First of all, I have to apologize for not being so much in evidence here over the past couple of weeks. It’s been busy: Last weekend had three – count ’em – three birthday parties, including a big (successful) surprise for my wife with many old friends, followed the next day by a museum extravaganza for my kid and some of her buddies and back to our place – in a hurricane – for the inevitable pizza and cupcakes, and then a family do for my wife. I had a cold, too, all last weekend. I’ve had school work, and although I’ve been on break this week, I’ve got papers to read – and plus I’ve had to do some serious work on an important project. It’s all good, but the blogging has been a bit of a victim. I’ll be cranking back up a bit more soon.
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For today, let me note a fascinating item in the indispensable “Talk of the Town” section of “The New Yorker.” The usually superb commentator, Hendrik Hertzberg, fell rather short of the mark on this one: Some Nukes. You know I’m not going to lie to you: I’ve pretty much hated nuclear power for about 40 years. There’s been very little that’s changed, in my view, to make it more attractive in all that time. The one argument that might’ve worked for me – that we’re in a climate crisis and nuclear is zero carbon – has been shot through with holes. But what’s worse is that as we have made unprecedented, nearly miraculous progress on renewables and other clean tech, money spent on nuclear becomes even more wasteful than before because it’s money that’s not being spent on clean tech.
Hertzberg and my favorite journalist, Betsy Kolbert, had some live chat on Hertzberg’s piece. There’s some great give and take there, as well as some interesting post-chat comment. What follows is my perspective on the piece, submitted to “The New Yorker” as a letter.
Hendrik Hertzberg is one of the sharpest policy wonks around. And he’s been around for a long time, so he’s got great breadth as well as depth. But he needs to go back to school on nuclear power. (See Comment – Some Nukes, March 22, 2010.)
His choice of individuals who he seems to think represent the environmentalist movement’s embrace of nuclear power is questionable. Beyond his recent attempts at environmental iconoclasm, Stewart Brand is not particularly involved as an activist. Patrick Moore is a paid flack for the nuclear power industry. Climate scientist Jim Hansen, universally revered – as he should be – as an outspoken prophet of the climate crisis, is not an energy policy analyst. One major mainstream environmental organization, NRDC, recently called the Obama administration’s support of a massive loan guarantee program for nukes a “mistake.”
The carbon footprint of nuclear power is far from zero as Hertzberg would have us believe. In fact, given the entire life cycle from mining uranium to processing to building the plants to disposing the waste and all the many parts in the continuum, nukes fall below natural gas but way, way above geothermal, solar and wind. Not incidentally, the waste disposal issue has not ever been properly addressed. Anywhere. Even nuclear power proponents will tell you that.
Cost? You bet. So much so that these plants would never have generated a kilowatt-hour of power in the US had they not enjoyed hundreds of billions in federal subsidies of various kinds over the years. Even so, no plants have been built here in 30 years. Why? It’s essentially financial suicide to try to build one. Yes, there was Three Mile Island and Chernobyl – and Davis-Besse in 2002 barely missed a reactor meltdown and containment failure. But have you heard of the aptly named WPPPS? The Washington Public Power Supply System defaulted on $2.25 billion in bonds in 1983 because of massive cost overruns at its nuclear plants.
There are many other reasons to avoid this increasingly dead end: the threat of proliferation, the threat of terrorism, the finite nature of the fuel, among others, not to mention that every dime spent on nuclear will not be spent on renewables, energy efficiency, green building, the smart grid, distributed generation, and the scores of clean tech alternatives – both high and low – that are on the verge, very possibly, of delivering us from the maw of the climate crisis. Nuclear power is not, as Hertzberg characterizes it, the “merely good.” It’s the catastrophically irrational, wasteful and dangerous.
