Does this sequence make any sense?
- Most activist environmentalists are deeply concerned about "global warming." Human beings, they stress, contribute to such warming by burning fossil fuels which release "greenhouse gases" into the atmosphere. They maintain that over the course of many years, deep into the next century, this process of global warming will likely proceed far enough to be dangerous to our children and grandchildren. Glaciers will melt, tides will rise, infectious tropical diseases will infect, floods will flood, heat waves will wave and sweating people will say it's not the humidity; it's the heat. Thus sayeth the vice president. It must be so.
- Nuclear power produces electric power without emitting any greenhouse gases.
- Activist environmentalists (most of them) hate nuclear power.
- President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore say America will not build any more nuclear power plants on their watch, and threaten vetoes to slow the process.
- Mr. Clinton announces with great fanfare that America will now be selling nuclear reactors to the Chinese and that this would have a great environmental benefit for the Chinese.
Huh? If nukes aren't safe for Americans, why are they safe for the Chinese? If nukes are safe for the Chinese and are environmentally sound, and if global warming is serious, why won't the enviros, and Clinton-Gore, consider moving ahead on nuclear power? How should we charac terize all this: Hypocrisy? Stupidity? Green religious fervor? Vice President Green-Gore's personal passion? The strong-arm politics of special-interest exaggeration?
Probably all of the above, but with its genesis in tree-hugging green fundamentalism. The decades-long argument about nuclear power offers a key to that mystical and muscular religion.
Nuclear power started out as an environmentalist's dream: no emissions, producing electricity "too cheap to meter." But the spooky idea of poisonous, invisible radiation became too tempting a target for neo-Luddites. What fluoridation of water was to the conspiratorial right, nuclear power was to the green left. Right-wing anti-fluoridation screwballs lost their fight-, as a result, Americans have many fewer cavities.
But left-wing anti-nuclear activists won their fight. Environmentally engendered legal battles
delayed construction of nuclear power plants by many years, thereby raising costs. Nuclear fence-jumpers set up further delays. Learned scientists like Jane Fonda denounced nuclear power. Courageous politicians (Mario Cuomo) canceled a completed $5 billion (!) nuclear plant under political pressure, and New Yorkers paid for it. A sometimes recalcitrant nuclear industry didn't help its case. Nor did falling prices of fossil fuels. In America, no new nuclear plant ordered since 1973 has been built.
We didn't get more cavities from halting nuclear construction. What we did get, according to the greenies and Gore-Clinton, is too much American-generated greenhouse emissions. One reason: America gets only 20 percent of its fuel for electricity from nuclear reactors. France gets almost 75 percent. Now, at the upcoming UN global warming conference in Kyoto, Japan, we will be told by the international community that we have to reduce emissions and pay for our sins, not with cavities, but with money, passed along in one form or another to American consumers. (Thanks, Jane.)
This is not to say that at this very moment a crash program to build nuclear reactors is the way to go. Some neutral observers, for example, think gas-fired turbines may have the intermediate- term cost advantage for new power production. They produce less greenhouse emissions than coal or oil - but they still do produce significant amounts.
If the threat of global warming is serious - I am quite dubious about the alleged science, but you never do know - then nuclear power is surely a long-range answer. We should keep all our options open, including the nuclear one.
American-built plants are now much-advanced, and with recent congressional action, pre-certifi able to avoid some of the tortuous legal nurdles. The trouble with nuclear waste is not that there is no solution, but lots of them. We know how to transport the hot stuff 2,500 shipments have already moved without a single radiation spilling accident. (Although, of course, the greenies call the vehicles "mobile Chernobyls," just as they say curing global warming with nuclear power is like curing alcoholism with heroin.) Not one person has been killed from radiation exposure from a nuclear plant in America.
American firms are now exporting safe and efficient nuclear plants to others - including, soon, our dear democratic friends in China. Accordingly, we should begin building some here, soon. If the environmentalists were serious, they would endorse such action. It's time to stop the hot air.
Ben J. Wattenberg is a syndicated columnist and is a senior fellow of the American Enterprise Institute.
Material presented on this home page constitutes opinion of the author.
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