President Bush is often met with cyni­cism when he cites nuclear energy as a way to curb greenhouse gas emis­sions. But what about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco Democrat, who says nuclear power “has to be on the table” in any discussion of climate-change policy? Or Senator Hillary Clinton, who says it “has to be part of our energy solution”? 

While questions about the safety of nuclear power persist, the big change is that nuclear is now seen as a way to reduce the threat of global warming and the threat that countries with an animus toward the United States will exploit their oil reserves for political advantage. A new study by the National Petroleum Council, titled “Hard Truths,” points out that nuclear currently represents only about 6 percent of the total energy mix globally. That won’t change over the next 20 years “unless nuclear generation is promoted for policy objectives such as limiting carbon dioxide emissions or enhancing energy security.” It seems that those policy objectives are becoming more and more enticing. 

At a hearing of the House Committee on Science and Technology last February, Pelosi assured Republican lawmakers that she would not be an “active opponent” of nuclear energy. “I have a different view on nuclear than I did 20 years ago,” she said. “The technology has changed and I bring a more open mind to that subject now.” Similarly, during a February cam­paign stop in South Carolina, Mrs. Clinton denied any “preconceived opposition” to nuclear power. “It doesn’t put greenhouse gas emissions into the air,” she said. 

More and more Democrats and ardent environ­mentalists are now rethinking the nuclear option. They have been joined in Europe by politicians anxious to meet their emissions targets under the Kyoto Protocol and wary of their vulnerability to energy blackmail by unpredictable or hostile gov­ernments in nations like Russia and Iran. “It is impossible to fulfill the Kyoto objectives without using nuclear energy,” Michael Glos, the German economics minister, said in early 2007. 

‘It is impossible to fulfill the Kyoto objectives without using nuclear energy,’ Michael Glos, the German economics minister, said in early 2007.

This year, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) expects to field a raft of building applications for new nuclear plants. China, India, and other Asian countries are already moving ahead with blueprints for more reactors. In late November, China’s top nuclear company signed an $11.9 billion agreement with the French nuclear firm Areva. As The New York Times reported, this marked “the largest deal in the industry’s history.” The paper quoted John B. Ritch, director general of the World Nuclear Association, saying, “A nuclear renaissance is now gearing up everywhere in the world.” 

According to the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), commercial nuclear power currently provides nearly 20 percent of America’s elec­tricity, with just over 100 operating reactors in 31 states. In 2006, the states most dependent on nuclear power for their electricity needs included Vermont (75 percent), New Jersey (53 percent), and South Carolina (52 percent). Nuclear also accounted for the largest portion of electric­ity generation in Illinois, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and New York. 

One of the most prominent supporters of nuclear energy is a Prius-driving Republican who also supports a cap-and-trade regime for carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and who left the Bush administration partly because she felt it was insufficiently green. Christine Todd Whitman, governor of New Jersey from 1994 to 2001, spent a tur­bulent two and a half years as director of the Environmental Protection Agency, and Bush’s opponents cast her 2003 departure as further evidence of the president’s baleful record on global warming. In 2006, Whitman became co-chair of an industry-backed pro-nuclear group known as the Clean and Safe Energy (“CASEnergy”) coalition. 

“What brought me to nuclear in the first place was the environmental aspect of it,” she says. “It doesn’t produce greenhouse gases,” nor does it produce such “regulated emissions” as sulfur dioxide and mercury. She is sensitive to linger­ing safety concerns, but stresses that the U.S. nuclear industry boasts a “very good” record. Even the 1979 Three Mile Island accident, Whitman argues, wound up being a success story in terms of damage control; there were no injuries to plant workers or to residents of local communities. 

Three Mile Island did, however, spark a public backlash against nuclear power, from which the industry has still not totally recovered. The par­tial meltdown near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, occurred just days after “The China Syndrome,” Jane Fonda’s antinuclear movie, opened in the­aters nationwide. Since then, there has not been a single new reactor ordered and built in the United States. The much more serious melt­down at Chernobyl in the Soviet Union in 1986 strengthened antinuclear taboos. But that was before fighting climate change became the focus of green movements across the globe. The cam­paign to reduce greenhouse gases has made some environmentalists more sympathetic to a technology they once strenuously opposed. 

One scientist who has changed his mind on nuclear is Patrick Moore, a founding member of Greenpeace who later split from the organization and now serves as co-chair of CASEnergy. Moore says the pro-nuclear movement is “a worldwide phenom­enon” and tackles the safety question head-on: “No one has been injured by nuclear power in the United States.” Indeed, citing Bureau of Labor Statistics data, he says it is now statistically safer to work in the American nuclear industry than it is to work in financial services or real estate. The CASEnergy fact sheet puts it this way: “You would have to live near a nuclear power plant for over 2,000 years to get the same amount of radiation exposure that you get from a single diagnostic medical x-ray.” 

