Tuesday, August 9th, 2016
Stephan: The nuclear power industry is a artifact remnant of the Cold War, created so that the U.S. could maintain a cadre of nuclear qualified engineers and other professionals by giving them a civilian career pathway. Great care was taken to make sure that the real cost of nuclear was never allowed to be widely understood, and nuclear power, the come on, was carefully separated from the never solved issue of nuclear waste.
By never solved I mean that from WWII when it began to the present day no successful solution to nuclear waste has ever been devised. And when you calculate the nuclear waste costs into the real price of civilian nuclear energy it becomes so preposterously expensive that no rational person would support it. And even to make the fake numbers work requires hundreds of billions in government subsidies.
The truth is nuclear power was always a smoke and mirrors operation whose real function was not power but maintaining a nuclear arms industry.
Credit: Shutterstock
Half of existing nuclear power plants are no longer profitable. The New York Times and others have tried to blame renewable energy for this, but the admittedly astounding price drops of renewables aren’t the primary cause of the industry’s woes — cheap fracked gas is.
The point of blaming renewables, which currently receive significant government subsidies, is apparently to argue that existing nukes deserve some sort of additional subsidy to keep running — beyond the staggering $100+ billion in subsidies the nuclear industry has received over the decades. But a major reason solar and wind energy receive federal subsidies — which are being phased out over the next few years — is because they are emerging technologies whose prices are still rapidly coming down the learning curve, whereas nuclear is an incumbent technology with a negative learning curve.
The renewable red herring aside, existing nukes can make a reasonable […]
