Nuclear critics come out of the woodwork
Jay
February 18, 2010, 7:08 pm

That didn't take long.

The author is, to quote Wolfowitz, "wildly off the mark" (notice the irony) when it comes to his assessment about nuclear power.

Depending on how you account for the costs, nuclear can either be insanely expensive or cheap as coal (which is the cheapest form of energy on Earth). The problem with nuclear plants is that the costs are massively frontloaded. Construction costs are high, but operations and maintenance are low.

Saying that building new wind capacity would be cheaper is laughable. It's not as if wind has no Federal subsidies plus it is an unreliable power source. Energy sources like coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear are important because their output is entirely controllable whereas the output on wind varies day per day.

The real reason why nuclear reactors take so long to construct and are subject to so many cost overruns is because of the rampant NIMBYism and the environmental lobby, which can file an injunction with a court and keep development ground to a halt for decades. This is the same reason why no new oil refineries have been built in the United States since 1970. The nuclear industry, similar to the oil industry, instead have to add capacity at existing sites.

Simply put, there is no better energy source than nuclear fission right now. Alternative energies like solar and wind are unreliable and frivolous. Biofuels rob from the food supply. And geothermal is limited and expensive. Nuclear is clean, cheap (when amortized over the lifetime of a reactor's operation), and greater advances in nuclear fission research can yield more benefits than electricity generation.