nuclear nuts

[miriam_e]

Background Briefing today was about how the nuclear power industry is key to the spread of nuclear weapons, and how the two are inextricably tied together. Increase one and you increase the other.

A while ago I posted a short rant about how dangerously stupid nuclear power is. I made the usual points about links to bombs, the difficulty and high cost of safe storage for millions of years, and the awful danger posed by nuclear accidents. I also made a number of other points, like the fact that Australia, being one of the driest places in the world should not be contemplating building power stations that are even more wasteful of water than coal-fired power plants -- both are glorified steam engines, and boil vast amounts of water away to run their turbines. But the point that seemed to catch in the throats of some was that nuclear power is driven by governments, not private capital. I said at the time that I'd back this up with more info, but never got around to it, having been distracted by many other things in the meantime.

Well, here is data on why private capital is not investing in nuclear power, and how it is paid for by tax dollars instead. The article was published recently by physicist and energy consultant Amory Lovins and a couple of his colleagues at the Rocky Mountain Institute. The original is one of several articles in a pdf document which is here, but if you hate pdf as much as I do I have painstakingly extracted the article and reformatted it into a web page, which is far easier to read.

http://miriam-english.org/alia/ForgetNuclear.html

An extremely condensed version was published in Newsweek too.

Comments

Black Fox

[revbobbob.livejournal.com]

Public Service of Oklahoma (called pisso by everyone who was stuck with them as their power company) is actually owned by a Texas company. They decided to build Black Fox nuclear plant. Then Three Mile Island hit the headlines. So "customers" (read "victims") in Oklahoma sent our money to Texas to build it halfway. Then we sent even more of our money to Texas to decommission it and tear it down.

Yeah, good old free markets. The American way. The American way to get screwed over.

Re: Black Fox

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

To be fair though, that is less a free market problem than a case of an irresponsible state funding it. If the state kept its nose out of nuclear power there would be few, if any, nuclear reactors ever built. They are simply too financially risky for private investors, and lower-cost alternatives begin to return a profit far more quickly.

Big, powerful companies, big, powerful government, and big, powerful individuals almost invariably bring corruption. We need free, open markets, but ones that are biased away from centralised accretions of power. We need markets which recognise that value lies in more than just money (happiness, knowledge, freedom, health, diversity, ecology, etc). Money sometimes aligns with some of these, but all too often specifically works against many of them.

Re: Black Fox

[revbobbob.livejournal.com]

Pisso is 100% private. you can buy its shares on the NYSE. I was wrong about Black Fox. We didn't end up paying for them to build the plant and then tear it down. We had to pay for their endless redesigns and abandonment. Not just the people who bought power from PSO, but the State spent taxpayer money on it too.

But it's good news in a way: citizen protests stopped it.

I remember driving past *some* power plant construction project near Inola in the early 1980s. Sorry for my error.

Re: Black Fox

[revbobbob.livejournal.com]

The leader of the protest was Carrie Barefoot Dickerson:

http://www.ecn.cz/temelin/CARRIE.HTM