Nuclear Deal

As outlined in the MIT interdisciplinary report on "The Future of Nuclear Power" I think it's likely that the solution to climate change problem involves greater quantities of nuclear-generated electricity and very likely that the solution involves a greater proportion of energy needs being met through nuclear power. That said, John Hood's view on how this might come about seems odd:

Nuclear power seems part of what I see as an emerging Left-Right-Center "deal" on climate change. No, I haven't given into alarmism. I still think the projections of global catastrophe from human-induced warming are unwarranted based on what I've read and heard. But if you don't seen the current drift of the debate, you aren't paying close attention. The elements of the deal might be something like this: 1) continue to remove restrictions on nuclear power as a future source of household energy; 2) raise taxes on motor fuels by a significant amount, fully offset by reductions in other taxes (state sales or income taxes would be my preference, as I'd prefer state rather than federal action here), which would discourage fossil fuel use; 3) spend the tax proceeds on improving highways and bridges, thus alleviating the nation's worsening congestion (which has a cost in air quality), and funding some new research into alternative energies; and 4) change state and local land-use regulations to allow more mixed-use developments that reduce the length of work commutes and make non-auto travel at least a little more likely.

What Hood's left off here is precisely the pro-nuclear policy shift liberals would be most likely agree to. Namely, a tax not on motor fuels but on carbon emissions. If you tax gasoline but not carbon per se then there's a large risk that gasoline will be displaced by electricity as the power of choice for cars, and the electricity will be generated by coal power plants. That would be a step backwards rather than a step forward. A carbon tax, by contrast, avoids that trap. And since a carbon tax would de facto assistance to all non-coal, non-gas forms of electricity generation, it would be a substantial form of assistance to the operators of nuclear power plants. Current law, in effect, forces the nuclear power industry to internalize a far larger proportion of the environmental hazards associated with its production than the coal industry is forced to internalize. Thus, as Belle Waring writes, "If, after the implementation of a reasonable, revenue-neutral carbon tax, nuclear power would be competitive without subsidies, then I would be happy to support nuclear power."

But, like Belle, if we're going to have the government subsidize something, I think we should subsidize something truly clean like solar or wind power. Carbon taxes are, however, a form of de facto subsidy to anything that's not coal, and there's your "deal" right there. On top of that, obviously, there are a lot of technical and regulatory issues I'm not really expert to discuss, but I would recommend the MIT report if you're interested in one long, dull, earnest effort to serve as an honest broker on those issues.

Comments

Nuclear power is far better than wind from an electric system stability standpoint.

Posted by KevinA | April 9, 2007 10:24 AM

First he insists that the new taxes be fully offset, then he tells us what to spend the proceeds on. Republican economics at its finest.

Posted by William Burns | April 9, 2007 10:29 AM

William Burns,
I think the extra money is supposed to come from the tax cuts -- perhaps by permanently repealing the 'death' tax.

With the CERN large hadron collider going online soon, how bout we innovate are way out of it with Fusion. Seriously.

There seem to me to be a lot of costs associated with nuclear that are hard to untangle from subsidies. For an immediate example, lets Iran wants to embrace nuclear power, perhaps even fusion -- what is our response, and how much does it cost. It seemst to me that the enrichment of nuclear fuel has inherent governmental involvement, and that it is very difficult to account for the security costs.

Posted by theCoach | April 9, 2007 11:13 AM

Outside of a few places with unusually steady winds, wind power is useless for baseline generation. It varies too rapidly and unpredictably, and so has to be backed up 100% by either storage, or something like gas turbines that can be brought online rapidly. While you could use it for peak load on an as available basis, the cost would be remarkably high compared to any power source where the utility dictates availablity, rather than mother nature.

Solar at least has the advantage of being moderately to highly predictable, depending on local climate. You can plan around solar, not around wind.

The real low hanging fruit is to abandon the idiocy of constant pricing, and start charging end users a variable rate over the course of the day reflecting the mix of baseline and peak generation costs. This would cause people to shift power usage away from peak periods, and allow a higher percentage of generation to be the cheaper, more efficient baseline plants. All sorts of usage shifting practices would become economically feasible, given sane pricing.

Posted by Brett Bellmore | April 9, 2007 11:21 AM

It's not at all obvious that replacing gasoline for cars with electricity would be a step backwards, even if said electricity were generated by coal plants. The internal combustion engine only boasts thermal efficiency of something like 25%; even an old coal plant does better than that, and the newest and most efficient are more like 45%. So even given losses from transmission, which are about 7%, and the higher carbon content of coal per unit energy, switching to all-coal electric cars ends you up about where we are now in terms of carbon emissions. However, since the grid is not (and would not be) all coal, in fact switching to electric cars would be a step forward, even if much of the electricity to run them came from coal.

