Forbes: Why conservatives should join the left's campaign against nuclear power.

[bananas]

http://www.forbes.com/columnists/forbes/2007/1126/034.html

On My Mind
Hooked on Subsidies
Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren 11.26.07, 12:00 AM ET

Why conservatives should join the left's campaign against nuclear power.

When it comes to politics, we don't often find ourselves in agreement with Bonnie Raitt or Graham Nash. But now that they are campaigning against new nuclear plants, they're our friends. Raitt, Nash, the Indigo Girls and other vocal rockers are attacking a provision in pending Senate legislation that would award what they call "massively expensive loan guarantees--potentially a virtual blank check from taxpayers" for nuclear power plant construction.

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Pro-nuclear groups herald the coming flood of applications as proof that nuclear energy makes economic sense. Nonsense. The only reason investors are interested: government handouts. Absent those subsidies, investor interest would be zero.

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So why does NRG want to build a nuclear plant in Texas? Two factors are in play. First, the license costs a relatively small amount compared with the cost of construction. Second, the federal government would guarantee up to 100% of the $6.5 billion to $8.5 billion NRG might borrow from capital markets (as long as it doesn't exceed 80% of the project cost). Without such guarantees no investor would lend significant amounts of capital to NRG.

How do France (and India, China and Russia) build cost-effective nuclear power plants? They don't. Governmental officials in those countries, not private investors, decide what is built. Nuclear power appeals to state planners, not market actors.

The only nuclear plant built in a liberalized-energy economy in the last decade was one ordered in Finland in 2004. The Finnish plant was built on 60-year purchase contracts signed by electricity buyers, by a firm (the French Areva (other-otc: ARVCF.PK - news - people )) that scarcely seems to be making good money on the deal.

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[phantom power]

1. Are conservatives generally in favor of nuclear power?

My general sense is that it's fairly unpopular across the board.

[gogogodzilla]

3. Nukes

I'd say most conservatives are pro-nuclear power.

For it helps us get off of middle eastern oil... and helps us keep all that money that we'd normally send to the middle east for that oil.

[diane in sf]

4. Cons and big business like top-down, centralized power, like nukes and coal.

All the distributed forms of power, particularly wind, hydro, solar, threaten one of their major holds on the population. They are also trying to grab the world's water and food supplies as well thru privatizing public water companies and patenting seed stocks (Monsanto).

[NNadir]

5. Really? Then how come BP is the world's largest solar company?

You know BP, don't you? The company that bleeds crude oil all over the Alaskan Tundra, and which blew up 25 people (injuring more than 100) in the Texas City refinery accident that the anti-nuke religion couldn't care less about?

The solar industry is great for big business because it wouldn't exist without huge subsidies.

Big giant corporations love subsidies.

In fact, anti-nukes have the economic knowledge in general of rabbits, not that I am trying to say that rabbits are stupid.

If you must know, Europe's biggest wind company, Repower, is owned by Areva, one of the world's largest nuclear companies.

In fact, the idea that solar and wind energy are some kind of cowboy strike against the corporate world is just another ridiculous fantasy held by the anti-nuke religion, which is owned lock stock and barrel, by the way, by companies like Walmart, Rio Tinto, and Royal Dutch Shell (Amory Lovins) and Gazprom (Gerhard Schroeder.)

In fact, the anti-nuclear religion spends all of its time on its knees in front of the dangerous fossil fuel companies about which it couldn't care less.

At the end of the day, the question of energy has nothing at all to do with silly socialist/libertarian fantasies. It is about something called science. It makes no difference if Fidel Castro builds a nuclear power plant or if Exxon builds a nuclear power plant. Nuclear power is safer, cleaner, and cheaper than all of its alternatives. There is NOT ONE anti-nuke who has ever bothered in their short pathetic lives the science of life cycle analysis. If they had done so, they would stop selling their little creationist like religion.

[NMDemDist2]

6. i think you missed her point

it's not in big business' interest to have affordable wind and solar available for us unwashed masses because we would be able to cut the power umbilical cord that makes them their billions

if not cut it, at least make it a damned sight smaller

I think many people agree that fossil fuels are very dangerous as are nukes.

neither is a viable alternative for long term answers

[NNadir]

2. Um, the left? Are you talking little Walmart-boy as part of the "left?"

For what is this a call? Declaring the piece of shit Amory Lovins a "leftist?" What part of his Rio Tinto options were donated to the poor in the Amazon who had to eat his pal's cyanide for the "green" gold mining operations?

Let's be clear. The yuppie brat anti-nuke religion is and always has been about rich people, going back to the days that the hardly poor citizens of Lloyd's Neck - where houses sold for a million plus even back in the 1960's - funded the anti-Shoreham stupidity.

Why did they fund it?

Because LILCO threatened to build a power plant where the rich white brats live.

The anti-nuke yuppie brat religion has NEVER care cared about the poor. It didn't then; it doesn't now; and it won't in the future.

The only people who can afford the anti-nuke's 20 cents per kwh toys www.solarbuzz.com are the readers of Forbes, the one's who don't want to face that they are nothing more than useless consumers sipping brandy on the decks of the Titanic.

Don't worry about the people going down, they're not in First Class.