This is largely written in response to Eric Zencey's diary entry "Freakonomists blame Jane for global warming." http://www.dailykos.com/...
It really disturbs me when people from the left, who are the ones that are supposed to embrace scientific analysis instead of spouting ideologically driven, fact-less rhetoric, make claims such as the ones in this diary and its comments. Eric does make some valid, and important, points but in a few cases hints at, or outright demonstrates his misconceptions with regards to nuclear power.
While the China Syndrome did make people afraid of nuclear power, what really killed the nuclear industry was Three Mile Island, huge interest rates, cheap fossil fuels and inefficient regulation. Also, in regards to Jane Fonda causing global warming it really doesn’t make sense to blame ourselves for past emissions since if we had emitted less we wouldn’t have realized warming was happening until later, putting us right where we are now anyway.
While TMI was a terrible accident, no one directly died because of it. There was radiation released as Eric mentions but he didn’t mention that using our (probably conservative) models, there would statistically be about 2 extra cancers from the incident. Compare this to the dozens of people that die in coal mining accidents each year as well as the thousands of lung cancer deaths from fossil fuel emissions.
Eric makes a good point that costs should be internalized (like how nuclear power pays 1 mil per kilowatt hour to take care of its waste). Nuclear power also pays for other externalities such as security at nuclear power plants. Likewise, fossil fuels should pay for their pollutant emissions (including CO2) and renewables should pay for energy storage because of their intermittent nature. It should be noted that renewables are not yet mainstream and should not yet be expected to directly compete with other power sources yet as I will discuss later.
Nuclear power plants are not "terrorist magnets" as Eric claims. The effort that it would take to cause a significant release of radiation at a plant could be used to kill far more people elsewhere. Even a plane flown directly into containment has a very small chance of causing a significant release of radiation. More concerning is the panic this might cause because of people's irrational fear of the consequences of such an event.
Finally we come to the argument about energy investment EI/EO. The idea that nuclear plants take as much energy to construct, run and decommission as they produce is about as crazy as the idea that George Bush hired the terrorists that hijacked the planes on 9/11. There are several studies about this and the carbon emissions from nuclear power plants are far less than for fossil fuels, perhaps slightly greater than wind but less than solar (wind, solar and nuclear are all so far below fossil fuels that the difference doesn’t really matter). If this weren’t true why would we build nuclear plants? Nuclear power generates 20% of our electricity meaning that if their energy balance was anything less than extremely positive building and running them would require a HUGE conspiracy to pay for all of it.
While the economics of nuclear power in the US may not be favorable with respect to coal (unless we take into account externalities like CO2 and other emissions) they are certainly better than for wind and solar. Wind in good locations is nearly competitive if we ignore the need for energy storage. Solar power simply isn’t cost competitive yet and doesn’t receive the research funding that it should. This is not to say renewables should not be used. They should. And their use should be significantly subsidized. No new technology is competitive without significant amounts of research and subsidies. Nuclear power did not become a competitive power source without subsidies, nor did oil, natural gas or coal.
While nuclear power does have issues, they are often not legitimately expressed. Nuclear power certainly cannot solve climate change by itself but while I plan to start paying the extra 2 cents per kilowatt hour to pay for renewable electricity, most of the world is not willing/able to do this. Until renewables come closer to price parity with current forms of electricity generation it is hard to imagine their growth to be so rapid as to displace nuclear and enough coal to supply the inexorably growing energy demand of the world.
Update
I've looked into it a little more and I believe the source Eric has seen regarding the energy balance of nuclear power is a study done by Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Smith http://www.stormsmith.nl/ This study has been debunked and is contradicted by virtually every other study on lifecycle CO2 emissions. Examples include
http://nuclearinfo.net/...
http://www.world-nuclear.org/...