billion in federal subsides over the past 60 years (roughly 30 times more than solar, wind and other renewable energy sources have received), nuclear power still costs substantially more than electricity made from wind, coal, oil or natural gas. This is mainly due to the cost of borrowing money for the decade or more it takes to get a nuclear plant up and running.

Remarkably, this inconvenient fact does not deter industry officials from boasting that nuclear is the cheapest power available. Their trick is to count only the cost of operating the plants, not of constructing them. By that logic, a Rolls Royce is cheap to drive because only the cost of gasoline matters,not the sticker price as well.

The marketplace, however, sees through such blarney. As Amory Lovins, the energy guru who directs the Rocky Mountain Institute a think tank that advises corporations and governments on energy use points out, Nowhere [in the world] do market-driven utilities buy, or private investors finance, new nuclear plants. Only continued massive government intervention is keeping the nuclear option alive.

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