But, yes, in any case a carbon tax makes much more sense than a straight-up tax on motor fuels.

Also, kudos to William Burns for beating me to the punch on pointing out the absurdity of offsetting the new taxes and also spending them.

Posted by dbeach | April 9, 2007 11:29 AM

One can be even more general. It's not carbon emissions we want to end, it's all global warming contributing emissions, including - for example - methane from agriculture.

Posted by otto | April 9, 2007 11:29 AM

New nuclear reactors types -- small-scale pebble-bed and large-scale fast-neutron -- are part of a sustainable future.

OK, but where? The EU, evidently.

But, there are two huge problems in this country that stem from the "Insull" heritage of faddish, debt-driven, unregulated investment in publicly-financed privately-owned utilities.

First, the land-speculators, bond-lawyers, paper-hangers, and their corrupt, ignorant political clients are there first, trumping scientists, engineers, accountants, and bureaucrats from start to finish. Thus, plans -- little more than air-brush drawings -- degenerate into projects, then deals, and, finally, Enron-grade scams. These may or may not even be completed and always entail a dinky scapegoat and monster public indemnity for the prestigous and improvident financial institutions involved in the predictable calamity. Maggoty trial-lawyers clean up what is left.

Then, the cycle starts again. This is neither economical or safe. France does this right. We do not.

Second, there is the intellectual and practical challenge of substituting this for that: bio-diesel for diesel oil from petroleum, di-methyl ether from cellulose or coal from for bio-diesel, and so on. This substitution entails myriad complementary technologies. For instance, process-steam or other gas from a large nuclear power generation station my be used to "coke", "crack", or "synth" biomass or coal feedstock into fuel, and materials on many different scales using an entire economy of heavy and light chemical plant. This is impossible to envision as a mere deal and to get done in a timely and efficient way in the presence of government publicity, subsidies, protection, and lies -- "regulation, de-regulation, ... whatever" -- administered by corrupt politicians including both the "cringing liberals" and "posturing conservatives".

France does this right. Anglo-America does not. How could we, when all authority in our society is vested with Life Peers (SCOTUS), the Federal Reserve Chairman, and the Unitary Executive, accountable to nobody and learned in law, theology, or nothing, respectively.

Posted by John Robert BEHRMAN | April 9, 2007 11:49 AM

Ha ha, Brett's comment made me think of a campsite we stayed at on the Columbia River. We pulled in and I thought "Gee, this is wonderful, a lot of empty sites to choose from, and, what's this?, it appears someone has swept each site and removed every particle of litter." It was like camping on a putting green.

About three in the morning we learned the reason- a 40-knot wind started blowing up the river. By five we gave up, struck camp and headed for a truckstop for coffee. It's a great place to camp, if you have a trailer or an RV.

For many centuries the world maritime trade was propelled by the wind, and naturally sailors chose places where the wind is predictable, which turns out to be almost everywhere. The sailing ship was killed by the cost of the rigging and the inability to flee submarines, not by fickle winds.

Posted by serial catowner | April 9, 2007 11:57 AM

Excellent!

Posted by C. Montgomery Burns | April 9, 2007 11:59 AM

For many centuries the world maritime trade was propelled by the wind, and naturally sailors chose places where the wind is predictable, which turns out to be almost everywhere.

Of course, you can't build wind turbines all over the ocean - they generally need to be somewhat near to land. And big windmills close to land have the somewhat unfortunate effect of being an eyesore for those with beachfront property. Which, as the Kennedy's can tell you, is a much more important issue than global warming.

Posted by Al | April 9, 2007 12:19 PM

The level of reliability necessary to get a ship across the ocean, and to prevent brownouts and blackouts in an electric grid, are worlds apart. If an old style sailing ship was "becalmed" for a few hours, it was no big deal. If your baseline plant drops out unpredictably a few hours a month, you need a 100% backup ready to go online at a moments notice, or your grid is going to achieve 3rd world levels of reliablity.

