Tag Archive for 'Nuclear'

Tom Blees: why US reactors cost more

Published on 7/22/2010 in Nuclear Power . 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Tom Blees, author of the must read Prescription for the Planet, wrote a concise rebutta to this silly David Noonan op-ed, explaining the causes for the excess costs for financial risk (in the US):

As for the costs of the two AP-1000 reactors proposed to be built in Georgia, those costs of $6.5 billion per reactor can be compared to the first-of-a-kind AP-1000s being built now in China. The FOAK construction of any such major project is normally considerably higher than follow-on units, and indeed the Chinese expect that this modular reactor cost will soon be lowered to nearly half of what these first reactors are costing them, yet even the first ones are estimated to cost $1.9 billion each.

So why should they cost more than three times that much in the USA? No, it’s not because of low Chinese labor costs. Japan was able to build US-designed ABWR reactors for about $1.4 billion per gigawatt, and they import virtually all the materials and pay their workers very well, higher than the USA in general.

The truth is that much of the cost built into nuclear power plants in the USA is the cost of uncertainty because of past experience. No company can be sure that a bunch of protestors with signs might not shut down their project when it’s half-built, as happened too often in the past. That and other weaknesses in the US nuclear power arena inflate prices to these ridiculous levels (compared to Japan, China, Taiwan and South Korea).

It’s not a weakness in the economics of nuclear power per se. Otherwise we would see it everywhere. Are Australians doomed to create the same sort of dysfunctional climate for nuclear power in their own country? If so, then maybe they should stick to coal. But don’t pretend it’s because nuclear power plants can’t be built economically.

We can hope that Australia will not make the same mistakes.

Small Reactors Generate Big Hopes

Published on 7/18/2010 in Nuclear Power . 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Good news in the WSJ: there is serious electric utility backing for the B&W mPower reactor:

A new type of nuclear reactor—smaller than a rail car and one tenth the cost of a big plant—is emerging as a contender to reshape the nation’s resurgent nuclear power industry.

Three big utilities, Tennessee Valley Authority, First Energy Corp. and Oglethorpe Power Corp., on Wednesday signed an agreement with McDermott International Inc.’s Babcock & Wilcox subsidiary, committing to get the new reactor approved for commercial use in the U.S.

Three big utilities, Tennessee Valley Authority, First Energy Corp. and Oglethorpe Power Corp., on Wednesday signed an agreement with McDermott International Inc.’s Babcock & Wilcox subsidiary, committing to get the new reactor approved for commercial use in the U.S.

(…) For utilities, a small reactor has several advantages, starting with cost. Small reactors are expected to cost about $5,000 per kilowatt of capacity, or $750 million or so for one of Babcock & Wilcox’s units. Large reactors cost $5 billion to $10 billion for reactors that would range from 1,100 to 1,700 megawatts of generating capacity.

While large reactors are built on site, a process that can take five years, the mPower reactors would be manufactured in Babcock & Wilcox’s factories in Indiana, Ohio or Virginia and transported by rail or barge. That could cut construction times in half, experts believe.

Because they could be water-cooled or air-cooled, mPower reactors wouldn’t have to be located near large sources of water, another problem for big reactors that require millions of gallons of water each day. That could open up parts of the arid West for nuclear development.

The first units likely would be built adjacent to existing nuclear plants, many of which were originally permitted to have two to four units but usually have only one or two.

Down the road, utilities could replace existing coal-fired power plants with small reactors in order to take advantage of sites already served by transmission lines and, in some cases, needed for grid support. Like any other power plants, these small reactors could be easily hooked up to the power grid.

One of the biggest attractions, however, is that utilities could start with a few reactors and add more as needed. By contrast, with big reactors, utilities have what is called “single-shaft risk,” where billions of dollars are tied up in a single plant.

Another advantage: mPower reactors will store all of their waste on each site for the estimated 60-year life of each reactor.

New topic: the NuScale reactor gets a mention near the end

(…) Today, Energy Northwest is talking to NuScale Power Inc. in Corvallis, Ore., about a reactor design which measures 15 feet by 60 feet. Each unit would be capable of turning out 45 megawatts of electricity.

Jack Baker, Energy Northwest’s head of business development, says he was initially skeptical about small reactors because of the “lack of economies of scale.” But he says he now thinks small reactors “could have a cost advantage” because their simpler design means faster construction and “you don’t need as much concrete, steel, pumps and valves.”

“They have made a convert of me,” he says.

