President Obama: But to create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. That means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country. [emphasis added]What else irritates me about this is an attitude found in many quarters of the physics community that nuclear power is an obvious solution to our energy problems. For example, this just came in the "What's New" email post from from Bob Park:
ALTERNATIVE ENERGY: THE PRESIDENT'S CALL RAISES SERIOUS CONCERNS. Last week in his State of the Union address the president called for increased generation of nuclear power and offshore drilling for oil and gas. Who could argue?Park's "concerns" actually are important ones, namely that making fuel from food crops will be unsustainable given the size of the human population when surplus turns to shortage.
But to address Park's question--Who could argue?--here is Arjun Makhijani of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER). Makhijani explains how Obama has abandoned campaign rhetoric about reducing nuclear power use over time, and how he failed to explain how nuclear power is an economic loser:
Further, while expressing concerns about deficits, the Obama administration is opening the spigot for more loan guarantees for new nuclear power plants because Wall Street won’t finance them. They are just too risky. A single project is often more costly than the entire net worth of many electricity generating companies. They don’t want to bet their companies on nuclear. But they are OK with betting taxpayer dollars. Given that the underlying relationship between energy demand and economic growth is changing (quite apart from the recession), many nuclear projects are likely to be abandoned. Some already have been. This would be "déja vu all over again." Every nuclear power plant ordered after the first energy crisis in 1973 was abandoned, leaving ratepayers and bondholders on the hook. This time it will be the taxpayers.Nuclear power is a long-term disaster for the environment and it never will build out enough to be our energy savior. It makes no economic sense as it requires boatloads of taxpayer money and crazy levels of protective public policy for the nuclear industry even to exist.
HERE is an audio program from the archives where Dr. Makhijani laid it all out about nuclear power a couple of years ago at the University of Maine. IEER is a leader in showing how wind and solar could be a sufficient energy source for the future--if we make the right decisions now. Unfortunately with Obama in charge, there is no sense we are going to do anything other than repeat the mistakes of the past.
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