Gwyneth Cravens

Gwyneth Cravens was like a lot of people. She knew something about nuclear energy and she was against it.

But she happened to make the acquaintance of D. Richard Anderson, who was thoroughly plugged into nuclear technology. It turned out that he was something of a major force in nuclear safety and he was able to open doors for her. Fortunately, Ms. Cravens is an intelligent, curious person who took advantage of an opportunity to track down all the facts. To make it better, she also is a skilled writer, able to present information accurately and clearly. Thanks to her gifts we are able to go on her Nuclear America Tour.

She and we see it all. Research laboratories, power plants, mines, waste isolation sites, everything that has to do with nuclear energy. But there's even more: she's able to talk with experts, people who've worked in these places for years.

And she lays it all out: facts and figures. The good and the bad. And she compares the alternatives. It's about as complete a reference as you're likely to find.

She describes herself going into it this way: "I lacked a clear sense of what radiation actually was, didn't know much about its sources, didn't distinguish between low-dose radiation and high-dose radiation, and was foggy about the difference between exposure and dose and about radioactive decay. I had no idea how a nuclear plant worked."

Near the end, she quotes a remark made by Anderson:

"One day God could say to us: I gave you the brainiest men and women in human history to come up with an understanding of the atom and its nucleus. I gave you enough uranium and thorium to last you for thousands of years. I gave you an understanding of how when uranium decays it releases energy. You didn't need to invent anything else. You had everything you needed to provide energy for yourselves and your descendants without harming the environment. What else did you want?"

Cravens, Gwyneth. Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007

GNEP

The discussion so far shows that the world has to move toward nuclear energy, along with other initiatives, to minimize global warming. The Global Nuclear Energy Partnership is a plan for making this an option for countries that presently rely on fossil fuels while preventing bomb proliferation.

The details of the plan are still under review while countries decide to join the partnership. But the general outline is understood well enough to describe here.

First we need to establish an important aspect of proliferation. Nuclear power plants aren't necessary for producing weapon material. The surest way to make bomb material is by enriching natural uranium to weapons grade. If an independent nation has a source of uranium, no other nation has the legal right to interfere with its weapons ambitions. At most, other nations can apply diplomatic and economic pressure on it, as many nations now are doing with no apparent effect on Iran.

There has been so much talk about diversion of spent fuel being a problem, you may wonder why it is that spent fuel isn't a necessary ingredient. The reason is that it's more difficult to make a successful bomb from spent fuel than from uranium ore. It's instructive to look at the history of the Manhattan Project that led to the first atomic bombs. In short, spent fuel contains transuranic actinides that cause the bomb to pre-detonate so the result is a burp instead of a bang.

All this means that the problem of proliferation is irrelevant to the issue of nuclear energy. But GNEP provides a formula by which the partners can offer safe and cost-efficient nuclear energy on the premise that the subscriber nations will prefer the GNEP fuel system over developing their own. The fuel processing and enrichment will be done by nations that already possess that capability.

So GNEP cannot stop any nation from acquiring a bomb. What it can do is offer nations a way to employ nuclear energy without building a capability for fuel processing and enrichment.

Coal Wastes

We've discussed before the mortality that results from coal. The best study done so far for the US puts the range between 33,000 and 121,000 per year, just counting adults over 25. But anti-nukes keep hammering at nuclear wastes as though they are such a huge environmental problem that the world should shut down all the nuclear plants as soon as enough windmills can be built to take their place.

But as we showed in an earlier article, The Dimensions of the Challenge, windmills and other part-time energy sources will never take the place of coal. Since nuclear is the only energy source that can, it's fair to compare the effects of both kinds of waste.

Nuclear opponents can't point to a single incident in which nuclear power wastes have caused harm to any person or any thing. So let's consider coal wastes, in comparison.

Jeff Goodell's book, Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006) makes grim reading. He recounts how coal companies have kept their operating costs down by poisoning the environment. On page 41 he describes the effects of the wastes of one coal mine in West Virginia and how they affect the local residents' water.

In this excerpt, "Massey" refers to Massey Energy Company. Don Blankenship is the CEO.