Government’s role in shutting down the US nuclear industry

Published on 7/17/2010 in Nuclear Costs and Nuclear Power . 1 Comment Tags: , , .

A November 15, 2007 Heritage backgrounder “Competitive Nuclear Energy Investment: Avoiding Past Policy Mistakes” provides a brief history of anti-nuclear activists and regulatory turbulence, counseling that, this time around, we must act to avoid those enormous costs.

Amory Lovins loves to say “there are no private investors interested in nuclear power”. That is manifestly untrue. But the fact that utilities and venture capitalists are investing in nuclear today is a miracle considering the massacre experienced by investors in the period 1970 through 1994 (when Clinton killed the Integral Fast Reactor). Lovins conveniently forgets to mention the true history:

(…) Investors hesitate to embrace nuclear power fully, despite significant regulatory relief and economic incentives.

This reluctance is not due to any inherent flaw in the economics of nuclear power or some unavoidable risk. Instead, investors are reacting to the historic role that federal, state, and local governments have played both in encouraging growth in the industry and in bringing on its demise. Investors doubt that federal, state, and local governments will allow nuclear energy to flourish in the long term. They have already lost billions of dollars because of bad public policy.

The United States once led the world in commercial nuclear technology. Indeed, the world’s leading nuclear companies continue to rely on American technologies. However, in the 1970s and 1980s, federal, state, and local governments nearly regulated the U.S. commercial nuclear industry out of existence. U.S. companies responded by reallocating their assets, consolidating or selling their commercial nuclear capabilities to foreign companies in pro-nuclear countries.

This paper reviews how overregulation largely destroyed the nuclear industry and why it remains an obstacle to investment in the industry. This dynamic must be understood and mitigated before the true economics of nuclear power can be harnessed for the benefit of the American people.

(…) Investors are right to be wary. Anti-nuclear activists have already exploited the authority of public institutions to strangle the industry. Now these same public institutions must be trusted to craft good public policy that reestablishes the confidence necessary to invite investment back into America’s nuclear industry. To be successful, the new policies must create an industry that does not depend on the government. They must mitigate the risks of overregulation but allow for adequate over sight while preventing activists from hijacking the regulatory process.

(…) Activists Gone Wild

Anti-nuclear groups used both legal intervention and civil disobedience to impede construction of new nuclear power plants and hamper the operations of existing units. They legally challenged 73 percent of the nuclear license applications filed between 1970 and 1972 and formed a group called Consolidated National Interveners for the specific purpose of disrupting hearings of the Atomic Energy Commission.

Much of the anti-nuclear litigation of the 1970s was encouraged by factions within the government.[4] Today, activist organizations determined to force the closure of nuclear power plants, such as Mothers for Peace, continue to use the legal process to harass the nuclear energy industry.

Activists went well beyond simply challenging nuclear power in the courts. On numerous occasions, demonstrators occupied construction sites, causing delays. For instance, in May 1977, the Clamshell Alliance led a protest that resulted in the arrest of more than 1,400 people for trespassing at the Seabrook plant site in New Hampshire.[5] In California, the Abalone Alliance adopted similar tactics and frequently blocked the gates of the Diablo Canyon power plant.[6]

A watershed victory for the anti-nuclear movement occurred in 1971 when a federal appeals court ruled that the construction and operating permits for a nuclear power plant violated the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. As a result, util ities were required to hold public hearings before obtaining a permit to start a project.[7] This decision created a major opening in the process that anti-nuclear activists could exploit.

Changing the Economics of Nuclear Power

(…) In addition, the role of the judiciary cannot be overemphasized. Congress’s loss of enthusiasm for nuclear energy led to more aggressive regulation, and because jurisdiction over nuclear issues was divided among multiple committees, there was no unified congressional direction. The result was an expansion of costly and often unnecessary rules.

In June 2006, the NRC listed over 80 sources of regulation,[8] including over 1,300 pages of laws, treaties, statutes, authorizations, executive orders, and other documents.(…) Because the interpretation of NRC regulations was left to the discretion of individual NRC technical reviewers, each license application would often result in its own unique requirements.[9]

(…) This inconsistency increased costs, further sour ing Congress on nuclear power and leading to an endless spiral of legislation, regulation, and still more added costs. Between 1975 and 1983, 430 suits were brought against the NRC, leading to 2,349 proposed rules and regulations–each of which required an industry response.[10] The addi tional and unexpected controls created industry wide uncertainty and raised questions about the long-term economics of nuclear power. They also drove up capital costs.[11]

This was all done by the NRC without adequate information. The NRC recognized as early as 1974 that it was issuing regulations without sufficient risk assessment training or cost considerations. It did not even have a program to train employees in how to conduct a review using NRC guidance.[12] Yet the commission continued to issue regulation after regulation.

