The question, Shannon, are you more interested in bashing leftists or are you interested in developing nuclear energy.

You can’t do one without the other. The left inculcated the idea into the popular conscience that nuclear power was fantastically dangerous and it is politically impossible to build plants without overcoming that fear.

What will you say to people when they ask, “If nuclear power isn’t dangerous, why did all these people say it was? Why do they continue to say it remains dangerous?” How do you answer that question, and convince people of the technicals truths if you cannot explain the deception?

1. Cost overruns

The major cause of cost overruns where delays caused by lawsuits and political action. In nuke construction, the cost of capital is the major expense. Paying 2-5 years interest on 4 billion dollars adds up in a hurry. Without that effect, nukes would not have had more cost overrruns than other large project. The government did push nuclear reactors in the 60′s out of prestige and that hurt. However, that problem was off the radar by 1980.

Total lack of PR

I’m not surprised. None leftist do think about propaganda per se. Most utility companies don’t have major marketing or PR departments because as monopolies they don’t need them. Any mistakes made would not have been so bad had not a hostile left been waiting to disseminate and exaggerate any mistakes.

The majority of the US population turned against nuclear energy and at no point could anyone seriously argue that the US population was on the “left” politically.

Because they believed the stories that it was dangerous. You had movies made about! Serious scientist and engineers would try to explain and then a leftist would pop out, accuse the scientist of being bought off by evil corporations and then exclaim that the people could trust only the nobel and altruistic leftist to tell the truth. There was a poll conducted in 1979 (which I read for debate class) in which 40+ of the American public thought a nuclear power station could detonate like a nuclear weapon! Where the hell did they get that idea.

So we’re at a point where we need to join together and continue the educational polemics against the anti-nukes.

And I don’t think you will get anywhere if you cannot discredit the fear mongering. As long as people trust the anti-nuke left, they’ll just assume your a pawn of the corporations.

There is this hard-core environmental community that is (and growing, BTW) motivated by climate change. This community is 95% anti-nuclear and is focused around NGO-type organizations like the RMI, Greenpeace, Green Party, etc. These are the *activists* and they number some tens of thousands.

I’m interested in changing the minds of the *passively* anti-nuclear percentage of the population that is between 30% and 45% of the country. We need to make these people at least passively pro-nuclear. We need to get the more pro-nuclear to become more outspoken, assertive and otherwise active.

Bashing the “left” isn’t going to help in this. Praising nuclear energy is.

You are correct about this: “In this regard, the question of why the left turned against nuclear power when the technical issues did not merit it tells us a lot about their cognitive processes. It informs our understanding of how they decide on other issues as well.”

But it applies not to LEFT since at the time people turned against nuclear energy, the REASONS were were multi-faceted and what you state above, while true, is a very small reason of the larger truth, which you ignore:

1. Cost overruns. After all, the anti-nuclear “left” only played a small galvanizing role in getting utilities to stop nuclear energy IN THE US. The nuclear industry is the MOST responsible for this disaster in the 1970s and 1980s. It is the industry that has to take responsibility, publicly and loudly (some have, most haven’t) about how screwed up they were in the way the US built it’s nuclear fleet. The majority of NP that were stopped or cancelled were done so without greenies or fundies running around NRC meetings. Ergo, it was the conservative Bds of Dirs. that did this.

2. Total lack of PR. Ever review the record of TMI? Terrible, stupid and WRONG information was spread to the press that MADE everyone afraid of nuclear energy. Whose fault was this Shannon? The anti-nuke “Alliances” that had already sprung up or the operator of the plant? Additionally, no other utility or nuke operator could even get out or tried to put out any serious information about what actually happened (or didn’t happen as the case may be) at TMI. No one. Zilch. I lived in Pittsburgh PA when TMI happened and it was because there was simply no counter-information to tell the truth that turned me the overwhelming majority of the population against nuclear energy and against those that defended it (which, BTW, were few and far between).

3. The majority of the US population turned against nuclear energy and at no point could anyone seriously argue that the US population was on the “left” politically. Most of my own right-wing friends, co-workers, “Reagan Democrats” were anti-nuclear after TMI.

So we’re at a point where we need to join together and continue the educational polemics against the anti-nukes. Getting from your “A” to your “B” is going to take a lot more finesse than speaking to the choir.

David

I just don’t see anything that you’ve offered that represents a deviation from the norm. You’ve never explained why I should regard this as unusual in the least.

