It Ain't Easy Being Green

Are you ready for the new definition of "green"? No, it's not the new black. It's nuclear power.

That's not the punch line to some obscure joke. In the latest Orwellian repackaging of an unpopular initiative, the right is attempting to recast nuclear power as the greenest alternative available to the evil-doer-supporting oil industry.

In an eerie replay that is reminiscent of the run-up before the Iraq war, the passing of No Child Left Behind and the Medicare Drug Benefit, suddenly the opinion pages are littered with commentary that is critical of other alternative power sources, claims that conservation efforts will be too little-too late and downplaying the dangers of nuclear power.

My favorite bolstering claim is the one that suggests that imposing an $X per ton tax on carbon emissions renders nuclear power's costs competitive. Tack that sentence onto any energy analysis and substitute another number for X and anything can be made to look cost-competitive, even using the ambient heat from your television set.

To understand why nuclear energy isn't green (and all those conservation groups that are allegedly forging alliances over this issue ought be ashamed of themselves), the nuclear advocates have to be sent back to the dictionary to re-learn the definition of another important word--pollution. The pollution that causes global warming is not the only kind of pollution, and some kinds are far worse than others.

Truly green solutions view the earth as a living organism with systems that are vital to it's survival (not our survival, but survival of the organism as a whole). Viewed through that lens the costs of nuclear power are infinitely expensive because the polluting by-products of nuclear power are impossible to ameliorate. We must necessarily pick sections of the earth (mostly underground) to permanently poison, and hope they remain isolated. Yes, carbon emissions are bad, but with enough determination, they are reversible, and not immediately toxic. It is the difference between drinking alcohol and drinking arsenic.

The true cost of each power source in this country will never be clear to the consumer until the costs of ameliorating the pollutive by-products are integrated into the supply cost. Nuclear energy, in particular, has never been subject to true market costs in this country, because it has always been highly-subsidized by this government, and clean-up costs invariably get shifted to someone else. And, if the government's cost to attempt to restore New York after 9/11 were $20 billion, what will the cost of a terrorist attack on a nuclear facility be?

And, all of those costs assume that everybody is playing by the rules. Past human behavior suggests that there is bound to be cheating and cutting corners as these plants seek to maximize profits--either by illegally disposing of wastes, or by skimping on maintenance or security, which means untold health costs down the line for invisible exposures. When the victims of those cancer clusters seven, eight, ten, twenty years down the line decide to sue, the government will surely have to step in and rescue a "necessary" industry, considered vital to our nations security because it reduced our reliance on foreign oil. By then, switching back to oil won't even be an option, because there will be such a small supply left that it will be too expensive for mass consumption.

We need a new paradigm that stops forcing these trade-offs and allows the consumer to weigh the real costs of their energy choices. Only then, can the market truly tell us what we feel comfortable living with (or dying with). Just as consumers have increasingly shown a preference for healthy, sustainable food production through higher prices for organic food, and a disdain for polluting, wasteful practices by putting pressure on tuna producers, milk producers, chicken factories, hog factories and veal factories, so they will weigh in on nuclear energy.

In the meantime, scientists, environmentalists and greens need to speak up now, before this nonsense picks up steam and overwhelms the public with misinformation. Democrats are going to need to provide a united front, even though they are overwhelmed in Congress.

Otherwise, we can go back to the old definition of green--it's what you get when you mix blue with yellow.