The Nuclear Renaissance is Pushing Ahead? Really?
Because there are plenty of people writing on the Fukushima disaster, I tend to comment on it quite sparingly. But I just received an email from Areva (the French nuclear giant) that begins: “With the nuclear renaissance pushing ahead, I’m sure you’re aware …”
I always marvel when I see stuff like this. When large, industrialized countries are saying no to nuclear, and its costs are skyrocketing (while renewables are becoming more affordable every month), does it appear credible to anyone that the “nuclear renaissance is pushing ahead?”
And what about the fact that the whole world is learning more about the safety issues every day? I’m not happy to have to say this, but I accept what this article suggests, i.e., that scientists believe Japan’s nuclear disaster to be far worse than governments are revealing to the public, but that it’s only a matter of time before this becomes clear to everyone. “Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind,” Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president, told Al Jazeera.
I’m not sure how any of this – and the decisions of Germany and Italy — squares with the “nuclear renaissance.”
Since the 1950’s, when the IAEA was established to promote its use as an energy source, fission has enjoyed an inside track of government support. The once touted and fraudulent ‘too cheap to meter” mantra has been replaced by a “Clean Energy” scam that manages to dance around the fact that the overall carbon savings using holistic accounting cradle to grave on nuke energy is next to nil without even considering the substantial health and biosphere hazards inherent in mining, operation and waste. The nuclear energy industry is a vampiric zombie, long dead by any rational reckoning, but still sucking thirstily on the taxpayer and grabbing for more.
What really astonishes me is when people who claim to support a free market solution then complain about subsidies to truly clean and sustainable renewable energy, but fail to even mention the sturdy government crutches used by both the undead nuke plants and the muscular and well-heeled (but doomed) oil firms. Put fossil and fission on a level playing field with concentrated solar using anything like a complete accounting that internalizes all costs, and we’ll be using modern sunlight to feed our needs the following year.
First, though, you must have honorable political leadership, not the sock puppets of finance and industry that we have today on both sides ot the aisle.
In an age of dwindling natural resources and expanding economies more countries are turning to nuclear power. According to Mark Fitzpatrick Senior Fellow for Non-proliferation at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London not since the Cold War has there been such renewed interest in nuclear — though this time the agenda is different… I think the word nuclear renaissance is a fair description of the global interest in nuclear energy as one of the necessary solutions to the dangers of global warming and to the need for energy security and diversification.