Abstract
Powering up
Nticipating the administration's bold new energy plan, Tom McNichol, a wag writing for the May 10 Salon web site, came up with something called “Vice President Dick Cheney's 10 Energy-Saving Tips!” My favorite was number eight, which cautions against solar and wind power. As McNichol explains: “So-called renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind power are, in fact, unreliable and even dangerous. During a typical 24-hour period, the sun is ‘off 50 percent of the time, while oil, gas, and coal still burn brightly.”
When Bush's backward-looking energy plan was announced a week later, the biggest surprise to many of us was the administration's wholehearted endorsement of nuclear power. Vice President Cheney declared it to be “as a matter of record, a safe, clean, and very plentiful energy source.”
The warmth of the administration's embrace delighted the industry: “In my wildest dreams … I couldn't imagine them getting so behind us,” Christian Poindexter, chairman of the Constellation Energy Group, told the New York Times.
Speaking on May 22 to the annual meeting of the Nuclear Energy Institute, Cheney pledged that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would be encouraged to speed applications for a new generation of reactors and expedite the re-licensing of existing plants. And the administration would seek quick renewal of the Price-Anderson Act, which limits nuclear operators' liability if anything goes wrong.
A flurry of stories like Time's “Nuclear Summer” and eCompany's “The France Syndrome” described the nuclear industry as revamped and rarin' to go—the easy if slow-to-come answer to this year's suddenly discovered “energy crisis.”
Lost in the shuffle was the irony that the crisis, to the degree it was not manufactured, could be largely traced to the temporary shutdown of a reactor at San Onofre, California, exacerbated by a second shutdown at Diablo Canyon. (Even nuclear power boosters should keep in mind that several years ago, a dry summer caused the closing of some French power stations when they were most needed because the water for cooling was not available from nearly dry river beds.)
The industry's new-found profitability is irrelevant to the question of building new plants; the current ones are so old that their enormous costs have been amortized. Good thing, too. After Washington State defaulted on $2 billion in power plant bonds in 1983, investors went in hiding. Everyone knows that if new plants are built, they will have to be different—smaller, less costly, and more rapidly built.
Then there's the safety/profitability nexus. Speaking in defense of the Bush plan to expand nuclear power, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill explained: “If you set aside Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the safety record of nuclear is really very good.” But if it is so good, shouldn't the industry be insuring itself, instead of relying on the Price-Anderson Act?
New technologies—smaller, safer designs like the pebble-bed reactor, which may be built in South Africa— could turn out to be workable. But nuclear power advocates should ease up on arguments that, after 50 years, only work with the Bush administration, not American investors.