"A few years ago, Dr. Diane Shafer, a busy orthopedic surgeon in Williamson, the Mingo County seat, noticed that a surprising number of her patients in their fifties were afflicted with early-onset dementia. In addition, she was hearing more and more complaints about kidney stones, thyroid problems, and gastrointestinal problems such as bellyaches and diarrhea. Incidents of cancer and birth defects seemed to be rising, too. She had no formal studies to back her up, but she had been practicing medicine in the Williamson area for more than thirty years, and she knew that many people who lived in the hills beyond the reach of the municipal water supply had problems with their water: black water would sometimes pour out of their pipes, ruining their clothes and staining porcelain fixtures. Many people had to switch to plastic fixtures because steel ones would be eaten up in a year or two. The worst water problems were in the town of Rawl, near Massey's Sprouse Creek slurry impoundment pond, where millions of gallons of black, sludgy water is backed up. Were the health problems in the area related to the pollutants leaching into the water supply from the slurry pond? Dr. Sharer suspected they were.

"Dr. Sharer is the lone physician on the Mingo County Board of Health. Despite her urgings, she could get no one at an official level to take much interest in the water problems in the area. So at her recommendation, a group of concerned citizens contacted Ben Stout, a well-known professor of biology at Wheeling Jesuit University and an expert on the impact of coal mining on Appalachian streams, to study the water quality in the area. Stout tested the water in fifteen local wells, most of them within a few miles of the Sprouse Creek impoundment and one just a short distance from Blankenship's home. Stout found that the wells were indeed contaminated with heavy metals, including lead, arsenic, beryllium, and selenium. In several cases, the levels exceeded federal drinking water standards by as much as 500 percent. Of the fifteen wells tested, only five met federal standards. Stout says that the metals found in the water samples were consistent with the metals in the slurry pond and the most logical explanation for how those metals got into the Williamson drinking water was that the impoundment pond was leaking into the aquifer. He also pointed out that coal companies often dispose of excess coal slurry by injecting it directly into abandoned underground mines, where it can easily migrate into the drinking water.

What if coal wastes had been handled as conscientiously as nuclear-energy wastes have been? It's a pointless question. Coal wastes can't be isolated from the environment because of their massive quantities. Here's what the US Department of Energy says about it:

"Nuclear power produces around 2,000 metric tonnes/per annum of spent fuel. This amounts to 0.006 lbs/MWh. If a typical nuclear power plant is 1000 MWe in capacity and operates 91% of the time, waste production would be 45,758 lbs./annum or slightly less than 23 tons. The solid waste from a nuclear power plant is thus not the volume of the waste, which is very small, but the special handling required for satisfactory disposal. A similar amount of electricity from coal would yield over 300,000 tons of ash, assuming 10% ash content in the coal. Processes (specifically scrubbing) for removing ash from coal plant emissions are generally highly successful but result in greater volumes of limestone solid wastes (plus water) than the volume of ash removed."

There clearly is no environmentally-sound way to dispose of 300,000 tons of ash (or more if the flue gas is scrubbed) at every power plant, every year. As long as we keep on burning coal we'll keep on polluting the groundwater.

Nuclear Accidents

There have been two serious accidents involving nuclear power reactors and it's right that they have received very much attention. They are at the heart of the debate over whether or not to expand nuclear energy to minimize global warming.

The reactor at Chernobyl was different from all the other power reactors outside the Soviet Union: it was inherently unstable, meaning that the reactivity in the core went up when it got hotter so that once the operators lost control there was no way to get it back.

The accident happened this way[source]. The night crew was told to perform a test to see if the reactor could sustain a sudden disconnection from the power grid. It happened that the night crew was inexperienced (presumably because of seniority rules), though that probably wouldn't have made any difference. What was supposed to happen was that the flywheel inertia of the turbine blades in the electrical generators would give enough power to run the coolant pump until the diesel-powered generators could start and power up.

The crew didn't know that the reactor was operating at an abnormal condition, having run at full power all day and then being cut back to part load, but that probably wouldn't have made any difference, either.

It's not clear why, but the coolant pumps were run at their maximum flow. Possibly the crew thought they were increasing the safety margin. But the resulting cooler temperatures lowered the steam pressure and water filled more of the reactor's internals. Water absorbs neutrons more than steam does, so the control rods had to be withdrawn to maintain power.

