Many conservatives are applauding recent surveys reporting increased support for nuclear power among Democrats, Republicans, and independents. Their apparent belief is that a favorable shift in the politics of nuclear power will allow for a reduction in the massive policy favoritism toward wind and solar power — destructive economically, environmentally, and in terms of the operation of the electric power system — while facilitating the self-defeating political stance that nuclear power is “zero carbon.”
They should temper their enthusiasm. Recent analysis from the Energy Information Administration reports estimates of prospective nuclear electricity production costs more than double those of natural gas-fired electricity. (If we include the cost of backup generation to avoid blackouts, much longer transmission systems, and massive amounts of land, on-shore wind and solar power are at least five times as expensive as gas-fired electricity, and off-shore wind power is about eight times as expensive.) That assumes the price of natural gas used for power production at $3 per million btu. Even were natural gas prices to double to $6, gas-fired power still would be 23% cheaper than nuclear electricity. The hope that increased political support for nuclear power will yield increased competitiveness is deeply problematic.
It gets worse. Among the many subsidies and other favoritism bestowed upon unconventional electricity production, the wind production tax credit is the most important and the most perverse. Depending upon a complex set of timelines and wage, domestic content, and other payoffs to various interests, wind producers receive roughly $27.50 per megawatt-hour of generation.
This creates a major competitive problem for nuclear plants because the wind producers receiving those tax credits have incentives to "underprice" their power, sometimes to zero or even below, knowing that the PTC will make them whole. Nuclear powerplants cannot be ramped up and down in the face of changing market conditions; they either are operating or not. So when the wind producers cut their prices, the owners of the nuclear plants also are forced to cut their prices, and cannot cover even their operating, maintenance, and variable costs, let alone their capital costs.
In the short run this has caused major problems for the nuclear operators, particularly in the Midwest. In the long run, it increases the riskiness of nuclear investment because of uncertainty about the magnitude of future subsidized competition from wind producers, and it reduces average future prices below those that otherwise would be expected by prospective nuclear operators.
Originally enacted in 1992, the “temporary” wind PTC has been scheduled to be phased out but then extended over a dozen times, most recently in the Inflation Reduction Act. The wind PTC has become a quasi-permanent feature of the policy landscape in substantial part because of the presence of a number of Republican senators from wind states. It is a major obstacle to the competitiveness of nuclear power.
However unfavorable the underlying economics, the conservative/Republican support for nuclear power is not misguided technologically. The same cannot be said about several of the other ideas that they have promoted, including such silliness as the “trillion trees” and “carbon capture and sequestration” nostrums. Republicans advocating them seem to believe that they provide a substitute for the hard work of actually confronting the leftist climate “crisis” madness, an endeavor that many Republicans have abandoned in favor of a stance of “Me too, but less,” driven by the apparent belief that “You can’t beat something with nothing,” and that it is not worth the effort to refute the evidence-free, anti-human, and totalitarian arguments of the climate alarmists.
It won’t work. Once conservatives and Republicans endorse, however implicitly, the idea that carbon dioxide is a pollutant — “nuclear power is zero-carbon” — they will have lost the debate. They will be reduced to negotiating with themselves over which destructive policies are acceptable, and they will find themselves without a bedrock principle with which to oppose an ever-expanding system of central planning. The only political benefit attendant upon the promotion of "carbon-free" nuclear power is the vociferous opposition elicited from the environmental left, thus exposing their hypocrisy. That simply is not enough.
Note that a certain minimum atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is necessary for life itself; it is not a “pollutant.” By far the most important greenhouse gas in terms of the radiative properties of the troposphere is water vapor, which no one calls a “pollutant.” But why not? Is it because ocean evaporation is a natural process? So are volcanic eruptions, the massive emissions from which of aerosols and toxins are pollutants by any definition.
Far better for Republicans finally to grow backbones. “All of the competitive” is a sound stance; “All of the above” is not, because the uncompetitive components have to be subsidized heavily, and thus inexorably will crowd out efficient energy. There is no evidence of a climate “crisis” in terms of temperature trends, polar sea ice, tornadoes, tropical cyclones, wildfires, drought, flooding, ocean alkalinity, and the other central dimensions of climate phenomena. The “crisis” narrative is derived wholly from climate models that overstate the mid-troposphere temperature record by factors of about 2.5. Climate policies cannot satisfy any plausible benefit/cost test: The entire Biden “net zero” policy would reduce global temperatures by all of 0.137°C by 2100, using the EPA climate model. (The entire Paris agreement: 0.141°C.) Climate alarmism will impoverish many millions in the U.S., and billions around the world because abundant energy is the sine qua non of human flourishing.
Would that be so hard?
