The American Spectator: RENEWED INTEREST IN NUCLEAR POWER
Environmental activists privilege “renewable” power sources, such as wind and solar, and proclaim they can promptly reduce the West’s reliance on fossil fuels. But a new report on the economic and environmental contributions of nuclear power to the United States may help shift the debate.
As consumers in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and even some U.S. states are fast finding out, renewable power is far more costly than other alternatives. Governments’ decrees to adopt green technologies drive many on fixed incomes into energy poverty, a scary scenario in which the poor or the elderly have to choose between eating and heating their homes during the harsh winter months.
A scientifically and financially sound form of alternative energy—nuclear power—gets little support from environmentalists. Helping to bring nuclear power back to the energy policy discussion, however, is a new study by the Brattle Group, an economic consulting firm with 250 employees and offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Washington, D.C., and six other locales around the world.
American nuclear energy plants contribute $60 billion annually to the U.S. gross domestic product, according to the Brattle report. Even while operating in a constrained regulatory environment for decades, the U.S. nuclear industry accounts for nearly 475,000 full-time jobs, and nuclear energy provides almost 20 percent of the nation’s electricity.
In addition, energy generated from nuclear plants “prevents 573 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions,” the Brattle economists state. The report also notes nuclear power has a very small carbon footprint, a favorite metric touted by the Obama administration. For those concerned about carbon emissions, the generation of carbon-free electricity from nuclear power plants should be a high priority today, the authors say.
“The economic and environmental benefits of nuclear energy are often undervalued in national and state energy policy discussions,” said Dr. Mark Berkman, coauthor of the report and a principal at the Brattle Group.
