Bush Stakes Bets on Nuclear Power

The United States is promoting a revival of atomic energy as the best ''clean alternative'' for curbing greenhouse gas emissions and halting climate change.

BERKELEY, USA - Nuclear power has been a half-century experiment in inflated expectations and extravagant expense. The technology was first developed during the Second World War by Manhattan Project physicists as a byproduct of the atom bomb's invention.

In the early postwar years, it was intensively promoted by an energy industry anticipating hefty profits and a US government concerned that the Soviet Union might gain a propaganda advantage by exploiting a ''peaceful'' use for the atom while the United States was still focused on perfecting its bombs.

But US nuclear-generated electricity once promised to be ''too cheap to meter'' has turned out to be too costly to calculate.

Budget overruns have reached into the billions of dollars, safety concerns have remained unanswered and there is still no agreed-upon storage site for radioactive wastes that will remain toxic for a thousand generations.

In the wake of these problems and a surprisingly effective anti-nuclear power movement, the once-inexorable march of US nuclear power stalled in the early seventies.

Not a single new plant has been ordered since 1978 and standing orders for 121 reactors were canceled. Today, just 20 percent of US electricity and eight percent of the country's total energy needs are met by nuclear energy.

Yet in the retro spirit of a 1950s-era Ford Edsel, the George W. Bush administration now proposes to revive nuclear power by re-licensing shuttered reactors, relaxing safety standards at existing plants and producing a new generation of Pebble Bed Modular Reactors (PBMRs).

The US nuclear industry hopes to reverse its bleak record by manufacturing cookie-cutter plants a tenth the size of the behemoths built in its heyday.

Yet PBMRs remain an untested possibility. Just one such plant currently exists, a small thermal-only installation in China. Independent experts fear that the absence of a secondary containment vessel (a feature critically missing from the Chernobyl plant) leaves no room for second chances in the event of malfunction.

The Bush team also hopes to revive reprocessing of spent fuel, which separates leftover plutonium from uranium for reuse in commercial or military reactors. The breeder reactor technology that is used to reprocess swallowed 100 billion dollars in the United States alone before research was halted in the late seventies.

Commercial reprocessing continues in France, Britain, Russia, Japan and India and is the largest contributor to a growing oversupply of weapons-grade plutonium worldwide. Reprocessed materials are compact and easily concealed, an ideal form for use by terrorists.

The Bush administration promotes a revival of nuclear power as the ''clean alternative'' best equipped to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Yet it simultaneously denies that climate change is even a threat.

Be that as it may, in order to contribute substantially to curbing climate change the nuclear industry must first develop a viable reactor design that can address the well-documented deficiencies that have bedeviled the first generation of reactors.

Given the absence of working second-generation reactors, this seems unlikely to occur within the time frame required to reverse climate change.

The United States would need to build two Pebble Bed reactors a day for the next thirty years, notes independent nuclear analyst Arjun Makhijani. ''To win on cost,'' he says, ''you've got to abandon safety.''

''Build them and we will come,'' quips Harvey Wasserman, a well-known anti-nuclear activist who helped organize a now-famous occupation of the Seabrook reactor in New Hampshire in the early 1970s. Confident that any attempt to revive nuclear power in the United States would galvanize broad public opposition, Wasserman dismisses nuclear power is ''an idea whose time never came.''

But if not nukes, then what will sate the ravenous American appetite for energy? Bush administration dismissals notwithstanding, conservation and energy efficiency could go far towards reducing consumption.

Over the next 20 years, American demand for natural gas will rise by 62 percent, electricity by 45 percent, and oil by 33 percent. Failure to reduce these rates substantially would ultimately extract a fearsome price on the US economy. Yet if it simply operated as efficiently as the economies of Europe and Japan, US energy consumption would drop by 30 percent, and carbon emissions by 35 percent.

Fortunately, change is in the air.

Wind power has recently emerged as a near-term, large-scale alternative to excessive dependence on oil and nuclear power. Wind turbines are the fastest-growing energy source on earth, with wind-generated energy rising 25 percent a year. All by themselves, wind farms planted in the American heartland between the Mississippi River and the Rockies, together with wind generators sited off the wind-blown US seacoasts, could fulfill the country’s entire electrical needs.

The current price of 2.5 cents on the dollar per kilowatt-hour is already cheaper than natural gas, oil and coal-generated electricity - and could drop further as the technology improves and wind farms multiply.

Germany and Denmark are leading the way with rapid conversion to wind and other renewable energy sources. At the same time, Germany recently committed itself to phasing out nuclear power altogether over the next few decades.

In promoting nuclear power and other industrial age fuels, the Bush administration is not only out of sync with the rest of the world but also with its own people. A recent New York Times poll found that two-thirds of all Americans believe conservation and energy efficiency would be more effective responses to US energy needs than the accelerated drilling and nuclear revival that the president proposes.

Few doubt the ability of Americans to invent more efficient technologies if given the proper incentives. The remaining question is whether we can curb our gargantuan appetites and become energy gourmets instead of gluttons.

* Mark Sommer is an author and internationally syndicated columnist who directs the Mainstream Media Project, a US-based educational organization bringing new voices and innovative ideas to the broadcast media.