The Whitman-Moore coalition supports fur­ther research into renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, and geothermal power. But it counsels a realistic assessment: geothermal is often impractical and capital-intensive, while wind and solar remain “intermittent and unre­liable.” According to CASEnergy, “A wind farm would need 235 square miles to produce the same amount of electricity as a 1,000-megawatt nuclear power plant. The nuclear plant would occupy less than one-half of 1 percent of that area. A 1,000-megawatt power plant can meet the needs of a city the size of Boston or Seattle.” 

Novelist Gwyneth Cravens, a former fiction editor at The New Yorker, makes a similar argu­ment in her new book Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy. “Despite the sums spent on wind and solar power in the past 30 years, and investments on the part of big energy corporations, fossil fuels remain dominant, and the small reduction in their use is almost totally due to the increased effi­ciency of nuclear power,” she writes. Though once a nuclear skeptic, Cravens spent several years investigating the technology and eventu­ally became a full-throated supporter. She now considers nuclear power essential to the fight against global warming. “Using a small foot­print, hundreds of nuclear plants in more than 30 countries cut carbon emissions by 600 mil­lion metric tons every year.” No, the process of harvesting nuclear energy is not entirely “carbon-free.” But “an inclusive analysis of the life cycle of nuclear power—the extraction of uranium and its transformation into fuel, the construc­tion of plants, the decommissioning of reactors, and the disposal of waste—shows that through­out the process, nuclear power emits about the same amount of carbon or slightly less than is produced during the typical life cycle of wind turbines and solar panels.” 

A founding member of Greenpeace, citing Bureau of Labor Statistics data, says it is now statistically safer to work in the U.S. nuclear industry than in financial services.

According to polls, says Cravens, most sci­entists want to expand nuclear power. In her book’s introduction, distinguished historian Richard Rhodes explains his own conversion to the nuclear cause. “I began writing about energy issues for national magazines back in the 1970s,” he says, “in the years of the Arab oil embargo and the ensuing energy crisis. I was as reflexively antinuclear in those days as too many of my col­leagues continue to be today. Then I researched and wrote my book The Making of the Atomic Bomb. In the course of doing so, I got to know the extraordinary men and women who devel­oped the science of nuclear physics, many Nobel laureates among them, and learned to my sur­prise that they looked at nuclear energy very differently from their perspective of firsthand knowledge than I did from my perspective of sec­ondhand ignorance. I asked them questions, I read their work, I visited laboratories and power plants, I researched and wrote a book-length his­tory of the development of nuclear power in the United States, and what I learned changed my mind. I came to understand that nuclear power is one of the best solutions to environmental public health problems, as well as a necessary and probably central part of any effort to reduce global warming.” 

Not all environmentalists agree. When, in 2004, the late Anglican cleric Hugh Montefiore called nuclear power “the solution” to global warming, he was forced to resign from the board of Friends of the Earth, a British group he once chaired. The green lobby also attacked James Lovelock, winner of the 1997 Blue Planet Prize (an environmental award often compared to the Nobel Prize), after he began urging opponents to shed their “irrational fear” of nuclear tech­nology. But among the more pragmatic greens, antinuclear attitudes are softening.

In early 2007, the European Commission in Brussels unveiled “An Energy Policy for Europe,” which looked favorably on nuclear for economic, security, and environmental rea­sons. “Nuclear power has been one of the ways of limiting CO₂ emissions within the EUand, for those Member States that wish, is also likely to form part of an energy scenario where significant emission reductions are going to be required in the coming decades,” the report said. “Nuclear power is less vulnerable to fuel price changes than coal- or gas-fired generation, as uranium represents a limited part of the total cost of gen­erating nuclear electricity and is based on sources which are sufficient for many decades and widely distributed around the globe.” Noting that the International Energy Agency has projected global use of nuclear to expand significantly by 2030, the European Commission stressed there were “economic benefits in maintaining and developing the techno­logical lead of the EU in this field.” 

Several of the post-Communist-era East European countries have plans to build new reactors, largely to mitigate their dependence on Russian energy supplies.

France generates more of its electricity—almost 80 percent—from nuclear power than any other country. In 2006, according to the NEI, Belgium and Sweden produced, respectively, about 54 percent and 48 percent of their electric­ity with nuclear, though both are committed to closing their reactors eventually. Among the other countries most reliant on nuclear were Lithuania (more than 70 percent); Ukraine (just under 50 percent); and South Korea and Switzerland (each a bit below 40 percent). Several of the post-Communist-era East European countries have plans to build new reactors, largely to mitigate their dependence on Russian energy supplies. 

Similar fears may influence the debate in Berlin. Although Germany generates around 30 percent of its electricity from nuclear, the Social Democrat–Green coalition of former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder voted to phase out nuclear power by 2020. But after watching Russia briefly cut off the fuel flow to Belarus and Ukraine for political reasons, Schröder’s successor, Christian Democrat Angela Merkel, hinted that her govern­ment might wish to reconsider the policy, given Germany’s reliance on Russian gas and oil. 

In Great Britain, which currently depends on nuclear power for about 20 percent of its elec­tricity, a government energy review published in July 2006 buttressed Tony Blair’s aggressive promotion of nuclear as a tool to trim CO₂ emis­sions. “Our assessment is that higher projected fossil fuel prices and the introduction of a carbon price to place a value on CO₂ have improved the economics of nuclear as a source of low carbon generation,” the report said. “We have concluded that new nuclear power stations would make a significant contribution to meeting our energy policy goals.” 

