But besides the harm done by CO2 as a greenhouse gas, consider the cost of the harm done by pollution. Please take a look at the European Commission’s report on the external costs of energy. Then, consider that fossil fuels are subsidized by tax credits.

If all energy subsidies were removed and utilities paid for the damage they caused, nuclear would pencil out as cheap as any available energy source.

“A new generation of nuclear power plants is on the drawing boards in the U.S., but the projected cost is causing some sticker shock: $5 billion to $12 billion a plant, double to quadruple earlier rough estimates.”

I’ve read the WIRED piece, and I’m still convinced that nuclear power can’t be an answer unless we’re willing to subsidize the [high] costs of nuclear energy for consumers. We’d spend years building costly plants, and the end result would be extremely expensive power, unless it’s subsidized by the government. That doesn’t alleviate my general unease with nuclear power, but if it’s to be a part of the solution for CO2 reasons, it can’t do so without heavy incentives.

On the subsidy/incentives point, the only way I’d support new nuclear construction is under a carbon marketplace system that would appropriately disincentive coal and natural gas plants. From a different WSJ piece:

“[Emissions penalties] matter[] because nuclear power’s ability to provide electricity at a competitive price compared to regular sources like coal and natural gas depends largely on those [large] construction costs [for new nuclear plants]. Fuel costs for nuclear power are miniscule. The only way to handicap the field in nuclear power’s favor is to put a big price tag on emissions of carbon dioxide. Since nuclear plants don’t emit CO2, they win when legislation penalizes carbon-heavy sectors like coal (and even natural gas).”

Are you ready for that type of regulation, Mr. Free Marketeer? If so, let’s talk nukes.

For what it’s worth, there’s a new type of nuclear plant under development. I don’t know enough about it to have an opinion on its value, but here’s a TreeHugger article discussing the merits of Thorium.

Although I think Red Craig thoroughly deconstructed your argument here, just in case your looking for more information on this subject:

http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/16-06/ff_heresies_intro

Henry

This waste issue has aways been a work of fiction. Even when the plan was to throw away the spent fuel instead of recycling it, the contention that future generations will be adversely affected didn’t bear scrutiny. When the fossil-fuel reserves are depleted and the climate is altered so that most people live in severe hardship, the last thing people will care about is capsules of nuclear-energy waste buried thousands of feet in a desert mountain.

The simple fact is that renewable energy only works if it has a backup energy source. The two backups available are fossil fuels and nuclear energy.

If we’re facing a continued short-term oil dependency either way, I’d rather wake up 10 years from now having shifted to renewable energy (with manufacturing processes that have gradually adopted those technologies) instead of looking out my window at the new nuclear plant that’s still being constructed, with other nuclear plants producing toxic waste without any place to go. Now, that assumes that in ten years Congress still won’t have figure out a solution for where to store nuclear waste….I’ll take that bet. But even if Yucca or another location gets off the ground, I still prefer my scenario.

I don’t follow your population limiting theory behind Lovins’ work. It seems to me that diversified power sources leave us significantly safer to prosper than loose nuclear material getting into the wrong hands.

Micropower means building many thousands of small dams on all the streams and creeks anywhere there’s enough fall to run a turbine. Besides the obvious impracticality of connecting all those turbines, and the difficulty of maintaining them, there’s the little problem that it would lead to the extinction of thousands of species. There’s a law against that, and if the the law is rescinded then we call all kiss wilderness goodbye.

You might wonder why Mr. Lovins gets away with promoting ideas that have to possibility of ever being implemented. You see, that’s the whole point. The aim of Lovins and his followers is to render the world, western countries in particular, unable to sustain current population levels.

If we as a species decide that limiting population is in our common interest, then we ought to be deciding in those terms. Forcing the world into the decision can’t help but lead to massive hardship. And trying to trick the world into the decision by lying about the most effective solution to global warming is plain dishonest.