No to nukes: nuclear power isn't cost-effective, no matter how you do the math.

• Author: de Rugy, Veronique
• Position: Columns - Column

WHEN BARACK OBAMA was just a baby, nuclear energy was touted as the technology that would finally provide pollution-free, limitless electricity for all. In its famous 1962 Port Huron Statement, the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society gushed about how "our monster cities ... might now be humanized" thanks to nuclear power. Like so many predictions about the future, that one rather dramatically missed the mark.

Surprising as it may seem, the United States still generates around 20 percent of its electricity from nuclear power plants. This despite the fact that no new facilities have been built since the notorious Three Mile Island accident of I979, which released small amounts of radioactive gases and iodine into the environment after a partial meltdown at a nuclear power plant in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. Public opinion has remained steadfast against the technology ever since. In February The Economist reported that 64 percent of Americans opposed building new reactors. Disputes over waste disposal have never been resolved, and the Fukushima reactor meltdown in March 2011 cast further doubt on the idea that nuclear power will ever be a long-term clean-energy solution in the United States.

All of this has not stopped the 0bama administration from betting on nukes. Even though the president prefers talking up more fashionable (and less economically viable) technologies such as wind and solar, in February his Nuclear Regulatory Commission quietly approved construction of what would be the first two new nuclear reactors in two generations. In 2010 Secretary of Energy Steven Chu touted the White House's commitment to "restarting the American nuclear industry and creating thousands of new jobs and export opportunities in the process."

But jump-starting nuclear power is not just bad politics. It's awful economics.

The nuclear energy industry in the United States is powered by corporate welfare on plutonium. What is in theory a wonderful technology is in practice an economic white elephant. The data accumulated during the last 30 years suggest strongly that nuclear plants will never be able to cover their operating costs, let alone recoup the billions it costs to build them.

A 2009 Massachusetts Institute of Technology study led by physicist Ernest J. Moniz and engineer Mujid S. Kazimi showed that nuclear energy costs z4 percent more than gas and 3o percent more than coal. And that's after taking into account a baked-in taxpayer subsidy...