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About Those Anti-Nuclear Arguments: They're Dishonest

By Chris Morrison

Updated on: November 23, 2009 / 7:52 AM EST / MoneyWatch

Another day, another fatuous report about why nuclear power shouldn't be built in the United States. A group called Environment Illinois is pushing a set of arguments against new nuclear power plants that are all about manipulating facts to make nukes look worse than they are.

This is part of a concerted push-back against nuclear by old-line environmentalists, many of whom have fought for decades against nuclear. Luckily, the group wrote their objections out in a bullet-pointed summary, so instead of a rambling rebuttal I can respond in kind. Here goes:

"To avoid the most catastrophic impacts of global warming, the US must cut power plant emissions roughly in half over the next 10 years."

This is the set-up for all of EI's arguments that follow. Incidentally, it's the same way that hard-line Republicans often start off their arguments against renewable power -- by implying that the scale of the task is too large for a particular solution.

"Nuclear power is too slow to contribute to this effort. No new reactors are now under construction in the US, and building a single reactor could take 10 years or longer. As a result, it is quite possible that nuclear power could deliver no progress in the critical next decade, despite spending billions on reactor construction."

No new reactors are under construction, but this mostly follows from regulatory impediments encouraged for years by groups like EI and Greenpeace. Building a single reactor could take 10 years; setting up a solar panel on my roof could take 10 years too, if a neighbors and bureaucrats keep blocking me. And while a nuke will take a few years to set up, it probably has a longer lifetime than any energy generator outside a dam. We've got more than a 10-year problem, after all.

"Even if the nuclear industry somehow managed to build 100 new nuclear reactors by 2030, nuclear power could reduce total US emissions of global warming pollution over the next 20 years by only 12 per cent -- far too little, too late."

Here's where EI fulfills the argument they set up in the beginning: that because nuclear can't support the entire U.S. infrastructure, it's worthless. Critics of any new type of power inevitably drag this out. It's bogus -- no single power source will ever provide all our energy, or even a mix of today's proven renewable technologies. And for the record, 12 percent of our total demand is a huge amount of energy.

Building 100 new reactors would require an upfront investment on the order of $600 billion dollars -- money that could cut at least twice as much carbon pollution by 2030 if invested in clean energy. Taking into account the ongoing costs of running the nuclear plants, clean energy could deliver five times more pollution-cutting progress per dollar.

How much CO2 renewables and energy efficiency will prevent from being emitted in future decades is open to interpretation -- meaning that you can bet every interest group is interpreting it as they please. But more to the point, much of that money, for either renewables or nuclear plants, must come from private industry. Attempting to inspire public admiration or hatred of one or the other is a wrong-headed subversion that investment process.

Nuclear power is not necessary to provide clean, carbon-free electricity for the long haul. The need for base-load power is exaggerated and small-scale clean energy solutions can actually enhance the reliability of the electric grid.

This final point is a rehash of Amory Lovins, who does have some good arguments against nuclear. However, the idea that millions of tiny power sources (solar panels and individual wind turbines) can meet our power needs still has to be proven, and in the meantime, neither solar nor wind is growing anywhere near robustly enough to replace our work-horse coal and nuclear plants.

One might argue that the best way to move forward, then, is a national supergrid that can handle distributed generation. Fine; but that grid would take at least ten years to build, given various regulatory and planning hurdles. According to the logic of Environment Illinois, that means we should just give up on it.

But the time and effort that goes into building any particular energy source isn't the real problem. Here's the bullet point that Environment Illinois forgot to add: "Nuclear power doesn't work with our environmental ideology." For many years, the morning cartoons have said that nuclear power is big, bad and scary, and for those who took the message to heart, there is no reason strong enough to change.

By the way, there are valid arguments against nuclear, most of which have to do with the state of today's nuclear industry and regulatory bodies. I just have yet to hear any arguments that make nuclear an obvious non-starter in the face of climate change, energy security and the comparable undesirability of coal. But if anyone can prove me wrong, shout it out below.