Posted by Brett Bellmore | April 9, 2007 1:39 PM

Am I the only struck by the stupidity of this deal? If there is one thing that should be learned from the rise to $3 a gallon oil prices is that the demand for gasoline is very inelastic. I would think the first step would be nationalizing many of the energy efficiency standards in California. From 1970 to 1997, California's per capita energy consumption decreased 13.3% while the country's per capita energy consumption increased 5.3%. Second step - subsidize fuel efficient cars and tax full inefficient cars in a net zero manner. Third step - buy old cars and destroy them as they pollute far more and are much less energy efficient than new cars. And that's not even thinking much out of the box. What about subsidizing forestry? Or odder sounding ideas like putting chalk in roads?

Posted by Dennis_D | April 9, 2007 1:50 PM

1) In regards to nuclear being better than wind because of the storage issues, a national fleet of plug-in hybrids would effectively act as a storage system and basically mitigate or eliminate the problem. There would of course, have to be investments in improving and updating the grid, but we need those anyway.

2) Not only are you flat out wrong that running a fleet of electric cars on coal would be a step backwords, but I have here a link of you apologizing for incorrectly making this exact point some time ago. What gives?
http://yglesias.tpmcafe.com/story/2006/2/2/21322/71517

3) The tax thing is hilarious. If we just raise taxes, we'll be able to lower taxes by the same amount and increase spending also! I think Atrios would call that a pony plan?

Posted by Sam L. | April 9, 2007 2:01 PM

And also, there are areas where wind is very predictable. They are also (shocking, I know) the areas where people propose building significant numbers of Wind generators. Let me know next time there is a night with no steady wind on the coast of Lake Michigan, or Cape Cod for that matter.

Posted by Sam L. | April 9, 2007 2:07 PM

"a national fleet of plug-in hybrids would effectively act as a storage system"

Nope. You not only have to have the storage capacity, it has to be charging when the wind is blowing, and discharged when it isn't; It has to actually be used for load leveling. There's no particular reason to expect that electric cars will be charged and driven in a manner that results in load leveling of wind power.

I repeat, what you really need is time of day pricing for electric power, so that people actually have some economic incentive to use baseline rather than peak power for things they can reschedule. It's the ultimate in cheap fixes.

Posted by Brett Bellmore | April 9, 2007 2:15 PM

Hm. Well I don't disagree on the pricing changes (though they might have a disproportionate impact on the poor, which should be considered.) That being said, your "nope" is overly dismissive.

The first link is a study that suggests HPEVs would allow greater wind penetration. The second is power point presentation from U Delaware suggesting that Vehicle to Grid technology (V2G) could expand that significantly. The third is an article from the (obviously fairly biased) Green Car Gongress on V2G.

www.nrel.gov/docs/fy06osti/39729.pdf
www.mast.udel.edu/628/Lect10b-wk-V2G.pdf
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2006/09/the_plugin_and_.html

One problem with V2G is obviously that when there's low wind, your car might not charge, but the beauty of PHEVs is that they have gas engines as well. And anyway, in many areas wind regularly peaks at night (at least in summer), when most cars would be charging.

Posted by Sam L. | April 9, 2007 2:41 PM

HOLD THE PHONE! when did leftist bastards develop an aversion to subsidies?

Posted by pimp hand strikes! | April 9, 2007 3:09 PM

Ok, reading your 2nd link, the claim makes more sense. The hybrid vehicles would charge less when the wind was poor at night. Effectively their engines would be doing the load leveling on a defered basis.

I'm not sure mobile IC engines are what I'd want to use to buffer wind power, but they'd exist anyway, so it wouldn't be a capital expense for the utility. The efficiency wouldn't be the best, though. From a pure CO2 and efficency standpoint you might still want to forgo the wind, and just build real baseline plants.

Posted by Brett Bellmore | April 9, 2007 3:24 PM

Yeah, well I have other reasons for supporting wind over nuclear that make this system appealing. I'm not totally in the anti-nuclear camp, but I think nuclear (and carbon-sequestering coal) should probably be last resorts.

Posted by Sam L. | April 9, 2007 3:38 PM

OMG, I trolled the troll!

You might notice that rightwingers have no problem with the idea that pricing might induce us to change our work schedules, thus solving traffic congestion, energy shortages, and the fact you didn't get laid last night.

Well, think of wind power as a form of pricing. For example, there is no reason you have to heat water as you use it- in fact, your water heater already buffers the difference between how long it takes to heat water and how quickly we use hot water.

There is no doubt that eventually we need to build buildings that don't need power for heating or cooling, make some of their own power with solar panels on the roof, and are located in walking or transit distance to most of our activities.

And it's easy enough today, with off-the-shelf technology, to build a house that is 80% off the grid.

