Nuclear power revival?

E - The Environmental Magazine has issued a news release about its latest issue. One story is about whether nuclear power is an economically viable alternative to fossil fuels in the debate about global warming. If you want to read the entire article, go here.

Below are some points in the news release that popped up in my e-mail a few minutes ago:

But in most cases, these environmentalists see nuclear as only a temporary fix, a holding action until a renewable-based energy economy can be put in place. According to NASA’s Dr. James Hansen, who in recent years sounded alarms about global warming to the chagrin of both his employer and the Bush Administration, “there is tremendous potential in energy efficiency and renewable energies, including solar power, wind energy, bio-fuels and geothermal.”

Nonetheless, the nuclear industry, aided by a very supportive Bush Administration, is moving ahead with its attempt to revive commercial nuclear power, but it’s unlikely to happen quickly. Although 30 new nuclear power plant licenses are pending, the first of these probably won't be on line until 2015 or 2016.

Will these proposed plants (some employing new and supposedly safer designs) actually be built? And given our global warming challenges, should they be built? It may be that the funding issue alone will derail the nuclear push: A Standard and Poor’s report last year priced nuclear at $1,500 per kilowatt -- twice the cost of a new coal plant. And cost overruns, it said, “are highly probable.” The base price for a plant is $3 billion today. Most of the proposed new nuclear stations are in the Southeast, and (partly to minimize local antagonism) most are on the site of existing units.

A much-quoted MIT report, released in 2003, says that nuclear power “is not now cost competitive with coal and natural gas,” but it concludes that nukes “could be one option for reducing carbon emissions.” However, the industry’s “stagnation and decline” makes that unlikely, the report concludes.

But to get the public to accept a major expansion of nuclear power, the industry will have to convince Americans terrified by the specter of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and intentional terrorism-related sabotage.

As for me, I'm not nearly as frightened of nuclear power as I was a few years ago, and I don't like all the gases and mercury that coal-fired plants put in the air. Even assuming there is no such thing as human-induced climate change through fossil fuels, it doesn't make sense to put so much bad stuff in the air.

But if nuclear costs twice as much as coal, what are we to do? Can you imagine a politician saying we can solve global warming, but only if you drive the next-generation Ford Pinto, pay twice as much for electricity and hang your laundry outside, and by the way, we're not asking rich folks to give up their private jets?

Ain't gonna happen.