Third Way Dispatch

I’ve been around politics a long time (circa the Mondale “surge”), and I’ve heard enough pandering and disingenuous nonsense spouted to keep aloft a flotilla of blimps. I’ve heard paeans to farmers of useless crops, love letters to members of narrow interest groups, and poetic praise to colorless down-ballot politicians. And all of this from candidates I support!

But rarely have I heard such dispiriting nonsense as that to which we were subjected during Tuesday night’s Democratic debate in Nevada, when the candidates turned to the subject of nuclear power.

Now I’m not totally naïve – I understand that, whatever the merits of the Yucca Mountain spent fuel repository, the candidates in a tight race for the nomination are not likely to come out strongly in favor of storing America’s nuclear waste in the center of an early caucus state.

But what was truly appalling was the way in which the candidates jockeyed for the position of most opposed to nuclear power generally.

John Edwards led the charge: “I am not for it [nuclear power] or agnostic. I am against building more nuclear power plants, because I do not think we have a safe way to dispose of the waste. I think they’re dangerous, they’re great terrorist targets and they’re extraordinarily expensive. They are not, in my judgment, the way to green this—to get us off our dependence on oil.”

Next, while giving a backhanded acknowledgment of his earlier support for nuclear power, Barack Obama trotted out all the other old – and wrongheaded – arguments against building new nuclear power plants: “Now, with respect to nuclear energy, what I have said is that if we could figure out a way to provide a cost-efficient, safe way to produce nuclear energy, and we knew how to store it effectively, then we should pursue it because what we don’t want is to produce more greenhouse gases… Now, if we cannot solve those problem, then absolutely, John, we shouldn’t build more plants.”

Not to be outdone, Hillary Clinton dismissed nuclear power from our future with this: “I have a comprehensive energy plan that I have put forth. It does not rely on nuclear power for all of the reasons that we’ve discussed.”

As George Will would say: “Well.” All of the objections to nuclear power that these candidates have offered are simply red herrings. As Third Way has written before, global climate change poses the greatest threat that mankind faces, perhaps the greatest our species has ever faced. If we are to confront this crisis effectively and in time, we simply must produce power without producing carbon. And the only way to get there from here is to build a LOT more nuclear plants, and to do so fast. One simple point: nuclear energy produces about 20% of US power usage today. Solar is about .02%. You triple solar power, you get to .06%. You triple nuclear, you get to 60%. The math isn’t hard.

I could reiterate the reasons why nuclear is NOT unsafe or too expensive, or why the waste problem is NOT too burdensome, but many others have done so more eloquently and persuasively. To that end, I strongly recommend that any skeptics read Gwyneth Cravens fantastic new book, Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy. Cravens, herself once a nuclear opponent, takes the reader on a complete tour of nuclear power generation from beginning to end, and she simply demolishes the opposing viewpoints, as well as the notion that we can escape our climate change problem exclusively through the use of renewable sources (she quotes scientists who call the fairy dust we’d need to do so “Unobtainium”).

But back to the politicians. The leading Republican candidates, to their credit, have been almost universally supportive of nuclear power. McCain mentions it favorably on his website, as does Huckabee, Romney and Giuliani. (Fred Thompson doesn’t, and he questions climate change, so he’s every bit the loser you thought he was.)

By contrast, Clinton’s wonky energy plan is nuclear-free, as is Obama’s and, of course, Edwards’). The best you could say for these guys is that they didn’t pronounce in nuke-you-ler.

Opposing Yucca is one thing (Mike Dukakis found a love for belgian endive farming when he went to Iowa – caucuses are powerful things). But coming out foursquare against nuclear power is totally ridiculous. If one of these Democrats becomes our next president, here’s hoping they get out a knife and fork and eat those words by supporting a massive new round of nuclear plant construction. The world’s future may well depend on it.