By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent
As I was scrolling through my LinkedIn feed this weekend, I ran across an article from Forbes magazine writer Michael Shellenberger that both made me laugh out loud and shake my head.
The headline of the article was “Had They Bet On Nuclear, Not Renewables, Germany & California Would Already Have 100% Clean Power.” Which, if you think about it, is like saying, “If my dog meowed, she’d be a cat.”
Shellenberger bases his article on a study by Environmental Progress, which a quick glance at their website shows is a shill organization for the nuclear power industry. Something you’d think Shellenberger, who writes about energy and the environment, might either be aware of or at least might want to disclose in the article.
Instead, Shellenberger wants to pretend that this is an organization like the Sierra Club or Greenpeace that are just interested in preserving the environment. He wags his finger at the denizens of the Global Climate Action Summit for not mentioning nuclear, and then goes ahead with his analysis of Germany and California, shaking his head at their foolishness for not investing enormous amounts of money in the nuclear energy.
Here are a couple of key issues that Shellenberger, in full nuclear hawk mode, ignores. First off, and most importantly, nuclear power is not a clean energy source. Even if you ignore the potential safety concerns about having a nuclear power plant in your back yard (and as someone that has two within 100 miles of his home in two directions, I have those concerns), there’s still the question of what to do with the spent fuel rods. Until you finally build that storage facility inside Yucca Mountain, you’re going to have to put those fuel rods somewhere – and right now there’s no safe place to put them.
Furthermore, he conveniently ignores the costs of storing those rods in his evaluation of costs of nuclear plants, which is something that get ignored by most nuclear proponents. And given the most recent struggles in constructing nuclear plants in Georgia and elsewhere, I’m going to respectfully suggest that the construction costs on which Environmental Progress based its projections may be a little understated.
This discussion is not academic. They are currently debating whether to include nuclear as a clean energy in Arizona’s renewable portfolio standard. So articles like this one from Forbes, dishonest as they are, are important to call out when they appear. Let’s make sure this one doesn’t go unanswered.
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Had They Bet On Nuclear, Not Renewables, Germany & California Would Already Have 100% Clean Power