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Should Congress Subsidize
the Construction of Nuclear Power Plants
and Revive the Industry?

NO

By John Passacantando

You would have thought the prospect of suicidal terrorists attempting to blow up a nuclear power plant would have made the nuclear industry and its proponents in government think twice before offering up a second generation of nuclear reactors at taxpayer expense. But far be it from those in the nuclear welfare state to look beyond petty self-interest. Despite abysmal economics, an atrocious safety record, and the very real concern of nuclear terrorism, the U.S. Senate is prepared to dole out billions of taxpayer dollars to the nuclear industry in order to construct new nuclear reactors. Never mind that these new nuclear reactors are unsafe, uneconomical, and unnecessary.

Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., never met a nuclear pork project he didn't like, and he has pushed to have the U.S. taxpayer foot the bill for the nuclear reactors the nuclear industry would never build on its own. Since the nuclear industry is unwilling to accept the economic risk, the Senate and President Bush want the American taxpayer to pick up the tab to make their world more dangerous.

Perhaps the Senate is betting these new reactors will fare better than the 103 reactors that already exist. But consider the economic and safety meltdown experienced by the nuclear industry over the last 30 years. The Department of Energy compared nuclear construction cost estimates to the actual final costs for 75 of these reactors. The original cost estimate was $45 billion. The actual cost was $145 billion!

Forbes magazine recognized that this "failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster of monumental scale." According to Forbes, "only the blind, or the biased, can now think the money has been well spent." Despite the $100 billion cost overrun, Sen. Domenici wants again to give the nuclear industry billions in taxpayer dollars and guaranteed loans.

However, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the prospects for a second generation of nuclear reactors are equally abysmal. The CBO says the Department of Energy could provide loan guarantees for up to 50 percent of the construction costs for seven new nuclear power plants, but it also considers the risk of default on these loans very high -- well above 50 percent. Little wonder that the three nuclear corporations attempting to site new nuclear reactors - Dominion Resources, Entergy, and Exelon - have stated that the numbers for new nuclear construction just don't add up.

Not only are new reactors an economic risk, they also threaten our public health and safety. After the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, the nuclear industry claimed their reactors posed no threat because they had containment domes to protect the reactor and prevent the release of radiation. Regardless of the veracity of these claims, these new nuclear reactors would lack the very containment domes the industry lauds. The government's nuclear advisers have already determined that the lack of containment on these new designs constitutes "a major safety tradeoff." But economics has trumped safety in the nuclear industry, and containment domes drive up the cost of nuclear reactors.

Nuclear power is dangerous enough when trained professionals are attempting to operate reactors without incident, accident, or atomic catastrophe. When you add to this danger the threat of nuclear terrorism, the continued support of nuclear power in the U.S. Senate becomes unconscionable.

Rather than attempt to construct new, unsafe, and uneconomical reactors on the back of the American taxpayer, the federal government should phase out the remaining nuclear reactors and replace them with clean, renewable sources of electricity that don’t threaten our families, homes, and communities. After all, terrorists aren't targeting windmills and solar panels.

John Passacantando is executive director of the environmental group Greenpeace USA (www.greenpeaceusa.org).

YES

By Gerald Marsh and George Stanford

Nuclear power is economical. All it needs is a level playing field. But the field is not level. For one thing, competing power sources are heavily subsidized by society. Unlike nuclear plants, they don't bear the full cost of disposing of their waste. Much of it is just dumped into the atmosphere, creating pollution that degrades the environment and causes illnesses and early deaths. If nuclear plants were given tax credits for the environmental damage they don't cause -- or if the others were charged for the harm they do cause -- nuclear would win the economic shakeout hands down. If Congress would assure the nuclear industry that regulations governing the industry would remain reasonably stable, the plants would be built.

Do we need nuclear power at all? You bet. Without it, we can't protect the environment and at the same time supply adequate electricity to the 10 billion people who soon will be populating the earth. Some myths get in the way. There's the notion that the U.S. or the European Union could, if they chose, be independent of oil imports. There's the misconception that nuclear power is the most dangerous energy source, whereas it's the safest. And there's the delusion that alternative energy sources, such as solar, wind, and biomass, can replace fossil fuels and nuclear power while maintaining modern living standards. Widespread faith in these myths has inhibited the development of a realistic energy policy.

What about burning more oil or natural gas to produce electricity? Forget it. Oil and natural gas are too valuable for transportation, heating, and plastics to fritter them away generating bulk electric
power in developed nations. Before the switch to natural gas for heating, cities were not healthful places to live. Already there is trouble; the growing use of natural gas for making electricity has led
to tight supplies and an upward spiral in the cost of heating our homes.

Environmentalists need to realize that for the bulk of our electricity, the choice is nuclear power or coal, and unrestrained coal burning would be an environmental disaster. Air pollution alone from fossil electric plants causes tens of thousands of deaths each year. This is due to the toxicity of the emissions combined with the scale of the operation: a single thousand-megawatt electric plant burns about three million tons of coal a year. Compare that with a nuclear plant's two-and-a-half tons of uranium, with all the waste contained.

The waste from nuclear plants must be isolated for a fairly long time (but not as long as many think -- only a few hundred years if the used fuel is properly recycled). It can be handled with essentially no impact on the general public or the environment. Not so the millions of tons of waste each year from a coal-powered plant.

What about radiation from nuclear plants? Not a problem. It has been known for a long time that coal plants put more radioactivity into the atmosphere (from trace impurities in the coal) than nuclear plants do, even when more than 95 percent of the fly ash is precipitated, and vastly more when it is not.

Other energy sources have their special applications, but in the future, nuclear power will be the main workhorse. There's just no other way for humanity to get enough of the clean and safe power it will need over the next few thousand years.

Gerald Marsh is a physicist on the advisory board of the National Center for Public Policy Research (www.nationalcenter.org). George Stanford is a nuclear reactor physicist, now retired from Argonne National Laboratory after a career of experimental work pertaining to power-reactor safety.

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