I am not saying that there is anything unusual in the fossil fuel establishment’s effort to protect its market share from a competitor. Where you and I disagree is in your assumption that all of the individuals and distributed groups within the large group enclosed by the term “fossil fuel interests” avoided the use of negative campaigning by proxies as part of their strategy.

Can you think of another industry that has such an enormous concentration of wealth based on selling a very narrow set of products that people need that has been exposed to a competitor with technical advantages measured in orders of magnitude?

You have dismissed the “means, motive and opportunity” evidence without really thinking through how different the world’s political power structure would be if nuclear fission had been allowed to flourish. Entire economies are structured around the daily extraction, transportation, storage and delivery of large masses of fossil fuel. It is hard to be a student of world history since the beginning of the industrial age without recognizing the important role played by control of fossil fuel resources.

We currently get about 7% of the world’s primary energy from about 70,000 tons of uranium that is very inefficiently consumed, leaving almost 99% of the potential energy behind. (Note: Enriched commercial fuel uses about 4-5% of its potential energy, but the tailings from the enrichment plants could also be turned into fuel.)

Nuclear engineers and scientists have built demonstration plants like the IFR, the Light Water Breeder Reactor, the Molten Salt Breeder Reactor that have demonstrated the ability to extract nearly all of the potential energy from the heavy metal input from both thorium and uranium. Simple math would indicate a fully developed energy production system COULD supply all of the worlds primary energy needs without needing to mine much more heavy metal than we already do. The plutonium economy technically could work and marginalize the fossil fuel economy.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s many prognosticators – including many government agencies – were predicting just such an evolution with many predicting the end of the need to produce much in the way of fossil fuel energy resources.

It is a normal, but not necessarily desirable state of affairs – at least for the vast majority of us who are not deeply invested in various aspects of fossil fuel industry ownership – for the owners of the establishment sources to work diligently to slow down the growth of their competition.

It is also a normal, but not necessarily desirable state of affairs for some rather strange bedfellow arrangements to occur with some of those arrangements being less than open.

Suppose that the fossil fuel industry and its government associates did not play a role in supporting the vocal anti-nuclear movement. What would those people have done if Gerald Ford had been reelected and implemented the nuclear vision expressed in his October 1976 policy statement on nuclear energy?

Would they have just watched as they steadily lost market share?

I have spent too long on this earth and in Washington to believe that wealth has no influence on politics and public opinion.

I’m not saying it doesn’t. I’m just saying this is the normal and even desirable state of affairs. I just don’t see anything that you’ve offered that represents a deviation from the norm. You’ve never explained why I should regard this as unusual in the least.

I can see now that no matter what evidence I quote, you intend to persist in trying to convince people that any participation by the fossil fuel industry in activities that harmed nuclear power paled in comparison to the very public and vocal fight by the activists.

I have spent too long on this earth and in Washington to believe that wealth has no influence on politics and public opinion. Please forgive me if I believe that fossil fuel industry leaders can count, run spreadsheets and recognize the income potential of selling in a tight market compared to one that is adequately supplied.

Please also forgive me if I believe that the industry leaders make decisions and make reasonably accurate predictions for the future state of their industry – otherwise, why would boards of directions bother to pay them tens of millions of dollars per year.

You are right that nuclear power has – almost uniquely – been slowed by opposition. I just do not believe that the opposition that you have identified was powerful enough to do the job without a lot of assistance. The evidence that I have found and documented over the years is strong enough for me – sorry that it does not move you.

Bottom line – Nuclear technology is certainly not dead; it is showing lots of evidence of pending rapid growth, but there will still be battles in the future. Nuclear proponents will have a better chance of success if they participate in some of the normal business behavior that you mention – sharing their own stories, trash talking the opposition, and manipulating the political situation to be more in their own favor.

It might help you to know that I have special interest in political cognition i.e. the mental process by which we individually and collectively arrive at political decisions. I want to understand why persons “A” chooses one policy and person “B” chooses another. I want to understand why the same people line up on the same side of wildly different issues time and time again. In this regard, the question of why the left turned against nuclear power when the technical issues did not merit it tells us a lot about their cognitive processes. It informs our understanding of how they decide on other issues as well.

I’m glad that leftist are turning back to nuclear power but I view this as merely accidental. I believe they demonized nuclear power in the first place to create a crisis from which they could claim to protect the people. Later, they seized on global warming as another crisis to protect the the people from. However, they discovered that their crises collided, They can’t protect against global warming without using nuclear power. Since global warming is bigger and protecting against it garners more power, they sacrifice their opposition to nuclear energy.