The automatic controls would ordinarily have shut down the reactor under these conditions, so the crew disabled the emergency cooling system and the emergency shutdown rods (usually called SCRAM rods).

The crew disconnected the plant from the power grid. But the pump power from the turbine blades wasn't sufficient so the reactor started heating up. Because of the instability this reactor had, the higher temperature raised the reactivity rate, causing more heating, etc. At that point the reactor was out of control. Steam drove water out of the core, and reactivity increased more. Once the crew realized something was wrong, they inserted the control rods. But the control rods inserted slowly, not quickly as the shutdown rods would have. To make matters worse, the tips of the control rods were made of graphite instead of boron. Graphite raised the reactivity rate instead of lowering it as boron would have done. The rods jammed when they were partly inserted.

The reactor continued to heat up. A steam explosion drove some parts out through the sheet-metal roof that kept rain off the reactor. Finally, the reactor body, which was made of graphite, reached its ignition point. The hole in the roof allowed air to enter and the reactor caught fire.

After the accident, the World Health Organization did an extensive investigation and continual followup; its findings were that actual deaths have numbered about 50 and theoretically there could be as many as 4000 fatal cancers in the future.[source] As tragic as that is, it doesn't approach the death rate due to burning coal.  Even in the US, tens of thousands of people die every year just from the pollution from generating electricity with fossil fuels.[Abt Associates Report, Exhibit 6-4]

What's interesting is that a big part of the region around Chernobyl now is healthier than before the accident. The chemical refineries and coal-burning plants caused terrible health problems. Now that they're shut down, the air is clean. Some people have moved back into the parts which officially are quarantined but where radiation isn't especially high. They eat vegetables from their gardens and drink water from their wells, and take eggs from their bug-eating chickens, and they're doing just fine. Wildlife have flourished in the area, including the hot spots. Wildlife biologists are studying the animals and plants and even after all these years they're not finding any radiation-related health problems. There's a superb book on Chernobyl's aftermath: Wormwood forest : a natural history of chernobyl by Mary Mycio.

So what are the differences between Chernobyl-style Soviet reactors and all the power reactors in the rest of the world? There are too many differences to list here, but we'll tick off the major differences that led to the accident.

1. The reactor was unstable.
2. The reactor had no containment structure.
3. The reactor was made of graphite, protected only with a sheet-metal shed. Outside the Soviet Union, power reactors have multiple layers of steel and concrete protection.
4. The crew hadn't been trained for the test it was performing.
5. The crew was working without supervision and went against plant operating regulations.


To understand why the reactor was built and operated so unsafely, you'd have to understand how the Soviet system worked. I'm not qualified to explain it, but if you read some Solzhenitzyn you'll get the idea. The accident did, however, prove that anti-nukes had vastly overstated the harm such an accident could cause. It turned out that the consequences, serious as they were, were of the same scale as disasters that happen every year.

More important, the accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979 totally destroyed the reactor but resulted in no adverse health effects, which validated the defense-in-depth designs used in all US power reactors.[source]

Hugh Montefiore: One of the World's Great Minds

Hugh Montefiore was an Anglican Bishop in the United Kingdom. Outspoken and remarkably radical on theological questions and environmental issues, he was elevated to Bishop over the objections of the Queen. He served on the Friends of the Earth's board for twenty years and as President of the board for six of them. Not long before he died, he changed his mind about nuclear energy and published an article in the Tablet. The Tablet is a religious journal and probably the article would not have attracted much attention, but the Friends of the Earth executives forced him off the board, so the incident gained some notoriety.

Here are some excerpts from the article:

Feature Article, 23 October 2004
Why the planet needs nuclear energy

"As a first step towards this goal, our Government has set itself the target of 10 per cent of electricity from "renewables" by 2010, . . ."

"This needs to be rigorously followed up if the 60 per cent reduction of global warming gases is to be achieved in time. So our Government has further set itself the 'aspiration' of 20 per cent of electricity from renewables by 2020. Yet there seems to be little idea how this second target can be achieved."

