Nuclear Power: Joe Romm Goes Free Market (Again)

“The nuclear industry has effectively priced itself out of the market for new power plants, at least in market-based economies. That’s why nuclear power’s share of global power generation has dropped to around 11 percent — its lowest level in decades.”

 – Joe Romm, ThinkProgress, February 4, 2019

As he periodically does, Joe Romm has again trashed nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuels, claiming that wind power and solar power are cheaper, can access affordable batteries for overcome intermittency, and can be scaled to the quantities needed (wrong, wrong, and wrong–a story for another day).

In “Taxpayers Should Not Fund Bill Gates’ Nuclear Albatross,” Romm states:

The reality is that nuclear power is so uneconomical that existing U.S. nuclear power plants are bleeding cash — and in many places it’s now cheaper to build and run new wind or solar farms than to simply run an existing nuclear power plant. Saving the existing unprofitable nuclear plants would require a subsidy of at least $5 billion a year, according to an analysis last July by the Brattle Group.

So, given existing plants are so uneconomic, it’s no shock that building and financing an entire new fleet of nuclear plants is wildly unaffordable — especially since a new nuclear plant can cost $10 billion or more.

A Civil War

There are many reasons why it is not easy being green. One is the civil war over the one mass alternative to oil, gas, and coal in electrical generation, however expensive: nuclear power. In the main, the modern eco-movement has increased, not decreased, CO2 emissions by working to reduce nuclear capacity, existing and new.

As I noted 16 months ago in reference to Romm’s dismissal of nuclear:

The irony is that to the extent that Romm et al. have been able to retire existing or block new nuclear capacity, they have  contributed to rising CO2 emissions. Environmental Progress has  documented this in these five talking points:

• Low-carbon power declined as a percentage of total electricity by 4.2 percent between 1995 and 2016.
• Percentage of total electricity from nuclear declined 7 percent between 1995 and 2016.
• The percentage of total electricity coming from solar and wind only increased 5.2 percent between 1985 and 2015.
• The world could lose up to two times more nuclear than it gains by 2030.
• Between 2010 and 2016, public support for nuclear declined from 62 percent to 51 percent.

In any case, it is both pleasing and strange to see Joe Romm don a free market, pro-consumer, pro-taxpayer hat when it comes to nuclear (and probably hydro too). His (post-modernistic) dream is that wind power, solar power, and negawatts can usher in a post-fossil-fuel era. In reality, fossil fuels will replace nuclear to a large degree.

James Hansen, the father of last quarter-century of climate alarm, begs to differ from Romm. Calculating the vast scale of energy needs versus renewables’ energy pittance, Hansen states:

People who entreat the government to solve global warming but offer support only for renewable energies will be rewarded with the certainty that the U.S. and most of the world will be fracked-over, the dirtiest fossil fuels will be mined, mountaintop removal and mechanized long-wall coal mining will continue, the Arctic, Amazon and other pristine public lands will be violated, and the deepest oceans will be ploughed for fossil fuels.

Simple politics comes into play, continues Hansen:

Politicians are not going to let the lights go out or stop economic growth. Don’t blame Obama or other politicians. If we give them no viable option, we will be fracked and mined to death, and have no one to blame but ourselves.

To Hansen, going renewable in light of the climate challenge is  “almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.”

Conclusion

Free-marketeers can smile and wink as Joe Romm oversells renewables and works to block the one major competitor to fossil fuels in electric generation, nuclear power. Such is the strange ideological world of the anti-industrial lobby. They are losing painfully and in slow motion. Tomorrow’s post will visit some of the angst experienced by the climate-change-advocacy losers.

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[1] According to the Washington Post: “Lawmakers are listening to him. Through the Energy Department, Congress approved $221 million to help companies develop advanced reactors and smaller modular reactors in fiscal 2019, above the budget request. But Gates and TerraPower, which received a $40 million Energy Department.”