Oct 07 2008
Nuclear Debate Stuck in the 80s
John Tierney of the New York Times goes retro with a look back at the energy debate of the 70s compared to the McCain-Obama energy platforms today. Some interesting analysis on nuclear energy…
Once utilities stopped building reactors, the share of electricity from nuclear power was projected to decline steadily as the oldest reactors were retired. But then several new “merchant energy” companies began assembling fleets of reactors sold off by local utilities. The new owners standardized operations, retrained workers and brought in human-factor engineers to redesign the famously indecipherable control panels. Under the old owners, the reactors were balky white elephants operating only 60 percent of the time. By improving maintenance and preventing mistakes, the new owners kept them running 90 percent of the time and won permission to upgrade their capacities. So even as the nuclear industry was shrinking in the last two decades as the oldest reactors shut down, the remaining ones were profitably generating an increasing share of the country’s electricity..
Plus “No Terrestrial Energy” is a lot harder to fit on a protest sign than “No Nukes.”
Nuclear has long been by far one of our cleanest and most affordable options. I think that support for it is growing, but if you and Tierney think that the debate is still back in the 80s, maybe that has something to do that nuclear power has not been a priority to Republicans (certainly in the past decade). Perhaps you ought to consider why it wasn’t. (Hint, it may have something to do with a lack of political will, a political position that climate change is no risk, a lack of concern about polition by coal-fired plants (that spew only on Democrat states), and a favoritism towards fossil fuels.)