"This is why nuclear energy is the most viable alternative, but the problem is that it takes several years between a decision to build a nuclear reactor and its commercial operation. If we are to have more nuclear energy soon after 2010 we must plan now. The Government has said that it is keeping open the nuclear option, but the question remains: why aren't our nuclear reactors being replaced as they become obsolete? Nuclear energy, at present supplying 20 per cent of our electricity, provides a reliable, safe, cheap, almost limitless form of pollution-free energy."

"The real reason why the Government has not taken up the nuclear option is because it lacks public acceptance, due to scare stories in the media and the stonewalling opposition of powerful environmental organisations. Most, if not all, of the objections do not stand up to objective assessment. The accidents at Three Mile Island in the United States and at Chernobyl in the Ukraine are usually cited as objections, without much consideration of what happened and what the results were. At Three Mile Island the additional radiation in the surrounding district was less than would be received in one day from natural sources, and no adverse medical effects have been proved."

"The advantages far outweigh any objections, and I can see no practical way of meeting the world's needs without nuclear energy."

Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth, explained the firing this way: "To have us saying one thing and a member of the board of trustees saying the opposite is clearly unworkable in practice. We can't have the organisation saying two things at once."[The Independent (London), Oct 22, 2004 by Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor]

He's right, of course. Party discipline comes first.

The Sayings of Caldicott

Anti-nukes adore Helen Caldicott. She travels the world to spread the message that nuclear energy is poisoning the planet. People who don't know anything about the subject celebrate her tireless efforts. Movie stars shower her with money.

On the other hand, Ms. Caldicott has had no training in epidemiology or health physics. She never has belonged to professional organizations devoted to these subjects and she never has published in a peer-reviewed journal.

The National Center for Public Policy Research assembled some of her more notable quotes, as follows:

"That's the argument Hitler probably used when he built the gas ovens -- jobs. " - Caldicott quoted in the Sacramento Bee, April 26, 1988, equating support for defense industry jobs with support for the Holocaust

"The support for that massacre (U.S. liberation of Kuwait) was skin-deep. People felt oppressed by their government was doing and the country was lost... That whole ordeal in the gulf was a practice round for nuclear war. It was obscene beyond belief." - Caldicott quoted by Dana Tims of the Oregonian, November 13, 1991

"Scientists who work for nuclear power or nuclear energy have sold their soul to the devil. They are either dumb, stupid, or highly compromised... Free enterprise really means rich people get richer. And they have the freedom to exploit and psychologically rape their fellow human beings in the process... Capitalism is destroying the earth. Cuba is a wonderful country. What Castro's done is superb." - Caldicott quoted by Dixy Lee Ray in her book Trashing the Planet (1990)

"As it is, life in America amounts to a corporate dictatorship." - Caldicott quoted by Dana Tims of the Oregonian , November 13, 1991

"At a Beverly Hills fund-raiser... nuclear arms opponent Helen Caldicott gave a controversial speech in which she likened Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to Jesus Christ and suggested the Department of Defense be renamed the 'Department of Annihilation.' " - Amy Chance of the Sacramento Bee, April 26, 1988

"Every time you turn on an electric light, you are making another brainless baby." - Caldicott quoted by environmentalist Theodore Roszak in the Oregonian, June 14, 1992

"[Caldicott] said that if principles crystalized during the Nuremberg Trials at the end of World War II were applied to allied prosecution of the Gulf War, hangings of the U.S. military brass would be in order." - Dana Tims quoted in the Oregonian, November 13, 1993, after conducting a telephone interview with Caldicott

Here's the scary part. Ms. Caldicott is a leading light, an intellectual paragon, among anti-nukes.

Pebble-Bed Modular Reactors.

If nuclear magazines had centerfolds, every month they'd show a picture of a PBMR.
[Source: MIT]

Whatever anyone could want a nuclear power plant to do, these sweethearts deliver.

They can't go out of control and overheat. You can shut off the cooling at full power and they just warm up a little and stop. They're made in modules; you get whatever size you want by assembling modules. You want small? Buy one module. You want big? Buy a bunch. They don't require heavy forgings so they can be mass-produced. They're cheap. They never have to shut down for refueling. They're gas-cooled so water chemistry is never an issue. They can drive hydrogen generators while generating electricity. They are so safe they can be built close in; the leftover heat can be used to heat homes and businesses instead of heating up the outdoors.