(…) The shifting regulatory environment gave rise to additional reviews from numerous public institutions.(…) between 1956 and 1979, the average construction permit review time increased fourfold. The average time required to bring a plant on line from the order date increased from three years to 13 years during a similar time period.[15]

(…) As more inspections and inspectors were required, delays often resulted from inadequate regulatory manpower. Workers had to spend inordinate amounts of time waiting for inspections rather than building the project. The oft-changing construction specifications also led to mistakes, which created further delays.Even after construction was complete, delays often continued. Delaying plant completion could cost up to $1 million per day.[17] Stories of costly and unnecessary delays litter the history of U.S. nuclear power. Plants such as the Shoreham nuclear plant on Long Island were completely built but never used because extremists succeeded in scaring the public and political leaders.

Overregulation Leads to a Declining Industry

Overall, regulation increased the cost of constructing a nuclear power plant fourfold. [19] Such cost escalation would have been justified if it had been rooted in scientific and technical analysis. Regrettably, it was largely a function of anti-nuclear activism, agenda-driven politicians, activist regulators, and unsubstantiated public fear. A total of $70 billion was added to the cost of nuclear reactors constructed by 1988, and this cost was passed on to the ratepayers. After 1981, the cost of constructing a nuclear power plan rose from two to six times, [20] which means that either consumers paid significantly more or utilities incurred losses if they did not charge market prices. Neither circumstance was sustainable.

(…) In total, $30 billion was spent on nuclear plants that were never completed,[26] which is more than the value of most of the companies that are considering new plant orders.

Steven Chu: America’s New Nuclear Option — Small modular reactors

Published on 7/16/2010 in Nuclear Power . 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Small modular reactors will expand the ways we use atomic power.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu in the March 23, 2010 Wall Street Journal making a reasonably good argument for the importance of mass-manufactured small modular reactors:

(…) one of the most promising areas is small modular reactors (SMRs). If we can develop this technology in the U.S. and build these reactors with American workers, we will have a key competitive edge.

Small modular reactors would be less than one-third the size of current plants. They have compact designs and could be made in factories and transported to sites by truck or rail. SMRs would be ready to “plug and play” upon arrival.

If commercially successful, SMRs would significantly expand the options for nuclear power and its applications. Their small size makes them suitable to small electric grids so they are a good option for locations that cannot accommodate large-scale plants. The modular construction process would make them more affordable by reducing capital costs and construction times.

Their size would also increase flexibility for utilities since they could add units as demand changes, or use them for on-site replacement of aging fossil fuel plants. Some of the designs for SMRs use little or no water for cooling, which would reduce their environmental impact. Finally, some advanced concepts could potentially burn used fuel or nuclear waste, eliminating the plutonium that critics say could be used for nuclear weapons.

In his 2011 budget request, President Obama requested $39 million for a new program specifically for small modular reactors. Although the Department of Energy has supported advanced reactor technologies for years, this is the first time funding has been requested to help get SMR designs licensed for widespread commercial use.

(…)

The image at left is the Cray XT Jaguar at ORNL (Oak Ridge National Laboratory). The Jaguar is just a wee bit more powerful than the supercomputers I worked on in the 1960s: the Jaguar is rated at 2.3 petaflops/s theoretical peak performance and 1.75 petaflops on the Linpac benchmark (that’s as of the latest 2009 upgrade to 6-core AMD Opteron processors — the system is regularly updated to keep up with Moore’s Law).

Lastly, the Nuclear Energy Modeling and Simulation Hub is likely to be a Very Big Deal – by leveraging Moore’s Law for reactor design and development. Surely the NRC regulators will exploit the hub to dramatically improve the efficiency of licensing.

Just as advanced computer modeling has revolutionized aircraft design—predicting how any slight adjustment to a wing design will affect the overall performance of the airplane, for example—we are working to apply modeling and simulation technologies to accelerate nuclear R&D. Scientists and engineers will be able to stand in the center of a virtual reactor, observing coolant flow, nuclear fuel performance, and even the reactor’s response to changes in operating conditions. To achieve this potential, we are bringing together some of our nation’s brightest minds to work under one roof in a new research center called the Nuclear Energy Modeling and Simulation Hub.