At no time did they make a dispassionate analysis of the overall technical merits of nuclear power. They’re support of it now is just as irrational as their opposition in the past. This kind of emotive, politically motivated thinking infest the left in general, especially in topics touching on science and technology.

I don’t see any reason to cheer because they accidentally blundered into the right decision.

Just in case it has gotten lost in our give and take, the postulate that I am trying to advance is that people associated with fossil fuel and desiring to maintain its market share played at least as large a role in the slowdown of nuclear power development as “the leftists” that you blame.

But you haven’t presented any evidence this true. All technologies face competition and all technology providers trash talk the opposition and attempt to manipulate the political system to their favor. You’ve not explained why this perfectly ordinary phenomenon was so extraordinary in the case of nuclear power.

The only unusual facet of the history of nuclear power is the anti-nuke movement. No other technology has faced such a concerted, widespread and sustained propaganda attack. You’ve not the made the case for why ordinary competition played as significant a role as the extraordinary political movement.

I am sure that those last three constituencies had a lot of meetings and discussions to hash out the final agreement that led to the passage of legislation that probably had more to do with the slowdown in nuclear power than any other – the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974.[emp added]

That’s the problem. Your convinced that something unusual was going on behind the scenes so you shoehorn evidence to fit your preconception. Again, there is nothing unusual about technology providers arguing their case in government or anywhere else.

I find the idea that the fossil fuel held usual sway over electricity policy in 1974 especially dubious given that the cause of the policy review was the 1973 oil embargo and the subsequent shortage of oil.

Try this: Read back over your evidence but this time look for oblique evidence of anti-nuclear political pressure.

The US did not just stop building nuclear electric power stations, we also stopped building nuclear powered cruisers…

I would would say that the primary drivers of that were higher cost and, wait for it, the political cost of overcoming anti-nuclear hysteria. Put simply, fossil fuel powered ships “cost” less in political terms than did nuclear ones. I would note that the tremendous economic power of the coal industry in the late 1800′s did not succeed in delaying the switch from coal to oil by more than a handful of years at most.

Interestingly enough, in the 1970s, the SINGLE largest customer for the oil industry in the US was the US Navy.

And that constitutes what percentage of their total business? If I sell 99 people one popsicle each and I sell one person two popsicles, that makes the latter my “largest customer” but they comprise a trivial part of my business. In evaluating the behavior of a business, you need to look at the percentage picture.

We have a better chance of getting around the actions of the left if we plant the seed of doubt that they are – perhaps unintentionally – working to advance the interests of the establishment fossil fuel industry.

Such a technique would be effective against the anti-capitalist leftist themselves. It would give them an out to support nuclear power. “Gosh, this clean, planet saving technology was suppressed by those evil oil capitalist! Good thing we were here to save the day!”

That, however, has nothing to do with actually understanding the problem in the first place. I think it more important to understand what really happened and who was responsible so that we can head of such disasters in the future.

The cracks are appearing. The Dailykos, a liberal Democratic Party blog, has shown that many participants have now been won over to pro-nuclear positions, people who, like myself, had once held a deep seated fear of nuclear energy. The calm, non-ideological demeanor, such as those often articulated by Rod Adams, has had an impact.

If you notice, there is a rising *painic* among the Antis/Fundis of nuclear power. This is why more and more articles are appearing by people like Lovins, Rohm, Wassermen etc on the “evils” of nuclear energy. Peoples opinions are becoming MORE pro-nuclear, and this crosses ideological boundaries.

David Walters
left-atomics.blogspot.com

You wrote:

Answer this: If we accept your supposition, what actions should we take? How does that in anyway change the strategy for advancing nuclear power? I can’t see it changes anything.

The actions of the left, however, are show stopping. We can’t get around the hysteria they generate without first educating people that their fears are in fact unfounded.

Good question. We have a better chance of getting around the actions of the left if we plant the seed of doubt that they are – perhaps unintentionally – working to advance the interests of the establishment fossil fuel industry.

My humble opinion is that public education to alleviate fear is a strategy that has been consistently tried without much success.

Just in case it has gotten lost in our give and take, the postulate that I am trying to advance is that people associated with fossil fuel and desiring to maintain its market share played at least as large a role in the slowdown of nuclear power development as “the leftists” that you blame.

You wrote:

For which you have zero evidence save for your dubious argument of economic motive. You don’t have public statement, confessions of people who regretted their actions, canceled checks, autobiographies, meeting notes etc. I on the other hand have all those things in abundance.

