Nuclear Power One of Several Green Weapons Against Global Warming

A recent story in Physics Today summarized the case for nuclear power as a strategy for combating carbon emissions and global warming. Although the MIT study ¹ on which the story was based was careful to point out that nuclear power is one of several such strategies (including energy efficiency, carbon sequestration, and renewable energy resources), all of which deserve increased governmental support, this point was lost in the magazine’s review, which appeared to present an either-or choice of fossil fuels or nuclear power.

The MIT study itself consciously sidesteps the most important question: Which strategies deserve the most governmental support based on their promise to minimize the total societal costs of energy? To answer that question, we urgently need more comparative studies of all greenhouse-gas reduction strategies that consider both the raw cost of power generation and so-called external costs (emissions, nuclear waste disposal, proliferation risks, and so forth). External costs are notoriously difficult to quantify, but comparative studies do exist. ² The MIT study considers the effect of a “carbon tax” to quantify the external costs of CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels and proposes a fee for nuclear waste disposal. But it does not attempt to quantify the full external costs of these strategies or compare such costs with those of other strategies.

The raw generation cost of leading renewable sources such as wind and solar energy dropped 80% from 1980 to 2002 and will continue to fall as economies of scale and new technologies take hold. ³ The cost of wind power at the most favorable sites ($0.05 per kilowatt hour) already makes it nearly competitive with fossil fuel sources on a raw-cost basis. Given that the external costs of wind power are probably much lower than those of fossil fuels and nuclear power, wind power should be getting much more support than it currently receives. Denmark generates 15% of its electricity from wind, compared with 0.3% for the US. What are we waiting for?