Nuclear promises safe, cheap energy, but the truth is less enticing

Energy independence is the new creationism; nuclear power its deity. As the head glow for nuclear’s new dawn, you can’t do better than Aris Candris. He’s president and CEO of Westinghouse Electric, the company aiming to build 14 of 25 new nuclear reactors planned in the United States. Candris also sums up everything that’s wrong with the nuclear power industry’s orchestrated revival — the deceptions, the manipulated numbers, the false promises and the sheer swindle of taxpayer dollars for a technology with a lethal past and an unproven future. Candris’ Nov. 9 tribute to nuclear in The Wall Street Journal tells the tall tale.

Candris claims that, because electricity demand will grow 21 percent by 2030 from current levels, and “renewable energy sources produce only a small percentage” of total electricity output, it’s “doubtful that they can be scaled up to a degree that would make a significant impact on rising electricity demand over the short or intermediate term.” Actually, that’s more true of nuclear, far less so of renewable. Not a single nuclear power plant has been approved and built in the United States since the 1970s. The newest one, Watts Bar in Tennessee, began construction in 1973 and went online in 1996 — a 23-year span that multiplied its initial costs, to $7 billion. Candris gives the impression that a slew of plants are about to be built. Not so. A slew of plants applied for licenses, but only because the federal government is offering up to $1 billion in tax credits per new nuclear plant (once electricity production begins), as long as the application was in by the end of 2008.

…Candris presumes that growing electricity demand is “too great to satisfy with energy efficiency and conservation alone.” And he points to France, which produces 80 percent of its electricity through nuclear energy, as the model of “the world’s most nuclear-dependent and energy-independent country.” But French electricity consumption is 7,200 kilowatts per person per year, 44 percent less than the American consumption of 12,900 kilowatts per person. France is a model — of conservation. (Candris is wrong about France’s independence: it imports all of its oil and natural gas.)

Smirking Chimp