The Patriot Post® · In Brief: Nuclear Power Is the Answer
Democrats say they want to save the planet. What they really want is control over our lives. If they were telling the truth, they’d be far more amenable to nuclear power, which, as energy expert Emmet Penney asserts, is where we should be headed. He starts, though, with renewables.
America is about to spend $126.9 billion on renewable energy thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act. When this is added to the already existing production tax credits, the total is $240 billion. Greens everywhere are rejoicing. Paul Krugman took to the New York Times to wonder if the Democrats had just saved the world from climate change.
And why not? America has seen emissions drop to 4.8 trillion tons a year since 2000. That’s a one-trillion ton decrease. In fact, since America has embarked on building out wind and solar, the country has returned to 1949 levels of emissions.
But are renewables really to thank? After all, wind and solar only accounted for about 12 percent of our electricity supply in 2021. Meanwhile, natural gas has increased to nearly 40 percent of our electricity supply, and coal has dropped to below a quarter from about half in 2001. Natural gas is less carbon-intensive than coal by half. In other words, renewables look like a niche hobby compared to what natural gas has done for lowering American emissions.
This isn’t the ultimate solution, however, given that too many renewables combined with being overly dependent on natural gas or imports sometimes leaves folks without power. See that infamous Texas winter storm for an example.
If what was first celebrated as a victory for green policy has instead bred unreliability and high prices throughout America’s electricity sector, how do we fix the problem while keeping our emissions low? There’s only one answer: nuclear power.
Once the bête noire of energy, nuclear has been experiencing a renaissance of late. A variety of countries including Britain, South Korea, Japan, the Philippines and Finland are giving the technology a second look. And for good reason: it’s clean, it’s safe, it produces cheap kilowatts, it’s reliable and it refuels rarely. All of these are attractive qualities.
He points to Canada and France as examples to follow, but wonders rhetorically why America can’t “join in on the fun.”
Two things: the green turn and overregulation. Since the energy crisis of the 1970s, the environmental movement has gained substantial ideological ground in American energy policy. It has taken on utilities that overcommitted to nuclear, riled up customers, and delivered energy austerity through wind and solar. As climate change arguments gained traction, so has the greens’ energy vision. Many Americans now see renewables as the be-all and end-all of climate policy.
As the greens expanded their influence, America’s nuclear industry ground to a halt. First, through a bandwagon market that triggered expensive delays, then through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s adoption of the so-called “as low as reasonably achievable” paradigm for measuring nuclear safety. ALARA’s basic logic is that any exposure to radiation, no matter how small, is potentially lethal. But the ALARA framework has meant that it is almost impossible to build nuclear plants on time and on budget, as the Vogtle plant in Georgia has taught us. Since the NRC was formed in the mid-Seventies, not a single design approved under its aegis has ever been completed.
He concludes that such grim facts are actually good news because “the obstacles to building more nuclear in America aren’t technical — it works now and it works well — they’re political and regulatory.” That’s something we can overcome. And we should.
We need nuclear power because we need cheap and clean energy that works. The alternative is blowing billions of taxpayer dollars on nothing more than crossing our fingers.