Similar computational modeling capabilities have enabled the design of Terrapower’s Traveling Wave Reactor.

IAEA study on life cycle GHG emissions for electricity generation chains

Published on 7/16/2010 in Energy Policy and Nuclear Power . 0 Comments Tags: , , .

LCA GHG emissions.jpg

Stewart Brand linked this IAEA 2000 study (PDF) in his new book Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. Extensive online footnotes for the book are available (free).

The IAEA study is one of the more credible analyses comparing coal, nuclear, solar and wind.

Click the thumbnail at left for the summary comparision figure, which shows nuclear is by far the lowest source of emissions per kWh of electricity produced. Hydropower can be similar, but viable sites have pretty much all been exploited.

The article summarizes the sources of GHG for each electrical option, and the key factors that influence the life cycle valuation — such as capacity factor, which is very low for solar and wind power.

BIG CAVEAT: as the article explains, the GHG/carbon impact of the backup power required for intermittent power sources like solar/wind are NOT included in these FENCH calculations (Full Energy Chain). So the real-world solar/wind carbon footprints are closer to a blend of 50% natural gas + 50% solar/wind. Because in practice each unit of intermittent power must be backed up by an equal amount of firming power, for which utilities usually pick natural gas (hydro if it is available, but that is a very limited geography).

Yucca Mountain

Published on 7/16/2010 in Nuclear Power . 0 Comments Tags: , , .

If you are keen to know everything about Yucca Mountain, read BLDG BLOG: One Million Years Of Isolation: An Interview With Abraham Van Luik. Seekerblog isn’t much interested in Yucca Mountain because we now know that we do not want to “bury” the incredibly valuable asset of unburned nuclear fuel.

I found the link to the BLDG BLOG article on Stewart Brand’s Chapter 4 webpage. In stark contrast to the Yucca Mountain fiasco Canada has developed a sensible strategy for managing unburned nuclear fuel — again from Brand’s page:

A year after the Yucca trip, Global Business Network was invited to run a scenario workshop for Canada’s Nuclear Waste Management Organization, which was conducting a series of meetings to explore what Canada should do with the waste from its twenty-two CANDU nuclear reactors.…

After eighty meetings across Canada, the nation’s nuclear waste policy emerged. It is based, says a report from the organization, on the principle of “Respect for Future Generations: we should not prejudge the needs and capabilities of the future. Rather than acting in a paternalistic way, we should leave the choice of what to do with the used fuel for them to determine.” Accordingly, Canada has an “adaptive phased management” plan, where the spent fuel remains in wet and dry storage at the reactor sites while a “near term” (1 to 175 years) centralized shallow underground facility is built, designed for easy retrieval; that will be followed by a deep geological repository for permanent storage. Future Canadians have options at every step. No mention is made of 10,000 years. The report does note that “during the 175-year period, the overall radioactivity of used fuel drops to one-billionth of the level when it was removed from the reactors.…”

Eurobarometer survey: Europeans and Nuclear Safety

Published on 7/15/2010 in Nuclear Power . 0 Comments Tags: , , .

There is a lot of information in this March 2010 study report [PDF]. I will note just two conclusions:

[1] the average European knows almost nothing about energy policy, and even less about nuclear power.

[2] Europeans who are more familiar with nuclear power are much more positive than the inverse population. E.g.:

Overall, public opinion in countries that have NPPs in operation tends to be more positive than in countries where domestic energy sources do not include nuclear power. Also, non-response rates are lower in the former group than in the latter. Sweden (73%) and Finland (67%), both countries where a substantial proportion of electricity is produced by nuclear power, have the highest numbers of citizens who believe in the positive role that nuclear energy plays in the fight against global warming.

I don’t have my source at hand on this, but I’m confident that polls of families living near French nuclear plants show something like 80% in favor of more nuclear power in their neighborhood.
An anomaly in the poll data is that France rates poorly in the above chart = 43% vs. 40% understand that “nuclear energy helps to limit climate change”.

Why did nuclear plant construction costs skyrocket?

Published on 7/15/2010 in Nuclear Costs and Nuclear Power . 0 Comments Tags: , , .

The short answer is Greenpeace and their cronies such as FOE:

A major source of cost escalation in some plants was delays caused by opposition from well-organized “intervenor” groups that took advantage of hearings and legal strategies to delay construction. The Shoreham plant on Long Island was delayed for 3 years by intervenors who turned the hearings for a construction permit into a circus. The intervenors included a total imposter claiming to be an expert with a Ph.D. and an M.D. There were endless days of reading aloud from newspaper and magazine articles, interminable “cross examination” with no relevance to the issuance of a construction permit, and an imaginative variety of other devices to delay the proceedings and attract media attention.

