One thing Hollywood is very good at is scaring the bejesus out of Americans — even when they’re merely spreading false fears.
A famous movie in 1979 called “The China Syndrome” chronicled a nuclear power accident that could kill tens of thousands of Americans with radiation poisoning. The title came from a spooky fairy-tale scenario in which the nuclear material would melt the earth right through to its core and then all the way down to China. Despite causing few deaths, the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania that year further panicked Americans about the safety of nuclear plants.
The damage to the industry was done and nearly fatal. For nearly four decades, the nuclear industry failed to permit any more new nuclear plants.
That was yesterday. The time is right for a nuclear renaissance. The incoming administration, from President-elect Donald J. Trump on down, is pro-American energy independence. Nuclear power has to be part of the equation.
We need to get back to building new plants so that we have the electric power capacity for the next generation of artificial intelligence and other uses that will tax the grid beyond what it can provide. AI will use three to four times as much energy as the internet, so demand is going to spike and we will be at risk of brownouts.
Jack Spencer — an energy policy expert at the Heritage Foundation — has just published a fabulous policy manifesto, “Nuclear Revolution: Powering the Next Generation,” on how we unleash (we love that word) a nuclear power renaissance in America.
Spencer shows conclusively that “obstructive regulations at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and anti-nuclear scare tactics from the left are what has inhibited this industry for decades.” It’s as if Jane Fonda (remember her in “The China Syndrome”?) were running our energy policy.
Today we get a little less than 20% of our electric power from decades-old nuclear plants that are now being retired. If we don’t build new ones, we will lose ground on our energy production at the very time we need much more capacity.
The federal government has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on wind and solar subsidies — but these are still niche energy sources that are NOT scalable to meet our $25 trillion industrial economy’s needs. Former Vice President Al Gore and the climate change environmental groups should be all in on nuclear as a clean energy source with very minimal greenhouse gases.
If we double our nuclear power capacity over the next decade or so and allow more natural gas and oil drilling here at home, we can regain our energy dominant position. OPEC would be a toothless tiger, and the Russian war machine could be defunded.
Small reactors that can serve towns of 50,000 to 100,000 people can minimize risks of major plant accidents that could put Americans in danger.
It’s all so logical. It puts America first.
We don’t need Fonda dictating our energy policy any longer.
Stephen Moore is a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He is also an economic advisor to the Trump campaign. His new book, coauthored with Arthur Laffer, is “The Trump Economic Miracle.”
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The rest of the world is seriously looking at building 4th generation nuclear plants, as the need for reliable baseload power is only going to intensify in the years to come. We really need to stop fixating on the fear tactics the Left in this country is constantly promoting in order to push their fantasy that the United States can completely function with only wind and solar farms. It certainly isn’t economically viable either, when you look at how expensive all these wind and solar projects are and the cost of electricity has indeed skyrocketed as Obama promised it would in 2007 and 2008.
I expect President Trump will quickly put an end to most of the so-called Green New Deal dreams that the Democrats have spent over a trillion dollars of taxpayer money over the last 4 years alone, when he takes office in January. Unfortunately, that is taxpayer money that has just been flushed down the old toilet at this point.
Most Europeans understand wind and solar are not going to cut it, even if some of their clueless leaders are resisting that reality. Already plans in Europe to decommission existing nuclear power plants have been put on indefinite hold and new 4th generation plants are being proposed. The so-called green dream of an EU running solely off wind and solar farms has been a huge failure and nearly destroyed the economies of several major European countries.
China is already well under way building the latest generation of nuclear plants, both large scale and SMR, as they intend to become completely energy independent and able to power the next 50 years of Chinese growth. So, we need to stop flushing hundreds of billions of dollars every year that we don’t have on the Left’s fantasy, and have to rely on borrowing from countries that want to bury us in the dust of history, and instead get back on track towards rebuilding this nation to achieve a better future.