No future in nuclear

At long last, the energy industry’s gravy train (aka The Energy Bill) has lumbered through the Senate, hauling more than $4 billion in direct subsidies and, according to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration, $5.7 in production tax credits for nuclear power. Touting reactors as the “clean energy” solution to global warming, its backers also helped to load on unlimited taxpayer-backed loan guarantees for up to 80 percent of the cost of nuclear and other energy plants.

However, the reality of this technology is precarious at best; it is always just a couple of pipe breaks or operator errors away from disaster. Despite the slick “greenhouse-gas-free” hype, nuclear power fails the more sober economic and national security litmus tests.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates a three-fold increase in worldwide carbon emissions between 1997 and 2100, even with an eight-fold increase in nuclear generation. If nuclear power replaced all coal in that scenario, emissions still climb by more than 2.5 times. To achieve that goal, the world would have to build at least 85 large (1,000-megawatt) nuclear reactors every year for the next century.

At $4 billion each (the average price of large reactors coming on line in the 1980s and 1990s) such an undertaking would cost trillions of dollars. The Energy Information Administration stated in its 2005 Annual Energy Outlook that “new [nuclear] plants are not expected to be economical.”

At least one utility leader, Dominion CEO Thomas Capps, agrees: “If you announced you were going to build a new nuclear plant, Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s would assuredly drop your bonds to junk status, hedge funds would be bumping into each other trying to short your stock.”

Indeed, last year, Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services found that “an electric utility with a nuclear exposure has weaker credit than one without and can expect to pay more on the margin for credit. Federal support of construction costs will do little to change that reality. Therefore, were a utility to embark on a new or expanded nuclear endeavor, Standard & Poor’s would likely revisit its rating on the utility.”

On the other hand, prospects for combating climate change via energy efficiency improvements and sustainable energy resources are impressive. A 2004 study by Synapse Energy Economics found that the United States could reduce carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation by more than 47 percent by 2025 compared to business as usual and meet projected electricity demand, while saving consumers $36 billion annually.

Reactor technology is replete with historic red flags. More than five out of every 10 federal energy research and development dollars have fueled the nuclear power behemoth since World War II. For that investment, we now get about 20 percent of our electricity or 6 percent of our overall energy. Compare that with energy conservation which received less than two of every 10 dollars but eliminates about 25 percent of our energy needs each year and has the capacity to back out anywhere from 20 percent to 40 percent or more depending on whose numbers one believes.

Even with the taxpayers’ largess, the nuclear industry has been bailed out at least twice by utility customers and shareholders (first with the cancellation of more than 100 reactors in the early 1980s and then again with more than $100 billion when deregulation fever swept through the utility sector in the 1990s).

Regardless, the tracks have been greased for the industry’s revival by repeated renewal of the Price-Anderson Act (limited liability for this touted “safe” technology); one-step licensing (virtual elimination of citizen and state oversight); federal acceptance of the liability for nuclear waste (Yucca Mountain is a technically flawed site and made further suspect by falsified data); and more tax breaks and rule-making favoritism than can be listed.

To curb global warming, viable technologies must be comparatively quickly and easily installed, and not require massive, centralized infrastructures. Reactors coming online since 1980 took an average of eight to 10 years to build (normally with massive cost overruns). Worldwide, security lapses, proliferation threats and terrorist strikes also shadow this technology as ominous wild cards.

Consequently, as a global warming solution, nuclear power is on a dead-end track. Before nuclear power gets its third or fourth chance, Congress and President Bush should give a first, real chance to a hybrid, distributed network of appropriate energy efficiency programs and renewable energy sources (wind, solar, biomass, geothermal). It’s an energy future we can afford and our children (and the planet) can live with.

Scott Denman is the former executive director of the Safe Energy Communication Council. He is currently co-director of Collaborations, a conservation and communications consulting and training firm based in Virginia. He spends his summers in Seal Cove. He can be reached at sdenman@earthlink.net.