That quote is from Chapter 9 COSTS OF NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS — WHAT WENT WRONG? of the online version of the book The Nuclear Energy Option by physicist Bernard L. Cohen, University of Pittsburgh. The book was published by Plenum Press, 1990, so it is slightly dated with respect to recent developments in modular mass-manufactured reactors (SMR), etc. Other than that it is a terrific resource — a concise handbook that covers all the high priority questions about nuclear power [risk/safety, radiation, costs, nuclear "waste", proliferation].

Prof. Cohen was there, on the scene so to speak, during the period of the 1970’s, 1980’s when Regulatory Turbulence, Regulatory Ratcheting and Intervenors quadrupled the cost of a nuclear power plant.

Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 9 covering Regulatory Ratcheting and Regulatory Turbulence:

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and its predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission Office of Regulation, as parts of the United States Government, must be responsive to public concern. Starting in the early 1970s, the public grew concerned about the safety of nuclear power plants: the NRC therefore responded in the only way it could, by tightening regulations and requirements for safety equipment.

Make no mistake about it, you can always improve safety by spending more money. Even with our personal automobiles, there is no end to what we can spend for safety — larger and heavier cars, blowout-proof tires, air bags, passive safety restraints, rear window wipers and defrosters, fog lights, more shock-absorbent bumpers, antilock brakes, and so on. In our homes we can spend large sums on fireproofing, sprinkler systems, and smoke alarms, to cite only the fire protection aspect of household safety. Nuclear power plants are much more complex than homes or automobiles, leaving innumerable options for spending money to improve safety. In response to escalating public concern, the NRC began implementing some of these options in the early 1970s, and quickened the pace after the Three Mile Island accident.

This process came to be known as “ratcheting.” Like a ratchet wrench which is moved back and forth but always tightens and never loosens a bolt, the regulatory requirements were constantly tightened, requiring additional equipment and construction labor and materials. According to one study,4 between the early and late 1970s, regulatory requirements increased the quantity of steel needed in a power plant of equivalent electrical output by 41%, the amount of concrete by 27%, the lineal footage of piping by 50%, and the length of electrical cable by 36%. The NRC did not withdraw requirements made in the early days on the basis of minimal experience when later experience demonstrated that they were unnecessarily stringent. Regulations were only tightened, never loosened. The ratcheting policy was consistently followed.

In its regulatory ratcheting activities, the NRC paid some attention to cost effectiveness, attempting to balance safety benefits against cost increases. However, NRC personnel privately concede that their cost estimates were very crude, and more often than not unrealistically low. Estimating costs of tasks never before undertaken is, at best, a difficult and inexact art.

(…)

Clearly, the regulatory ratcheting was driven not by new scientific or technological information, but by public concern and the political pressure it generated. Changing regulations as new information becomes available is a normal process, but it would normally work both ways. The ratcheting effect, only making changes in one direction, was an abnormal aspect of regulatory practice unjustified from a scientific point of view. It was a strictly political phenomenon that quadrupled the cost of nuclear power plants, and thereby caused no new plants to be ordered and dozens of partially constructed plants to be abandoned.

Regulatory Turbulence

We now return to the question of wildly escalating labor costs for construction of nuclear plants. They were not all directly the result of regulatory ratcheting, as may be seen from the fact that they did not occur in the “best experience” projects. Regulatory ratcheting applied to new plants about to be designed is one thing, but this ratcheting applied to plants under construction caused much more serious problems. As new regulations were issued, designs had to be modified to incorporate them. We refer to effects of these regulatory changes made during the course of construction as “regulatory turbulence,” and the reason for that name will soon become evident.

As anyone who has tried to make major alterations in the design of his house while it was under construction can testify, making these changes is a very time-consuming and expensive practice, much more expensive than if they had been incorporated in the original design. In nuclear power plant construction, there were situations where the walls of a building were already in place when new regulations appeared requiring substantial amounts of new equipment to be included inside them. In some cases this proved to be nearly impossible, and in most cases it required a great deal of extra expense for engineering and repositioning of equipment, piping, and cables that had already been installed. In some cases it even required chipping out concrete that had already been poured, which is an extremely expensive proposition.

