Just in case you forgot why nuclear energy is so bad, here is an unpleasant reminder from Chernobyl – the wildfires are near the contaminated area – a burn in the region could release radioactive ash.
For years it’s been trendy to argue that in pricing fuels it’s important to use ’true (or full) cost accounting’ to adequately compute the total cost of fuels. Alternative fuels, through this reasoning, don’t look nearly so bad in comparison on a cost basis once you add in environmental costs, cleanup costs and the like to the cost of fuel. The usual public policy conclusion is invariably that the greenshades sharpen their pencils to compute externals, and the government then add those externals to the cost of the fossil fuels in the form of a tax.
So I’ve been reading about this true cost of accounting for nearly 3 decades and while there has been a lot of accounting done, gubbermint has sat on its ass and delivered nothing in the way of the tax. In fact, under the Shrubya Reign of Error, they larded the fossil fuel industry with massive additional subsidies in a hellish ‘false cost accounting’ variant that could only have been concocted by a coterie of cthonic cretins on K Street.
The BP oil disaster, however, points to a novel approach for implementing at least a portion of applying ‘external’ costs – forget fossil fuel taxes that lily-livered Congress will never pass – instead, make the fucking companies pay directly for their messes!
For example, the various oil companies could start with a supervised safety review of the other offshore wells currently in production as well as the 27,000 abandoned wells just in the Gulf of Mexico whose capping were most likely never supervised and which may be decaying as I type. How about forcing the coal companies to put out the millions of tons of coal burning in thousands of coal seam fires around the world that are spewing noxious chemicals and carbon dioxide with zero benefit to anybody? Or nuclear power plants paying for permanent storage of the 64,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel that will stay radioactive for up to 250,000 years?
We don’t need technology breakthroughs in alternative energy. We need to eliminate the unbelievable corporate welfare the industry currently enjoys in subsidies, we need to force the companies to clean up the messes they have already created and to have plans to prevent and correct future messes, and we need to invest in conservation and modern grid infrastructure to properly use the power we do produce.
But first we need to break the link between the conservatives and the fossil fuel companies, otherwise we’ll keep circling the drain, faster with each turn of the spiral.
*Update 7/15/10* Could Congress actually be taking action to investigate those 27,000 abandoned Gulf Wells? Or is this just more ‘look concerned’ bullshit?
Nuclear powered car? Well not exactly, but if the Repugs get there way next year and ram their pork-laden energy bill up our orifices we may well be driving cars indirectly powered by nuclear. Many moons ago I predicted that King George the Witless’ so-called ‘hydrogen economy’ was really just a smokescreen for the “nuculer” (sic) industry. In one of those “I hate it when I’m right” moments, apparently the energy bill does exactly that – it “includes $1.1 billion to construct an atomic reactor in Idaho to produce hydrogen.” And didn’t President Pathological Liar claim that the so-called hydrogen car would be nonpolluting?”
“A public that yearns for, and has now been promised, “pollution-free” energy will be given instead something that produces plutonium, strontium, cesium and dozens of other highly toxic radioactive waste products. One can only imagine the chuckles inside the White House about the “gotcha” built into the hydrogen initiative. You environmentalists want clean hydrogen instead of oil? We’ll give you plutonium. “
“The energy bill would also reauthorize the Price-Anderson Act, the most extraordinary piece of corporate socialist legislation in U.S. history. Price- Anderson immunizes the nuclear industry from as much as 99 percent of the liability it might face in case of a serious release of radioactivity in a major accident. This subsidy has always been difficult for nuclear advocates to explain. On the one hand, they tell the public that the technology is safe and people living near reactors have nothing to worry about — in fact, we should be building more of them. On the other hand, they tell Congress correctly that the technology is so dangerous that no insurer will accept the risks, and that unless Congress limits the public’s right to compensation for damages, the free market will bring nuclear power to a halt.”