Finland, which generated about one-third of its electricity from nuclear power in 2005, high­lights both the potential and the limitations of European support for going nuclear. In 1993, the Finnish parliament rejected a proposal to build the country’s fifth nuclear reactor, an idea that had been kicking around since the 1980s. Yet by 2002, the Finns were more amenable: the par­liament narrowly endorsed construction of the reactor, prompting the Green Party to resign from Finland’s coalition government. As in other European countries, the impetus to go nuclear came partly from Kyoto mandates and worries over Russian fuel imports. Their fifth plant is due to be operational in 2009, and there has recently been talk of constructing a sixth. 

The opposition of Finland’s Greens is no anom­aly. The environmental lobbies in Europe and the United States still don’t like nuclear power. “It’s too expensive and it takes too long to bring online,” says Jim Riccio, a nuclear policy ana­lyst with Greenpeace. Riccio, who once worked for the Naderite Public Citizen organization, dis­misses CASEnergy as “a paid front group” for the NEI. “They’re being used by the industry,” he says of Whitman and Moore. (CASEnergy is transparent about its financial backers, which include the NEI.) Rather than going nuclear, Greenpeace would prefer to boost “efficiency standards” and focus on renewables such as wind and solar—and shame the U.S. govern­ment into joining Kyoto. 

Nuclear critics ‘do have legitimate questions,’ former EPA director Christine Todd Whitman admits. ‘I think the industry now has legitimate answers.’

Riccio ticks off a host of proliferation and safety concerns, including the near-accident at Ohio’s scandal-plagued Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station in 2002 and the persistent problems caused by Japan’s reactors (which have suffered several bad accidents in recent years, including the leakage of radioactive material this summer following an earthquake). “The nuclear industry has never been able to deliver what it promises,” Riccio says. 

Other leading environmental groups concur. In an October 2005 position paper, the Natural Resources Defense Council argued, “The nuclear power industry in its present state suffers from too many security, safety, and environmental exposure problems and excessive costs to qualify as a leading means to combat global warming.” Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, has said, “Even if we can design—and operate—safe nuclear power plants, nuclear power is not safe if we cannot mine uranium safely, or man­age the nonproliferation problems associated with having nuclear expertise embedded every­where there is electricity.” 

Riccio points to a 2003 study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which found “four critical problems” with expanding nuclear power use: cost, safety, waste, and prolif­eration. “In deregulated markets, nuclear power is not now cost-competitive with coal and natu­ral gas,” the authors said. Meanwhile, “We know little about the safety of the overall fuel cycle, beyond reactor operation.” 

None of the four hurdles, however, was deemed insurmountable by the MIT researchers. For one thing, nuclear plants may be costly to build and bring online, but they are relatively cheap to operate. And a carbon tax would instantly make them more competitive with coal and gas. “We believe the nuclear option should be retained,” the report concluded, “precisely because it is an important carbon-free source of power that can potentially make a significant contribution to future electricity supply.” 

In terms of waste, the MIT study reckoned that “successful operation of the planned disposal facility at Yucca Mountain would ease, but not solve, the waste issue for the U.S. and other coun­tries if nuclear power expands substantially.” So why not make Yucca into a national waste repos­itory? That’s what the Bush administration has tried to do since 2001. But there are several poten­tial roadblocks, including a license review by the NRC, litigation battles, concern over radiation standards, and a denial of funding by Congress. 

Yucca is located roughly 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, inside the Department of Energy’s Nevada Test Site, where hundreds of nuclear weapons were detonated during the Cold War. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, remains adamantly opposed to the Bush plan. Whitman, who supports making Yucca a federal reposi­tory, puts it bluntly: “The problem is Harry Reid.” 

Moore believes that “Yucca is a key to the puzzle,” but “not the key.” Several states—includ­ing California, Illinois, Connecticut, and Wisconsin—essentially bar the construction of new nuclear reactors before a national waste repository is established. But either way, Moore insists, we don’t want to be put­ting spent uranium and plutonium into Yucca. We want to be “burning it” for fuel. He regrets that America has been so reluctant to embrace the recycling of spent nuclear fuel rods. President Jimmy Carter banned the practice, also known as “nuclear reprocessing,” in 1977, hoping to thwart weapons proliferation. “But it had abso­lutely no impact on that,” Moore argues. “The United States has allowed itself to fall 35 years behind the rest of the nuclear community.” 

Writing in Science magazine three years ago, Princeton scholars Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow diagnosed the thrust of the challenge for nuclear promoters: “Substantial expansion in nuclear power requires restoration of pub­lic confidence in safety and waste disposal, and international security agreements governing uranium enrichment and plutonium recycling.” But Whitman remains convinced these prob­lems are manageable. Nuclear critics “do have legitimate questions,” she admits. “I think the industry now has legitimate answers.” 

Duncan Currie is managing editor of THE AMERICAN.