The simple fact is that wind, solar, and hydro will be more than adequate for our legitimate needs. And no, we do not need a 'nanny-state' to tell us what is legitimate- just make sure the price of energy includes the full cost to us and our world and this stuff will all sort itself out in short order.

That's the magic of the market.

Posted by serial catowner | April 9, 2007 3:54 PM

The problem with nuclear is that politically it's a very easy energy fix with an entrenched, rich lobby touting its virtues. But it's incredibly dangerous. Furthermore, even if you put power plants in "uninhabited" areas, they have a tendency to get populated--look at Indian Point in Westchester County. When it was built in the mid-50's, Westchester had only 2/3 of the population it has today.

It's not to say that smart people should be demanding a nuclear power freeze. But the problem is that all the political winds push us toward simply substituting nuclear for carbon. That's a huge mistake: nuclear has unbelievable downsides, and we shouldn't be putting our political energy into making it more acceptable, we should be putting our political energy into creating incentives for new energy sources, like solar, tidal, wind, etc. We should be pushing to re-think energy approaches, like demand pricing and decentralized energy production approaches where homes/businesses are part of the grid as producers as well as consumers. If we put solar panels on top of buildings, wind generators on top of skyscrapers--even if they just take care of 5% of peak demand, that's nuclear power plants we don't have to build.

We know nuclear energy is there. We know what it can do, and what the downsides are--especially in an age of terrorism. Progressives shouldn't be talking about ways to make nuclear energy more palatable--the industry will take care of that. What we should be trying to do is create the sort of change that will require us to build FEWER additional nuclear power plants. We need to demand a sea change in the way we approach energy, from a top-down, centralized energy production to a more distributed production system.

If progressives allow the lobbyists to simply replace coal plants with nuclear plants, then we have failed.

Posted by anonymous | April 9, 2007 4:01 PM

"Well, think of wind power as a form of pricing."

That makes no sense. Wind power could be made more feasible by variable priceing, but wind power isn't the pricing itself, it's perfectly possible, (Regrettably, it appears to be where we're headed!) to have wind power AND the current uniform pricing that causes people to turn the airconditioner on at 2 PM instead of cooling the house overnight, and closing the blinds in the morning.

"If progressives allow the lobbyists to simply replace coal plants with nuclear plants, then we have failed."

It's talk like that that drives the suspicion that global warming is just an excuse for the left to force lifestyle changes you wanted anyway.

Posted by Brett Bellmore | April 9, 2007 6:52 PM

I wasn't aware that nuclear power was a lifestyle choice.

Posted by daveNYC | April 9, 2007 7:44 PM

"the sort of change that will require us to build FEWER additional nuclear power plants" certainly refers to lifestyle changes.

I think rational, variable pricing of power would drive lifestyle changes, but only because it would give people more accurate cost feedback on their choices. Some people want to dictate those choices, rather than giving people better information on which to make them.

Posted by Brett Bellmore | April 9, 2007 8:04 PM

Actually, I think that variability in electric power output from wind is less of a problem than meets the eye. When wind is producing more power than needed, divert the excess to electrolysis of water and use the resulting hydrogen to run fuel cell vehicles. When it's not producing enough power, well... the grid is a big place. Bring up some more capacity somewhere else.

It's not like this problem hasn't been solved - we've ALREADY got some pretty big wind farms that are making significant contributions to electrical generation in some areas. I don't think anyone is suggesting that wind power will ever be our sole source of power, but it's certainly part of the answer.

Posted by Sean Peters | April 9, 2007 9:43 PM

There are no claims made of forcing lifestyle changes upon anyone. The argument was for changing electricity generation to a more distributed system that uses more renewable sources of energy instead of simply replacing our current fossil fuel plants with nuclear ones.

I didn't see any talk about setting the thermostat to 65 and wearing sweaters.

Posted by daveNYC | April 9, 2007 11:08 PM

The scientific consensus is that nuclear power is safe and clean. It cannot compete with coal on the energy markets, but would be expected to if the appropriate carbon taxes were applied (revenue neutral or otherwise). Seriously, read the link to the MIT guys. It's really good. Well, if you're into science, engineering, and that sort of stuff.

Last year sometime Scientific American put out an article investigating how we could solve the carbon crisis. It outlined many different independent steps we could take, including conservation, better efficiency, renewables, nuclear, and carbon sequestering or trapping(I don't know if that's the exact term), and some others that I forget. Renewables alone will not solve our problem. Conservation alone will not solve our problem. Neither will nuclear. The future requires a comprehensive solution on many fronts, and an emotionally charged aversion to nuclear robs us of one of the most practical ways to make an impact on the greenhouse gas issue.