How is all this possible, you're wondering. Here's the deal:

The big bugaboo with conventional reactors is that the fuel elements stay in the reactor for a long time, a couple of years or so. During that time they build up fission products that give off heat even when you shut the reactor down. So the challenge is to ensure that cooling is always available to the core, no matter what. You may recall that during the Three-Mile-Island accident the operators deliberately turned off the cooling pumps and, sure enough, the core overheated and melted.

The concept here is to continually refuel. The fuel elements only spend a couple of weeks in the reactor before they are put into storage and the few fission products they hold are allowed to decay away; then they are cycled back through the reactor. Actually, a number of concepts for doing this have been proposed; it happens that the PBMR is the concept going into commercial operation.

How it works is that spherical fuel elements, called pebbles, are fed into the top of the reactor while others are withdrawn at the bottom. The pebbles are mixed graphite and uranium, coated with an abrasion-resistant ceramic. They're like billiard balls.

The design feature of greatest interest is that the reactor has a strongly negative void coefficient, which is a physicist's way of saying the reactivity rate goes down when the temperature goes up. So they don't need control rods or shutdown rods, although some versions have them. You control the power of the reactor by controlling the flow of gas coolant through the pebble bed. If you want less power you cut back the flow of gas; as the temperature rises the reactivity rate drops. If you want no power you shut off the flow; the temperature rises to the shutoff point and the reaction stops.

Could all reactors be this kind? Possibly. The catch is that the world probably will need some advanced-cycle reactors and an advanced-cycle PBMR hasn't been invented yet. So it could be that the future will include a mix of PBMRs and advanced-cycle reactors.

In the meantime, customers in China and South Africa are trying them out.[source]

Yucca Mountain

A long time ago, one of America's least-successful presidents made a bad decision; he decided that the US would not recycle spent fuel from its nuclear power plants.

The reasoning he offered was like this: if the US recycled its spent fuel, North Korea would make atomic bombs. And if the US didn't recycle its spent fuel, North Korea would not make bombs.

You can quickly see that this argument overlooks a basic fact, that North Korea's bomb-making decisions did not depend in any way on whether or not the US recycled its spent fuel. And it led ineluctably to a solid blockage at the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle.

The plan all along had been to reprocess spent fuel. Reprocessing the wastes separated out the valuable uranium and transuranic actinides to use as fuel. The remaining wastes were only 3% of what was there before and would lose their toxicity in some centuries; five would be sufficient. [chart] Many geologic places, such as caves or abandoned mines, could store those wastes safely.

But the decision by that president changed everything. Suddenly there was no way to deal with the spent fuel. It had to be stored at the reactor plants where it had been generated. Not only did the volume of waste go up by a factor of thirty, it would stay dangerous for many thousands of years, even hundreds of thousands. There was, and is, a federal law that utilities are not allowed to process or even permanently store the spent fuel. That meant that the Department of Energy had to find a geologic location where the waste could be isolated for thousands of years.

It happened that this change transpired at a time of fervent opposition to nuclear energy, and nuclear opponents fomented public protest in all the candidate locations for the permanent repository. Finally, the US Congress decreed in 1987 that the location would be Yucca Mountain, Nevada.[Timeline] Nevadans were not favorable to this decision; Nevada had more vacant jobs than workers in need of them and saw no gain for themselves in such a facility. Nuclear opponents focussed on the area and in no time most state residents believed that Yucca Mountain was the worst possible location for a spent-fuel repository anywhere in North America and knew at least a dozen reasons why.

As the site evaluation proceeded, features were discovered that would raise the cost many times above the initial estimate and also would lengthen the time to do the work by years. But the biggest blow came in 2004, when the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. ruled that the repository would have to ensure safe storage for at least 300,000 years, as far into the future as Homo rhodesiensis lived in the past.[Timeline]

Almost anti-climactically, word leaked out in 2005 about some casual e-mails between analysts five to seven years earlier. They were chatting about pressure from managers to slant their conclusions, and about filling in software documentation after-the-fact; the sort of private ruminations in which officeworkers engage. Opponents of the project seized on these stories as proof of falsifications in the analysis. Later investigations resulted in no actions being taken against the participants.[source]

Presently, the Energy Department plans to submit its application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission this year and the review process will take at least three years. It's possible that the repository could go into service as early as 2017.[Timeline] But leading elected national officials have declared their intentions to stop the project.

