(Feb. 20, 2010) Environmentalism is the religion of the left, commentators often pronounce: “The Church of the Environment,” as conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer puts it.
I have no argument with them here. Many environmentalists have taken leave of their senses, making a ritual of recycling and a demon of carbon dioxide, a colourless, odourless and tasteless gas that is indispensable to all life on Earth. By conducting mystical inquisitions into our imagined carbon footprints instead of focusing on core issues such as protecting our air and water, environmentalists hurt their cause.
But those on the right, particularly in the U.S., have their own dogma, one that is equally irrational and that also hurts their cause. The religion of the right is Nuclear Power.
“Go nuclear,” urges Charles Krauthammer. “The nation should generate much more than the one-fifth of its electricity nuclear power currently produces”, urges conservative columnist George Will. Build 50 more nuclear plants, urges William Kristol of The Weekly Standard. “Senate Republicans support building 100 new plants as quickly as possible,” maintains Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate Minority Leader.
All these defenders of the right preach the virtues of competition and free markets, of fiscal restraint, of small government, of innovations born of the entrepreneurial spirit. All preach the fallacy of thinking the government should be in the business of picking winners. Yet such is their faith that none are troubled by nuclear power’s role as the antithesis of everything their secular selves believe.
Not one nuclear plant, anywhere in the world, has ever been built without government subsidies of some kind. The only country that has enthusiastically embraced nuclear power — France, which obtains close to 80% of its electricity from its state-owned reactors — drove its power sector to financial ruin: “Catastrophic,” in the frank words of the president of Electricite de France, the state-owned power company. The only privately owned nuclear generating company that operated in a competitive environment — British Energy, which inherited the best reactors in the U.K. fleet after the U.K.’s state-owned monopoly was broken up and privatized — soon went bankrupt and was taken back by the U.K. government at taxpayer expense.
Commercial nuclear power is the most heavily subsidized industry in the history of the world and the single biggest money-loser in the history of business.
But, but, but, some conservatives might protest, nuclear power would be economic if not for the regulatory burden placed on it by environmentalists. Or on irrational consumer fears. Or on its association with the nuclear weapons industry.
They forget that in its early days, nuclear power was welcomed by environmentalists as a clean alternative to coal. That it was Ban the Bomb peaceniks, Einstein among them, who argued that nuclear weapons technology should be turned to peaceful uses. That it was the private sector insurance industry that refused to underwrite commercial nuclear technology because of the potential for a catastrophic accident. That it was the early private sector nuclear manufacturers — GE and Westinghouse — that likewise refused to stand behind their product to spare their shareholders the prospect of ruin: They sought and got government exemption from liability.
Most of all, conservatives forget that the commercial nuclear industry was a creation of government, launched in 1953 by the Eisenhower administration’s Atoms for Peace program. As early as 1957, Eisenhower learned through a report for the government’s Atomic Energy Commission that nuclear power was not commercially viable. Eisenhower then decided to push commercial nuclear power on foreign policy grounds, hoping that international regulation of the commercial nuclear power industry would discourage states from independently building reactors for military use.
Fifty years on and the industry remains commercially unviable, as everyone on the right knows. Urges Senator McConnell: “We hope Democrats will join us in [aggressively pushing nuclear power] … the president could start by moving forward on the nuclear loan guarantee program.”
This hope of McConnell, and of every other true-believing conservative, is gaining traction, and — miraculously — under the auspices of the most liberal U.S. government in memory. This week, the Obama administration announced a loan guarantee of $8.33-billion to build the first new U.S. reactors in nearly 30 years. “This is only the beginning,” Obama declared, in expressing his desire to kick-start a nuclear renaissance by tripling to $54.5-billion the subsidies that the Bush administration had introduced.
Only the beginning, indeed. If those loan guarantees prove sufficient to bring nuclear power back from the dead, electric utility ratepayers face surcharges that could exceed $40-billion per reactor over the reactor’s life, according to a study last year by the Institute for Energy and the Environment at the Vermont Law School. But even these sums wouldn’t be enough to make nuclear power commercially viable. According to a 2007 letter from Wall Street’s largest investment banks to the U.S. Administration, the private sector would require a 100% unconditional guarantee before risking its own money on the nuclear industry.
Krauthammer, Will, Kristol et al. know that nuclear power is uneconomic. That larding the nuclear technology undercuts more deserving technologies, present and future. That the government’s Congressional Budget Office and General Accounting Office both rate as high the chances that the government will need to make good on its loan guarantees.
But these conservatives have a faith that conquers all, a faith in nuclear power that sweeps aside their lesser faith in the marketplace.
Sources for this column:
The Economics of Nuclear Reactors — Renaissance or Relapse
Nuclear Power’s Role in Generating Electricity
Energy Probe 