What Nuclear Renaissance?

[Wilms]

What Nuclear Renaissance?

By Christian Parenti

This article appeared in the May 12, 2008 edition of The Nation.

April 24, 2008

snip

All of which raises the question: why is the much-storied "nuclear renaissance" so slow to get rolling? Who is holding up the show? In a nutshell, blame Warren Buffett and the banks--they won't put up the cash.

"Wall street doesn't like nuclear power," says Arjun Makhijani of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. The fundamental fact is that nuclear power is too expensive and risky to attract the necessary commercial investors. Even with vast government subsidies, it is difficult or almost impossible to get proper financing and insurance. The massive federal subsidies on offer will cover up to 80 percent of construction costs of several nuclear power plants in addition to generous production tax credits, as well as risk insurance. But consider this: the average two-reactor nuclear power plant is estimated to cost $10 billion to $18 billion to build. That's before cost overruns, and no US nuclear power plant has ever been delivered on time or on budget.

As Dieter Helm, an Oxford professor and leading economic expert on energy markets, has found, there never has been and never will be a nuclear power program totally dependent on the market.

Sixty years ago, the technology was swathed in manic space-age optimism--its electricity was going to be "too cheap to meter." While that wasn't true, nuclear power did serve a key role in the cold war: spent nuclear fuel rods are refined for weapons-grade plutonium and enriched uranium. That fact aside, rarely has so much money, scientific know-how and raw state power been marshaled to achieve so little. By some estimates, an investment of several hundred billion dollars has led to a US nuke industry of 104 operating plants--about a quarter of the global total--that produces a mere 19 percent of our electricity.

In fact, the sputtering decline of nuclear power has been one of the greatest industrial failures of modern times. In 1985 Forbes called the nuke industry "the largest managerial disaster in history."

snip

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080512/parenti

[texastoast]

1. May it continue to fail n/t

[losthills]

2. Nuclear power is not economical.

It only exists because governments have heavily subsidized it as part of their nuclear weapons programs.

[jpak]

3. The meme "Nuclear Renaissance" was conjured up by the Nuclear Energy Institute

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Nuclear_Energy_Institute

...and they loves them some Dick Cheney...

http://www.whitehouse.gov/vicepresident/news-speeches/speeches/vp20010522.html

[LiberalEsto]

4. Insurance is a huge factor

What insurance company in its right mind would insure such a potential disaster?

Back in the mid-80s, when I lived in South Plainfield, NJ, a local day care center had to shut down because they couldn't get coverage -- they had swings and other play equipment that the insurance company wouldn't cover. This is why you hardly see swings in playgrounds any more.

If they balk at SWINGS, do you think they'll cover a nuke plant?