Constructors, in attempting to avoid such situations, often included features that were not required in an effort to anticipate rule changes that never materialized. This also added to the cost. There has always been a time-honored tradition in the construction industry of on-the-spot innovation to solve unanticipated problems; the object is to get things done. The supercharged regulatory environment squelched this completely, seriously hurting the morale of construction crews. For example, in the course of many design changes, miscalculations might cause two pipes to interfere with one another, or a pipe might interfere with a valve. Normally a construction supervisor would move the pipe or valve a few inches, but that became a serious rule violation. He now had to check with the engineering group at the home office, and they must feed the change into their computer programs for analyzing vibrations and resistance to earthquakes. It might take many hours for approval, and in the meanwhile, pipefitters and welders had to stand around with nothing to do.

Requiring elaborate inspections and quality control checks on every operation frequently held up progress. If an inspector needed extra time on one job, he was delayed in getting to another. Again, craft labor was forced to stand around waiting. In such situations, it sometimes pays to hire extra inspectors, who then have nothing to do most of the time. I cannot judge whether all of these new safety procedures were justifiable as safety improvements, but there was a widespread feeling among those involved in implementing them that they were not. Cynicism became rampant and morale sagged

Prof. Cohen goes on to document the history of how Greenpeace and friends managed to destroy the Shoreham, Long Island plant — which was eventually sold to NY state for $1.

But the worst delay came after the Shoreham plant was completed. The NRC requires emergency planning exercises for evacuation of the nearby population in the event of certain types of accidents. The utility provides a system of warning horns and generally plans the logistics, but it is necessary to obtain cooperation from the local police and other civil authorities. Officials in Suffolk County, where Shoreham is located, refused to cooperate in these exercises, making it impossible to fulfill the NRC requirement. After years of delay, the NRC changed its position and ruled that in the event of an actual accident, the police and civil authorities would surely cooperate. It therefore finally issued an operating license. By this time the situation had become a political football, with the governor of New York deeply involved. He apparently decided that it was politically expedient to give in to the opponents of the plant. The state of New York therefore offered to “buy” the plant from the utility for $1 and dismantle it, with the utility receiving enough money from various tax savings to compensate for its construction expenditures. This means that the bill would effectively be footed by U.S. taxpayers. As of this writing, there are moves in Congress to prevent this. The ironic part of the story is that Long Island very badly needs the electricity the Shoreham plant can produce.

Global Warming and Nuclear Energy

Published on 7/15/2010 in Nuclear Power . 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Recently I discovered an interesting and very useful resource. Following are some of the facets of the material offered by proprietor “Red Craig”.

Global Warming: A Guide for the Perplexed

Energy and Climate Change: Articles of Special Interest (as I write, there are three up-to-date July 2010 references)

Global Warming and Nuclear Energy (blog format), Index of posts

“Red Craig” has obviously done his homework on energy policy, and is well-informed on renewables and nuclear energy. You will find that he has put a lot of energy and time into these essays — but does not seem to be receiving the credit that he deserves (in terms of Google juice).

You might as well start with the excellent “Scorecard on Environmental Groups“. On the same topic, I recommend his short essay “Propoganda“, which begins with:

When the Berlin wall fell, East Germans were astounded to learn that West Germans were better off than they were. Every time East Europeans liberated themselves they made the same discovery. Today, North Koreans are starving but they believe the South Koreans are worse off. The fact is, propaganda works.

In the same way, anti-nuclear political organizations have succeeded in convincing people that nuclear energy is a threat to the environment. As we have discussed in earlier articles, nuclear energy has the best safety record and the best environmental record of any practical energy source. It also is essential to minimizing global warming. But anti-nuclear activists have cloaked themselves as Defenders of the Environment and by constantly hammering people with the same slogans they’ve made people so secure in their misconceptions that most never have looked at the issue plainly.

Eric Hoffer knew the value of anti-nuclearism before it even existed when he wrote about true believers:

“When Hitler was asked whether he thought the Jew must be destroyed, he answered: ‘No. . . . We should have then to invent him. It is essential to have a tangible enemy, not merely an abstract one.’”

So nuclear energy has been enormously valuable to political organizations. They can command immediate obedience from their followers by continually fabricating misinformation.

Bernard Cohen

Published on 7/14/2010 in Nuclear Power . 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Physicist Bernard Cohen is a go-to source on nuclear energy. His University of Pittsburgh page includes links to a number of papers, particularly those disproving the LNT Linear No Threshold hypothesis.

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