So that's the story of Yucca Mountain. It all happened because of a bad presidential decision made decades ago. Fortunately, that decision has been reversed and we're going back to the first plan. Not only does it solve the waste problem, but it stretches the supply of uranium.[source]

Bafflegab: Energy Subsidies

I've tried to keep the articles objective, except where the discussion requires some insights into the thinking of political activists. Even there, we're on reasonably firm ground because nuclear opponents have been staunchly consistent and have always communicated their opinions freely.

But the subject of subsidies is altogether different, and that is the point of this article. I am only covering the US situation; I don't understand what goes on in other countries. I don't fully understand what's going on in the US and I don't think anyone else does, either. But the reason this comes up is that nuclear opponents wish to prove that nuclear energy costs more than its price shows; that if it weren't subsidized it would be hopelessly expensive.

The first murky issue is, what constitutes a subsidy? A subsidy is supposed to be a transfer of money (or possibly property) to an economic entity as a financial benefit. No energy sources get subsidies. But a tax credit is the same thing, so all energy sources get subsidies.

In the current energy plan, the first 6000 MW of new advanced-design nuclear plants can receive up to 1.8¢ per KWH in tax credits for up to 8 years. Up to six new plants could qualify for a subsidy to offset the cost of designing and permitting.[source] Clean renewable sources can receive up to 1.9¢ per KWH for up to 10 years.[source]

So those seem clear enough. But plants are also offered loan guarantees. That clearly benefits the utilities that build them. It also benefits investors. But it only costs taxpayers if the utilities default on the loans. So is that a subsidy? And if it is, how does one evaluate the probability of a default?

Nuclear opponents always cite federal underwriting of nuclear insurance as a subsidy. That could be considered a benefit, but it only costs the taxpayers if there's an accident exceeding 10 billion dollars in damages. In the history of the program, taxpayers have never paid out a cent. Is that a subsidy? And if it is, how does one evaluate the probability of an accident?

Nuclear opponents consider money spent in the past on research and development to be a subsidy. But the R & D money went to make nuclear plants safer, not cheaper. In fact, the research achievements raised the cost to utilities because they had to upgrade their plants when new technology became available. It could be that the superior technology prevented expensive accidents, but the main beneficiaries were members of the public. So, should R & D expenditures be considered a subsidy?

But these considerations don't slow nuclear opponents down for a second. They throw numbers around as if they meant something, and never try to justify them. Here are some examples:

"In the last 50 years, nuclear energy subsidies have totaled close to $145 billion; renewable energy subsidies total close to $5 billion."[prwatch.org]

"Between 1948 and 1998, the federal government spent $111.5 billion on energy research and development programs. Of this amount, 60 percent, or $66 billion, was dedicated to nuclear energy research, and 23 percent, or $26 billion, was directed to fossil fuel research."[PIRG]

"Management Information Services, Inc. (MISI), conducting a study of the cumulative effects of energy subsidies, found that by 1997 Federal subsidies for energy had amounted to $564 billion (1997 dollars) over the last five decades, roughly half of which went to the oil industry in the form of tax expenditures. MISI considered eight categories of Federal activity and quantified subsidies in six. In contrast to other findings, MISI found that subsidies to renewable sources ($90 billion) outpaced those to natural gas ($73 billion), coal ($68 billion), or nuclear energy ($61 billion)."
[eia.doe.gov]

"While the bill's environmental objectives are a strong advance, one provision remains misguided. Despite the provision of billions of dollars in subsidies to the nuclear industry in the 2005 Energy Policy Act and over $85 billion in historical subsidies, the bill introduced today contains additional nuclear subsidies that NRDC continues to oppose."[NRDC]

But let's take the wildest of the these guesses, prwatch.org's 145 billion dollars. Spread over the 17,111 billion KWH nuclear plants have generated, the cost of this purported subsidy is 0.8¢/KWH. In contrast, the subsidy for geothermal, wind, and solar, using prwatch.org's 5 billion dollars spread over 485 billion KWH, would be 1¢/KWH. Or, if we use MISI's estimates, the subsidies would be 0.4¢/KWH for nuclear and 18¢/KWH for renewables.

