Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free is getting an enthusiastic response, but several new nuclear facilities are planned.

I have been going around the country speaking about my new book, Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free: A Roadmap for U.S. Energy Policy.

(Download it free) (Note: 4.3 MB pdf)
 

Nothing I have done in 37 years of work on energy, environment, and nuclear weapons and power issues has caught on like this.

As evidence of serious and rapid climate change mounts and a price on carbon emissions looks more and more certain, companies' coal-fired power plants are hard to justify and harder to finance.  So the nuclear industry wants to ride into town as the savior. Having failed to deliver electricity “too cheap to meter” (promised in the 1950s by the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss), it now wants massive new government subsidies in the form of loan guarantees.

But it is a false choice. Those who oppose nuclear power as the “solution” to the global climate crisis are right: a combination of efficiency, renewable energy, combined heat and power, and emerging technologies such as plug-in hybrid cars can allow us to phase out all fossil fuels and nuclear power in 30 to 50 years.

Eight new nuclear reactors are being proposed in Texas alone. The two near Amarillo, in the panhandle, will consume 60 million gallons of water every day—more than what the entire city uses. The company proposing the plant has said there is a lake there in an unidentified location that will supply the water.  In Idaho, the CEO of Alternate Energy Holdings, which wants to build a power plant there, implies that nuclear power will cost only 1 to 2 cents per kilowatt-hour, because capital cost is borne by the investors, as if Wall Street were a kind of charity for electricity consumers.  Far from it.  Wall Street got burned by nuclear power in the 1980s; it is leery of financing them.  That’s why the nuclear industry has the largest hat in hand in Washington, D.C. asking for handouts such as license application subsidies and 100 percent loan guarantees.

But at least some investors are catching on. Mid-American Energy, owned by Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway, announced last month (January 2008) that it was abandoning plans to build a nuclear power plant in Idaho because it could not provide economical power to its customers.  Austin Energy, the city-owned utility in the capital of Texas, has recommended that the City vote not to buy a share of the two proposed reactors near Bay City Texas. The investment would, at this time, be “unwise” and imprudent” said the utility, because of insufficient time to examine the paperwork and the risk of cost overruns and delays.

Here is a link to a summary of my book (Note: 2.5 MB pdf)

and to an op ed I recently wrote for the Deseret News (Salt Lake City)

I invite you to comment on the analysis in my book, on what you are doing in your neighborhood, city, county, or state regarding energy and climate and to link to my blog.

Comments

[Rebecca Ann Hale]

Dear Dr. Makhijani:
Thank you for helping people understand more about why nuclear is not Clean Energy. We are all suffering as a result of many good technologies being left under-developed while money and power have been following a path to hell, in terms of backing nuclear proliferation. Your book will help wake more people up to the facts. When reason can prevail, nuclear plans will be slowed, and human-safe technologies will get pushed forward. Your plans sound workable and in a comfortable timeframe.
I live in Reno, NV, and am concentrating my efforts in area of environmental / science curriculum enrichment.

Sincerely,
Rebecca Ann Hale
Reno, NV

[Mike Berger]

Mr Makhijani
Your idea of a world power by wind and solar energy is a fairytale. Nuclear energy is the best alternative to fossel fuel. Nuclear energy is safe,clean, and inexpensive. However years of anti-nuclear power propaganda have left most americians confused and misinformed. Europe has been building nuclear power plants for decades with out any of the problems you contribute to nuclear power. I have to wonder how much of your funding comes from oil rich coutries that rely on America's continued oil dependence for there prosperity.

Mike Berger
Dallas, TX

[John Rachow Iowa City IA Physicians for Social Responsibility]

It seems to me that a central organizing principle of this blog is the book Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free: A Roadmap for U.S. Energy Policy. It is unlikely that either the nuclear power or fossil fuel industries would have funded such an analysis to develop a roadmap that suggests shedding both nuclear power and fossil fuels is feasible in the next 40 years or so. I suppose this forum is not so much to discuss the pros and cons of nuclear power, which has serious unsolved waste problems, as to discuss alternatives to both nuclear and fossil fuels. It is extremely naive to think that European countries, or any other country, have found nuclear energy to be a panacea. Certainly the experience of the last 60 years does not support the conclusions that nuclear power is clean, safe, and cheap. All nations that have significant nuclear power generating capacity are still heavily dependent on fossil fuel importation in addition to use of domestic fossil fuels. It is instructive to watch closely the current nationwide experiments currently running in countries such as Sweden, Finland, Netherlands, Germany, and France. A basic flaw in many discussions and
analyses is the false assumption that we have to accept that a huge increase in future energy demand is an unalterable fact. There are several examples documented in Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free of sustained periods in recent years in the U.S. of sustained periods of level energy consumption with simultaneous sustained robust overall economic growth. Another thing that has always bothered me is the recurring effort to equate electricity power generation in the U.S. to oil imports. Oil goes mostly to transportation and home heating and nuclear energy will not ameliorate this need. The lion share of U.S. electricity generation is from domestic coal with its terrible down side that is already hard upon us. Global warming and toxic emissions from coal burning (and oil) is already a colossal threat to life on the planet. Burning fossil fuels may do us in well before nuclear waste becomes a terminal illness for humankind.

[Arjun Makhijani]

A response to responding to Mike Berger:

1. IEER does not get or accept donations from governments or corporations. Specifically, Mike Berger wondered how much money IEER gets from “oil-rich countries.” The answer is: zero. It is amusing to think that the U.S. government does get such funding, since some Middle Eastern oil-rich countries are buying U.S. securities and financing some of the U.S. budget and trade deficits. IEER’s funders are listed in the various issues of Science for Democratic Action. See the list of issues at http://www.ieer.org/sdafiles/index.html

2. There is not much nuclear power construction going on in Western Europe. In fact, there are only two reactors being built in there: one in Finland and one in France, both by AREVA. The European nuclear landscape is very varied from governmental gung-ho in France, with President Sarkozy being an ardent global salesman for AREVA reactors, notably in the Middle East and Asia, to countries like Germany that have decided to phase out nuclear power. It’s worth checking the facts about Europe. For a recent article I’ve written on the French nuclear power system, see page 5 of the current issue of Science for Democratic Action at http://www.ieer.org/sdafiles/15-2.pdf Among other things, I point out that France has not “solved” the problem of nuclear waste. It reprocesses spent fuel and in the process increases costs for its electricity ratepayers and pollutes the oceans all the way to the Arctic. Twelve of fifteen Western European countries have asked France to stop, with no success so far. For all that, French high-level waste has nowhere to go. Most of it is stored on the reprocessing site at La Hague. Like the U.S. repository program, the one in France is also very controversial. For IEER’s evaluation of the French repository program (done by an IEER team that included world-class geologists), see a summary in English at http://www.ieer.org/sdafiles/13-4.pdf. For the full report in French see http://www.ieer.org/reports/bure/1204index.html