The Lowdown on Nuclear

Until building new nuclear power plants becomes economically viable without government subsidies, and the nuclear industry demonstrates it can further reduce the continuing security and environmental risks of nuclear power—including the misuse of nuclear materials for weapons and radioactive contamination from nuclear waste—expanding nuclear power is not a sound strategy for diversifying America’s energy portfolio and reducing global warming pollution.

NRDC favors more practical, economical, and environmentally sustainable approaches to reducing both U.S. and global carbon emissions, focusing on the widest possible implementation of end-use energy-efficiency improvements, and on policies to accelerate the commercialization of clean, flexible, renewable energy technologies.

The most economically efficient way to address the economic, environmental, and security risks of new nuclear power plants is to internalize the costs of avoiding or mitigating these risks in the market price of electricity and fuels.

The United States can do this effectively by first regulating both carbon dioxide emissions and the unique risks posed by the nuclear fuel cycle, and then letting the “invisible hand” of the market deliver the lowest-cost technologies for providing energy services that meet minimum universal criteria for environmental sustainability, public health, and energy security.

The nuclear industry rejects this “level playing field” approach. Despite the public expenditure of some $85 billion on civilian nuclear energy development over the last half century, nuclear industry lobbyists continue to aggressively seek and obtain additional federal subsidies, so that investors in new nuclear power plants can earn a return on what would otherwise be a dubious commercial investment. Meanwhile, these subsidies displace government funding that could otherwise be directed toward cleaner, more competitive technologies with a much wider market potential for reducing global warming pollution.

The fastest, cleanest, and most economical solutions to global warming will come if energy efficiency and renewable energy compete on a playing field that has been “leveled” by regulatory and taxation schemes that compel the pricing of polluting energy alternatives at closer to their true costs to society and the environment, not merely at their immediate costs of extraction and combustion.

Despite the fact that a national global warming emissions cap-and-trade system would materially assist the economic case for nuclear power, the nuclear industry has not been willing to openly advocate for such a system.

This suggests either that the industry privately lacks confidence in its own rosy claims that nuclear energy can play a big future role in displacing carbon, or that large generating companies prefer that U.S. taxpayers shoulder the lion’s share of the risk, while they harvest the carbon savings from new nuclear plants to prolong the profitability of their polluting coal-fired plants. Probably both explanations are true.