If we were to believe nuclear opponents, they all are stalwart Defenders of the Public Purse. They are deeply concerned that taxpayers will have to support uneconomic nuclear power plants. Renewable energy sources are different, though. Taxpayers should be glad to support them.

But these numbers show that this is all a red herring. Even if we accept nuclear opponents' exaggerated projections of nuclear subsidies, most renewables still won't compete. On economic grounds, the choice is between nuclear and coal.

So why is coal so cheap? It's because the federal government has a deliberate policy of allowing coal-burning utilities to emit so much pollution into the air that thousands of Americans die every month, all in the interest of holding down electricity rates. Just counting deaths among adults over 25, the estimate ranges from 33,000 to 121,000 per year in the US [table]. Nuclear energy can't compete with coal and neither can anything else, not even conservation.

Subsidies for nuclear energy are not necessary. If air-pollution controls were adequate then windpower, nuclear, and conservation would all be cost-competitive. But if we set a policy that coal-burning utilities are free to poison the air, and we want at the same time to make them stop operating, then we can't just leave it up to the market to decide.

Propaganda

When the Berlin wall fell, East Germans were astounded to learn that West Germans were better off than they were. Every time East Europeans liberated themselves they made the same discovery. Today, North Koreans are starving but they believe the South Koreans are worse off. The fact is, propaganda works.

In the same way, anti-nuclear political organizations have succeeded in convincing people that nuclear energy is a threat to the environment. As we have discussed in earlier articles, nuclear energy has the best safety record and the best environmental record of any practical energy source. It also is essential to minimizing global warming. But anti-nuclear activists have cloaked themselves as Defenders of the Environment and by constantly hammering people with the same slogans they've made people so secure in their misconceptions that most never have looked at the issue plainly.

Eric Hoffer knew the value of anti-nuclearism before it even existed when he wrote about true believers:

"When Hitler was asked whether he thought the Jew must be destroyed, he answered: 'No. . . . We should have then to invent him. It is essential to have a tangible enemy, not merely an abstract one.'"

So nuclear energy has been enormously valuable to political organizations. They can command immediate obedience from their followers by continually fabricating misinformation.

Consider the pollution from coal. Thousands of Americans die every month from the air pollution generated by coal-burning power plants. Please see the Abt report, "The Particulate-Related Health Benefits of Reducing Power Plant Emissions." [http://www.abtassociates.com/reports/particulate-related.pdf]. It's a long report, very technical; if you like, you can just look at the results table Worldwide, the deaths certainly run in the tens of thousands every month. Coal pollution is the main source of lead in the ocean; fish now are so poisoned with lead that people are advised to limit their consumption. When whales beach themselves and die the carcasses have to be treated as hazardous waste because of the heavy metals they contain.

But environmental groups have offered only token opposition to coal pollution. When confronted directly, they'll answer, Oh, we're against coal too! Then they'll explain that nuclear versus coal is a false choice, that windmills will solve the world's energy needs. Here's an experiment: if you find one of these people, ask him where the energy will come from when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining. I guarantee he'll change the subject.

This debate has always been one-sided. The anti-nuclear political organizations have set up a straw man to fight against: the Nuclear Industry. In their presentation, the Nuclear Industry is directing a massive, well-financed campaign and only the stalwart Defenders of the Environment are standing between Good and Evil. Actually, the big players in nuclear energy always have been energy companies, not nuclear companies. Westinghouse, General Electric, Exxon, etc. are glad to provide whatever kind of energy utilities and their ratepayers are willing to take. There never have been powerful groups able to take on Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth or any of the anti-nuclear political organizers. In the US, an industry group called the Nuclear Energy Institute is struggling to get good information over the shouting of the nuclear opponents; it's like your high-school basketball team going up against the Lakers.

But the dishonesty goes deeper. Nuclear opponents don't just spread misinformation and exaggerate the strength of their opponents. Besides that, they shed themselves of all responsibility. The easiest position to take is the one that never will be tested. Despite their unwillingness to admit it, they know as well as you and I that the world never will depend on part-time energy sources. So no matter what happens they'll be able to say that the world should have done it their way.

This self-indulgent preening shouldn't be allowed to affect public policy.