The Real Nuclear Tragedy

Once upon a time there were three safecrackers named Cal, Earl, and Gus. For a long time they had schemed to rob the biggest house in town, which was said to have a safe containing huge quantities of diamonds. One day Cal heard that the owners would be away that weekend. It would be a perfect opportunity. The only problem was their dog, a huge mastiff that would permit no intrusion onto the grounds surrounding the house.

“That’s easy,” Earl said. “We just go to the butcher shop and get the biggest, juiciest steak in the place. We toss it into the bushes where it’ll take the dog a long time to get at it.” The ruse worked. The dog was diverted, and the three cleaned out the safe at their leisure.

The meaning of this parable is as follows. Cal, Earl, and Gus are the fossil fuels — coal, oil, and natural gas. The house is our planet, the safe its ecosystem, and the diamonds the many species on which we depend for our existence. The dog is the environmental movement. The steak is nuclear power.

If you are in your late 40s or older you can remember the energy crises of the 1970s. It was a time of short-tempered drivers in long gas lines and serious worries about freezing in the dark. Energy scarcity was obvious. What to do about it was less clear.

As a solar energy researcher at the time, I was well tuned in to the debate. On one side were mainstream analysts, guardians of the conventional wisdom. They noted that when America’s economy grew, our use of energy also grew in almost perfect lockstep. Expressed in real, inflation-adjusted dollars, the size of our economy doubled between 1950 and 1970. Our use of energy also doubled. They therefore assumed that if robust economic growth was to continue, our energy use would have to double once more by 1990 and yet again by 2010.

Analysts associated with the environmental movement had a different view. They pointed out that we used energy very inefficiently and argued that with conservation and better technology the economy could grow with much smaller energy inputs.

One thing both sides did agree on was that America was rapidly using up its supplies of oil and natural gas, and the world as a whole was not far behind in that depletion scenario. They were wrong about that, and therein hangs the tale.

The mainstream analysts saw a huge gap between our future need for energy and available supplies of conventional fuels. The solution they proposed was nuclear power.

Environmentalists were aghast. Not only did they have safety concerns, they also feared that nuclear energy would crowd out the infant solar, wind, and geothermal technologies. They reasoned that if the nuclear dragon could be slain, America would be forced onto the “soft path” of conservation and renewable energy.

The battle raged through the 1970s. The decisive event was the March 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant. This caused much of the public to turn against nuclear power. Electric utilities dropped plans to construct nuclear reactors. At the beginning of 1979 there were nearly 180 applications to build such units, with perhaps 100 more expected in the coming decade. After Three Mile Island, no more applications came in and many of the existing ones were withdrawn. In the end, only about 100 nuclear power reactors became operational in the United States, and about that many continue in use today.

This was a partial victory for the environmentalists. Although the nuclear industry wasn’t crushed, it was stunted. And although their victory wasn’t total, environmentalists could take comfort that their predictions about energy efficiency were correct, while those of the mainstream analysts were wildly wrong. Between 1970 and 2010, the American economy grew by 213 percent. Energy use grew also, but only by 44 percent. Even more striking, our use of oil and natural gas increased by only 17 percent.

The salient point, though, is that oil and gas use did increase. We didn’t run out of these fuels. New supplies were found all over the world. In America today, natural gas production is at an alltime high, and oil production is also climbing after a long period of decline. Moreover, consumption of coal, the black sheep of energy that everyone seemed to ignore, rose 70 percent in the same period. This was an environmental disaster, because coal’s emissions of carbon dioxide, the main cause of global warming, are truly horrendous.

The upshot is that, despite the environmentalists’ partial victory in the nuclear power battle, they lost the energy war. Despite our record of increasing energy efficiency, we were not forced onto the soft path. In 2010, more than 80 percent of our energy still came from fossil fuels, while solar and wind power supplied only about 1 percent. Since then, solar and wind have more than doubled, and with farsighted policy choices they are likely to take off, but right now they supply just over 2 percent of our energy.

The big winner was not the environmental movement but coal. Had we built 300 nuclear reactors instead of only 100, the coal industry would have been fatally squeezed between lower than expected increases in energy use and ever-increasing supplies of nuclear power.

The defeat of nuclear power was therefore as much in the interest of the coal industry as it was in anyone’s. I don’t know how much the anti-nuclear movement was funded by the coal interests. All I can say is that if I ran a coal company in the 1980s I would have given the activists everything they asked for and considered it money well spent.

The missed opportunity to make coal obsolete was the first part of the real nuclear tragedy. The second and more important aspect is that, like the dog in the story, for several decades the environmental movement was largely diverted from what should have been its most important task, fighting global warming. Environmentalists have, of course, been warning against the dangers of climate change for a long time. They failed, however, to translate their concerns into public passion as they had with their aversion to nuclear power.

Nuclear power is as carbon-free as wind or solar. That’s a fact. But is it safe? Nothing is absolutely safe, but many studies have shown no increased mortality from American nuclear power plants, even from Three Mile Island. That’s more than one can say for coal. In preferring fossil fuels to nuclear power, the American people have avoided a small risk to themselves by imposing much greater risks of global warming onto the entire world.

What is to be done now? We can’t ban fossil fuels, but we can ensure that users bear the full cost of their consumption. The best way to do that would be a fee on greenhouse gas emissions from these fuels, imposed at the point of origin.

The funds collected would be returned to the American people as a dividend in equal shares. This would cover consumers’ higher energy costs while providing powerful incentives toward greater efficiency and the use of carbonfree energy. Much of this will come from the sun and the wind, both of which are now ready for prime time, but if some of it turns out to be nuclear, so be it. The quicker we can close our coal plants, the better.

Fighting nuclear power may have been understandable in the 1970s, but today it’s worse than a waste of time. Reducing carbon emissions has to be Job 1. To paraphrase what Vince Lombardi said about winning in football, when it comes to energy and environment, climate change isn’t the main thing, it’s the only thing.

John Andrews, who has a Ph.D. in physics, did research on solar energy and energy-efficient buildings for 25 years at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He lives in Sag Harbor.