Time will tell, I suppose, with the Chinese planning to build all those pebble bed reactors. Let's hope they do it with enough international transparency so that we can learn from their experiences.

Posted by Shane | April 10, 2007 1:14 AM

One big problem with nuclear is that we still don't have an agreed-upon solution to the long-term waste storage problem. Basically, at this point it's Yucca Mountain or nothing, but the earliest it can open is 2017 and lots of stuff could intervene.

I often hear claims that "today's advanced nuclear plants are safe," but of course they said the same thing back in the days of TMI, so I have no idea if it's true. The bad news is that if you think the plants are safe and you turn out to be wrong, you may have just hosed thousands of square miles, essentially forever.

Remember Chernobyl? Think that's all in the past? Think again - the containment structure they built around the destroyed reactor building is near collapse, and if it goes, it'll release massive amounts of radioactive dust.

Bottom line is it's all well and good to talk about how much safer nuclear is today and how only those weenie leftist luddites could be against it, but the thing is the dangers in the enterprise are so great that if we have just one major accident we could wipe out all of the benefit from using this technology.

Posted by jimBOB | April 10, 2007 2:04 AM

"One big problem with nuclear is that we still don't have an agreed-upon solution to the long-term waste storage problem. "

We can't have an "agreed upon" solution to long term waste storage, so long as one of the factions that has to agree to call it "agreed upon" is committed to killing the industry by choking it in it's own wastes. The problem with waste storage hasn't been technical for a long time. It's political.

"f we have just one major accident we could wipe out all of the benefit from using this technology."

We already had, in Chernobyl, the worst case accident: A dangerous plant design run in a deliberately unsafe manner catches fire, and spews radioactive smoke over half a continent. There will, barring deliberate stupidity, never be another accident like it. And the death toll was apparently less than that you could blame on a year's world-wide use of coal. About 4000 excess deaths integrated over the next century. It killed less people than such hideously contraversial technologies such as "in ground swimming pools".

Posted by Brett Bellmore | April 10, 2007 6:46 AM

look at Indian Point in Westchester County. When it was built in the mid-50's, Westchester had only 2/3 of the population it has today.

I'm no population expert but is there any region of the country outside of maybe the big population centers in the northeast for which the statement isn't true?

Posted by Mark Adams | April 10, 2007 9:21 AM

The problem with waste storage hasn't been technical for a long time. It's political.

This is another way of saying that no one will willingly allow permanent storage of the waste in their area. Technical or not, this is a big problem.

There will, barring deliberate stupidity, never be another accident like it.

Of course, before it happened, we were told there would never even be even one accident like it.

And the death toll was apparently less than that you could blame on a year's world-wide use of coal.

Notice I didn't talk about excess deaths (though I find the 4000 figure absurdly low). I was talking about rendering thousands of square miles unusable and uninhabitable for the indefinite future.

On the safety question, "proving" nuclear power plants safe is the ultimate proof of a negative. The only way the proposition can be proved is by disproving it, if there's a major accident. Otherwise all you know is that you haven't had a major accident yet.

Is the industry safe? I have no idea. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't but it could be. Whatever is the case, going nuclear means taking out a colossal bet, which if you lose, you lose big.

Posted by jimBOB | April 10, 2007 10:12 AM

Fair enough about the double-counting observation. In the Corner post, I left out a component to the "deal" that I meant to include and have included in past iterations: offsetting to foregone sales or income taxes with lower spending on, says, corporate or agriculture subsidies, or other low-priority spending that we might get broad agreement on. That would essentially transfer budget authority from relatively ineffective or even counterproductive spending to useful infrastructure investment. Might need to tweak the federal/state shares of the higher gas tax to accommodate this.

Posted by John Hood | April 10, 2007 10:15 AM

"I was talking about rendering thousands of square miles unusable and uninhabitable for the indefinite future."

Then you are talking about something that didn't happen.

Posted by Brett Bellmore | April 10, 2007 11:42 AM

Then you are talking about something that didn't happen.

Guess I must have missed all those people moving back into Pripyat

Posted by jimBOB | April 10, 2007 12:21 PM

Maybe you missed the fact that the area is being used as a wildlife sanctuary. Wildlife not being terribly obsessed about mildly elevated cancer rates. Or perhaps you missed the fact that radiation decays on a very predictable, in other words, definate, basis.

