"We will feel mounting pressure to plunder the environment. We will have a crash
program to build more nuclear plants, strip-mine and burn more coal, and drill
more offshore...

"Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for
ourselves some advantage over others ... It is a certain route to failure."
--Jimmy Carter
1977

"I don't think that right after a major environmental catastrophe is a very good
time to be making American domestic policy,"
--Mitch McConnel (on Fox News)
2011

The nuclear accident in Japan couldn't have come at a worse time for the
atomic power industry in the USA.

Contrary to the propaganda smokescreen so meticulously laid down by the nuke
lobby, opposition to nuclear development in the US has not come from those pesky
environmentalists or Luddite liberals, it has mainly resulted from a refusal by
Capital to provide funding for new plant construction. Investors have simply not
seen nuclear power generation as a big money-maker. It has feared the public
suspicion and enormous expense of new safety regulations prompted by the Three
Mile Island and Chernobyl experiences. As long as cheap oil and coal were
available, pouring money into nukes was simply not seen as profitable.

However, as alternative energy fails to deliver, oil gets pricier and harder
to locate, and coal gets slammed for its global polluting effects, the industry
has seen a way out, at least for the next few years. This seems to be one industry incapable of seeing beyond the "next few years". Why build new nukes when the existing 100-odd US nuclear plants can be re-certified for a few more years of productive life? These plants may be nearing (or exceeding) their design lifetimes, and many are way obsolete (even unsafe) by present industry
standards. But with a few superficial safety "upgrades" and some friendly
regulation, they can be expected to squeeze out a few more years of profit for
their owners, and they are a lot less likely to generate the determined
opposition new plant construction will be sure to provoke from the Greens. Lead time for new construction is decades, these legacy plants are profitable right now!

It stands to reason, however, that the key components of these plants, the reactor cores, cannot be upgraded. These metal structures have been under continuous neutron bombardment for decades now and we simply do not know how this has affected their structural integrity.

Eventually, the dependence on nuclear electricity will become so severe that
the industry will achieve its holy grail: a massive taxpayer-subsidized
government crash program to pay for a flurry of new plant construction as a
means of meeting the inevitable energy emergency that lies just over the
horizon, and the desperate need for massive public works jobs that exists right
now. Conservative politicians are always whining about government spending, but
I've yet to see them complain when it is directly funneled into the pockets of
their big business constituency, and when it can fuel an indefinite continuation of our resource-squandering but oh-so-profitable lifestyle.

The nuclear industry also has a long and lurid history of suckling at the
public funding teat. Nuclear technology was developed under wartime and Cold
War government programs, and the Fed has long provided the boosterism (remember
Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace?), the organization to make it happen (AEC), the
regulation that made it palatable to the public (NRC), and even the government
underwriting guarantee the insurance industry refused to provide. The government
even funded the propaganda effort that prepped the public; I know, I used to
work for it. There would be no nuclear power without government subsidies,
period. The industry only paid for the plants and the fuel. With that kind of
sweetheart deal, of course nuclear power is cheap. The taxpayer takes the risk, the corporation collects the profits.

Those expenditures which could not be funneled directly into
revenue-generating activity were left for the government to take care of, again,
at public expense. The most critical is the nuclear fuel reprocessing
infrastructure that would handle the highly dangerous spent fuel assemblies that
are currently deteriorating in temporary storage facilities all over the
country. It is absolutely essential these wastes be safely transported to fuel
reprocessing facilities, the unused U235 fuel recycled, the inert U238
stored, and the Pu239 isolated for possible military use (and kept away
from terrorists). The remaining fission products and other wastes must be then
refined into some compact and non-soluble form that can be safely stored,
without human supervision, for thousands of years. This is not an engineering
impossibility, but to do it on an industrial scale would require an enormous
amount of money the private sector has shown absolutely no interest in providing. Industry instead has concentrated on investing in some temporary upgrades to obsolete plants to keep them profitably on line (and generating even more wastes) for a few more years.

The industry's program so far has been to create the most profit for the least
expenditure by not developing nuclear energy in an orderly and safe way, but by
keeping currently functioning generating capacity on line as long as possible.
For those, like myself, who favor nuclear power and recognize it as an important
part of our energy future, we can take some comfort in that the Japanese tragedy
may be the last chance we have to build a rational energy policy, one that takes
the long term economic and environmental benefit of the nation and the world
into consideration, not just the short-term economic well-being and infinite
greed of a handful of companies and their stockholders. And we must not allow the architects of the current flawed system to remain in charge of its future development, or I can guarantee there will be other Fukushimas in our future.