Nukes are No Way to Power an Industrial Economy

The "powers that be" have begun a new campaign to convince us that we must have dozens or hundreds -- worldwide, thousands -- of new nuclear power plants to avert the threat of global warming.

Three groups have teamed up for the campaign: the Cheney-Bush administration, the nuclear power corporations, and most recently the New York Times. The campaign has two official mascots -- Christine Todd Whitman, the failed former head of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and Patrick Moore, the widely-mistrusted former head of Greenpeace International.

Each of the three campaign partners has a different agenda, but they all want you to believe that building hundreds or thousands of new nuclear power plants is the best way to meet the world's need for electricity -- that nuclear power is safer, cleaner and cheaper than all the many alternatives.

Electricity can be generated by many kinds of machines. Commercial- scale electric plants exist now based on wind turbines, photovoltaic panels that turn sunlight directly into electricity, geothermal plants that draw their heat from the deep earth (one to two miles below ground), turbines powered by natural gas, coal-fired dinosaurs, and nuclear power plants. There are other ways to make electricity but these are the main ones in commercial use today.

Nuclear power plants are by far the most complicated way to make electricity. Nuclear power starts by mining radioactive uranium out of the ground, then "enriching" it in a centrifuge that can make nuclear fuel but can also make fuel for an A-bomb. (Iran's current plan to operate its own centrifuges is what all the wrangling is about with Tehran.) The enriched uranium is then stuffed into a nuclear power plant where it undergoes a controlled fission reaction, splitting atoms to release tremendous quantities of heat, which is used to boil water to turn a turbine to make electricity.

...We're not sure how much nukes can reduce global warming, but we should spend billions more taxpayer dollars to subsidize nukes? This is no basis for national policy. Between 1948 and 1998, civilian nuclear power received at least $77 billion dollars of federal subsidies (in constant 2005 dollars). The insurance industry still won't touch nuclear power with a ten-foot pole so Congress has to limit the industry's liability by law -- a huge subsidy to the nuclear power corporations. Wall Street won't touch it either without huge additional federal guarantees and subsidies. This is a technology that falls on its face unless Uncle Sam provides a permanent crutch.

We should ask ourselves, Why aren't we willing to spend $77 billion to subsidize energy-saving measures, and the development of existing minimally-polluting technologies like wind turbines with hydrogen storage, and hydrogen fuel cells to make electricity and power vehicles? Even Ford and General Motors -- not the brightest bulbs on the corporate landscape -- say they will offer us hydrogen fuel- cell vehicles in the next few years. These technologies exist now.

Solar technologies such as wind power have an even better safety record than nuclear and they too are looking more affordable as the cost of oil rises...

...These alternative sources of energy don't fit the divergent agendas of any of the three pro-nuke campaigners. Of all these alternative energy options, only nuclear power offers to create an endless series of international crises (think Iran, think North Korea) requiring macho threats of military showdown at the OK corral. Only nuclear power requires multi-billion-dollar centralized machines that can be controlled by a tiny handful of investors -- thus empowering Wall Street elites instead of empowering farmers who would be only too happy to put wind turbines in their corn fields. (A farmer in Colorado is likely to receive $3000 to $5000 per year for hosting a single wind turbine on a quarter-acre of land, instead of producing 40 bushels of corn worth $120 or beef worth perhaps $15 on that same land.)

Of all the available alternatives, only nuclear power relies on machines that require armed guards, anti-terrorist exercises and simulations, evacuation drills and other paramilitary apparatus. Only nukes with their threat of rogue weapons can provide endless excuses to spy on other nations and search through the phone records from every citizen. Only nuclear power with its unbreakable link to A- bombs "requires" the President to declare habeas corpus null and void, and to declare that he and Mr. Rumsfeld will torture anyone they choose to torture any time it suits them, thus commencing the Great Unraveling of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was imposed upon Real Americans by that class traitor Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his commie-loving wife back in 1948.

In sum, none of the available alternative energy sources can match nuclear power's ability to thwart the nation's inherent democratic tendencies and stop the nation's slide toward local control, small- scale enterprise, self-reliance, and a populist political reawakening. Without nuclear power and petroleum to anchor their centralized authority and provide excuses for their military adventures, the "powers that be" will soon seem very much like the little man behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz. And that would never do. It simply would never do...

A good read, and timely. Oil, coal, and nuclear energy perpetuate a certain private investment group, its managers, and its clients. On the other hand, as outlined here, the development of biotechnology could produce inexpensive virtually inexhaustible sources of hydrocarbon and hydrogen- coupled to solar energy.

But once the right bugs are bioengineered, any nation- or city or town or co-operative for that matter- should be able to cultivate them and process the effluent.

That certainly won't do.

After all, it's hard to justify hegemony in a world suddenly without limiting resources.