Posted by Brett Bellmore | April 10, 2007 12:38 PM

Maybe you missed the fact that the area is being used as a wildlife sanctuary.

Cool! So if an equivalent amount of land around a U.S. nuclear facility were to be suddenly converted from commercial/residential/agricultural use to wildlife sanctuary, that'd be just ducky. Glad to hear that.

By the way, did you miss what I said about how they are far from finished with dealing with the plant site itself? The enclosure could collapse at any time, sending up huge clouds of highly radioactive dust, and exposing the still very very radioactive ruins to the elements. Nice.

radiation decays on a very predictable, in other words, definate, basis.

Yup. Too bad that rate is so slow that high level sites like the Chernobyl ruins will still be radiating for millennia.

Posted by jimBOB | April 10, 2007 1:38 PM

"So if an equivalent amount of land around a U.S. nuclear facility were to be suddenly converted from commercial/residential/agricultural use to wildlife sanctuary, that'd be just ducky."

No, but that's not going to happen, because we don't use reactors without containment buildings. Or of such a dangerous design. A worst case accident at a modern reactor has enormously less consequences than one at the sort of death traps the USSR was using. If TMI is a good example, more people will die from media induced heart attacks than from radiation in the event of a US accident.

I repeat: A death-trap design, run by a totalitarian state with contempt for public safety, had a worst case accident, and it cost fewer lives than annually occur due to drownings in in ground swimming pools. A death total that was dwarfed by a good dam failure.

Get a sense of perspective.

Posted by Brett Bellmore | April 10, 2007 1:55 PM

No, but that's not going to happen, because we don't use reactors without containment buildings. Or of such a dangerous design. A worst case accident at a modern reactor has enormously less consequences than one at the sort of death traps the USSR was using.

All this means is that if there were a catastrophic accident in the U.S. it wouldn't happen in quite the same way. Listen, I've read about the Chernobyl accident, and I know that the soviet building and maintenance procedures in use there were appalling, and that test underway as the accident happened was handled with incredible incompetence. We can hope that profit-driven enterprises that built U.S. nuclear facilities would not be so lax, but we don't know it as a fact.

One thing the soviet engineers at Chernobyl had in common with you was absolute confidence in the safety of their facility. I read a story that hours after the event the engineer in charge was still inside, refusing to believe what people were telling him (that the reactor had exploded and burned) and was still attempting to get the destroyed mechanisms to insert the destroyed control rods into the destroyed reactor.

Nuclear reactors, whether here or elsewhere, are highly complex devices containing highly volatile and toxic elements, with very large numbers of potential failure modalities. To say that you know such a device "can NEVER fail" is foolish.

And I think comparing what happened (and continues to happen) in the vicinity of that event to swimming pool accidents shows a real lack of perspective. Swimming pool accidents don't leave toxic contamination on large geographic areas, or accident sites requiring billions in ongoing mitigation that may continue to be necessary for generations.

Posted by jimBOB | April 10, 2007 3:07 PM

"Swimming pool accidents don't leave toxic contamination on large geographic areas, or accident sites requiring billions in ongoing mitigation that may continue to be necessary for generations."

No, they just kill a lot more people, in aggregate, than the worst nuclear accident in human history. Just like the day to day operation of the coal industry does. As I say, the hysteria about nuclear power demonstrates a severe lack of perspective. The 'horrors' of nuclear power are barely a blip next to what we routinely accept from other industries without blinking.

Posted by Brett Bellmore | April 10, 2007 3:28 PM

yeah, 9/11 wasn't really that bad either, I mean who knows, there were probably 3000 people dying by falling off ladders that day...

Posted by novakant | April 10, 2007 6:07 PM

Actually, I think think the more unsustainable assumption made by Brett concerns baseload power. Sure, the way the power industry is set up now requires giant plants churning out electricity with enough spare capacity to handle any spike in demand. But that's not the only way to run a grid. Indeed, experience with flow batteries (such as the vanadium redox batteries) suggests that we could create storage buffers that would level out variation in output from wind farms and solar electric facilities.

Sure, we don't have such storage banks now and, of course, they add to the cost of electricity. But we are going to add a lot of energy infrastructure in the next fifty years, wind is already cheaper than nuclear and solar is getting rapidly less expensive. Rather than cling to the mid-20th Century model of energy production, we might as well use this opportunity to develop a new one.

Posted by jlw | April 11, 2007 12:23 AM