Nuclear revival? Don't bet on it!(nuclear power coming in use)

• Author: Flavin, Christopher

In January this year, Newsweek magazine's cover boldly proclaimed "The Return of Nuclear Power." As I gazed at the cover photo of a glowing red nuclear power plant, I realized that I had seen virtually the same cover--on Time magazine, roughly 15 years ago. The two stories had the same thesis: nuclear power is about to mount a comeback.

Since nuclear construction collapsed in the early 1980s, its return from the dead has been proclaimed at regular intervals, spurred by environmental and economic concerns and by the public-relations efforts of a multi-billion-dollar industry that has had an almost empty order book for over two decades.

None of these "revivals" materialized, but many argue that the latest should be taken more seriously. With oil prices skyrocketing and concern about global warming deepening, scores of editorial writers and policymakers, and even a few environmentalists, argue that we can't afford to discard any energy option with the potential to displace coal, which provides 40 percent of the world's electricity and is the largest threat to the world's climate.

The appeal of nuclear power starts with the fact that it is already a large established power source--the world's 441 reactors have a generating capacity of 369,000 megawatts (MW) that produce 16 percent of the world's electricity. But that is the perspective from a rear-view mirror (see graphs). The industry is now growing at well under 1 percent per year, and the construction pipeline is virtually empty: only 23 reactors, with a capacity of 16,000 MW, are under construction. (In the mid-1980s, more than 200,000 MW were in the pipeline.) Two more reactors were shut down last year, bringing to 116 the total number of reactors that have been permanently taken off line since the age of nuclear power began; that's nearly 35,000 MW. Most of the engineering specialists who built the current fleet of nuclear plants have retired, and many universities have closed their nuclear engineering programs. The relatively conservative International Energy Agency forecasts that nuclear power generation will peak within 10 years and then begin a slow decline.

The industry likes to blame environmentalists for its moribund state. But market forces have done far more to damage nuclear power than anti-nuclear activists ever did. The dramatic collapse of the nuclear industry in the early 1980s--described by Forbes magazine as the most expensive debacle since the Vietnam War--was caused in...