"It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter, will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours." U.S. philanthropist and nuclear energy proponent Lewis Strauss, 1954.
Well, famines are less frequent. Travel is easier and faster. And people live longer. Three out of four utopian visions isn't bad. But when Lewis Strauss predicted that nuclear power would make next-generation electricity "too cheap to meter," he got it wrong. Nuclear power has been in trouble ever since - as much (or more) for economic reasons as for environmental reasons. Counting full "life cycle" costs (including eternal storage of wastes), it is now impossibly expensive: the energy source that only governments can afford. And natural gas, an alternative, is abundant and cheap. As U.S. physicist and environmental seer Amory Lovins puts it, nuclear power can't survive free-market capitalism.
In its Cold War origins, nuclear power promised a lot: the energy of the atom, all but free for the taking. But nuclear power has never kept its promises. Fifty years later, nuclear power plants produce only 15 per cent of the world's electricity, far less than once envisaged. In direct competition with it, natural gas produces 20 per cent and coal 40 per cent.
In a report published March 2 ("Managing the Nuclear Fuel Cycle"), only days before a nuclear power disaster struck Japan, the U.S. Congressional Research Service (CRS) asserts that it was economic risks, not environmental risks, that ended the nuclear industry's free-for-all energy delusion. Mr. Lovins agrees. In a comment last week, he says new nuclear reactors - around the entire world - are 100 per cent subsidized.
Of the 66 reactors now listed as "under construction," Mr. Lovins says, 12 have been so listed for 20 years, 45 have no startup dates and all 66 were located in centrally planned countries (such as China and Russia). Zero, he says, were free-market purchases. But nuclear power, he says, was already anachronistic by 1978 - the year before the meltdown scare at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania.
The CRS concludes that, by the 1970s, U.S. nuclear power plants had proven "grossly uneconomic." In fact, it says, "nuclear power depends on the utility regulatory system to recover its costs." This is a remarkable finding. It means that the industry survives solely on a kind of public kickback - a retroactive tax.
In its own analysis, the U.S. Energy Information Administration says the capital cost of a new nuclear power plant in the country is now $5,300 (U.S.) per kilowatt (excluding interest payments). The global mean is $4,100 (ranging from $1,556 in South Korea to $5,000 in Hungary). In contrast, the capital cost of a coal-fired plant ranges from $807 per kilowatt to $2,719; and the capital cost of a gas-fired plant ranges from $635 per kilowatt to $1,747.
And 80 per cent of the world's 442 nuclear reactors are now in OECD countries: Read, technologically-advanced countries. But 541 reactors are now either under construction, planned or proposed in such nuclear novice countries as Belarus, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Egypt and Iran. If all of these reactors go into operation, the world will be operating more than 1,000 nuclear reactors - merely to boil water.
For its part, Canada has spent around $30-billion to establish and to sustain a nuclear industry - making the federal government the industry's sole significant risk-taker. Yet Atomic Energy Canada Ltd. is now up for sale with (apparently) no buyers in sight. However: Ontario's plan to add two new reactors to its Darlington plant - total associated cost to the province: $30-billion - would keep the industry in business for a while.
Enough is enough. For environmental reasons, for economic reasons and for political reasons (including nuclear proliferation), the government should end its obsession with nuclear power: Until the industry can buy its own reactors, get rid of its own wastes and pay for its own insurance. The government won't, of course. As the world's biggest supplier of uranium, Canada makes nuclear power pay off - in its role as global enabler.