There are many books and articles on the subject of nuclear power development – I once spent a couple of years worth of free time perusing several aisles worth of such material in the US Naval Academy library. (Yes, I am a real bore in person.) Unfortunately, that period was before I owned a laptop and my notes are in random paper binders and hard to search or catalog. I also no longer have much free time available for library visits.

Fortunately, the world now has Google Books. I did some searching and found Congress and National Energy Policy by James Everett Katz, published by Transaction Publishers, 1984. That book includes details about the evolution from a focused Atomic Energy Commission with full responsibility for nuclear power development to our current situation. We now have a regulator with no responsibility for the risk of insufficient energy supplies or the risk of pollution caused by coal, oil and natural gas and a Department of Energy that has competing interests and budgetary priorities between all forms of energy.

Here is a quote from page 39-40 under the heading of
Atomic Energy: A Growing Problem
“The lack of a strategic approach to energy policy and distorted energy research and development priorities were among the elements that led to rising congressional displeasure about the heavy stress the federal government had given to atomic energy. Atomic energy – because of its dramatic quality and importance to national security – had from its inception received concentrated attention and support from the federal government.”

Later on page 40 the book continues:

“During the 1970s this independence was increasingly attacked, both from within the government and outside. During the 1973-1974 energy shortages criticism was augmented by supporters of competing energy sources and by public interest groups.”

On page 51, after more details about the various interests and leadership in the effort to reorganize federal energy policy, the book goes on under the heading of

Curbing Nuclear Energy

Congress had led the White House into reorganizing the government’s energy research and development responsibilities by replacing the “anachronistic” AEC with a broad-based energy research agency. The new agency’s degree of commitment to nuclear power, as opposed to other energy sources was hotly contested, but the basic concept of reordering the structure met with little resistance…
Before ERDA could be properly established it had been necessary first to disarm the JCAE (Joint Committee on Atomic Energy), which had traditionally hampered reorganization efforts that might slow atomic energy development or diminish its fiefdom – the AEC. Partly because of congressional concerns about overemphasis on nuclear energy, the JCAE began to lose its once awesome influence…
Virulent public attacks had also weakened the JCAE, which was seen as being “outmoded,” forcing an “overconcentration,” and fostering “proprietary interest” in nuclear energy at the expense of other “more promising” sources of power…
Because much of the effort to overcome the nuclear lobby would have been wasted if it were allowed to dominate the newly formed ERDA, the Senate included safeguards to assure that all energy technologies would receive ample consideration. The Senate report of the ERDA bill sought “balance and meaningful priority-setting among the competing energy sources…

Finally, (for this comment, but certainly not the end of the evidence) page 54 provides a fairly clear summary of a couple of years of bureaucratic infighting and competing testimony.

ERDA (Energy Research and Development Agency) was an awkward conglomerate of competing interests in possession of a nebulous mandate and diffuse goals and faced with an antagonistic combination of clients…
Such eclecticism resulted from ERDA’s need to satisfy four constituencies. The atomic establishment wanted to push for nuclear energy development in every available format. Those generally interested in energy policy wanted a central mechanism that could rationalize and plan energy research, develop long-range objectives, and oversee the pursuit of these ends. Nuclear power opponents wanted a new nuclear safety agency split off from energy development because AEC could not realistically be expected to both promote nuclear energy and be circumspect about controlling, regulating and evaluating it. Finally, proponents of other energy forms – such as coal, solar, and oil – sought an institutional structure that would promote development of their favored energy form. To continue with only a pronuclear establishment, these three latter constituencies argued would result in an imbalance of government R&D efforts.

I am sure that those last three constituencies had a lot of meetings and discussions to hash out the final agreement that led to the passage of legislation that probably had more to do with the slowdown in nuclear power than any other – the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974.

One of the major consequences of the disbanding of the JCAE, which Katz includes as part of reorganization effort, was to eliminate the congressional and senate staff expertise on the value of nuclear power for such applications as ship propulsion.

The US did not just stop building nuclear electric power stations, we also stopped building nuclear powered cruisers and destroyers and never did get around to building nuclear powered amphibious ships. We even decommissioned our few nuclear ships early rather than invest in the maintenance and upgrades of what were fairly unique designs without many following units.

We did build about ten carriers and continued building submarines. However all the rest of our naval vessels have been oil fired despite the proven tactical value of endurance and speed provided by nuclear power. Certain congressional committees and Navy budget submitters liked oil fired ships because they could be built for a somewhat lower initial cost.

The Navy liked getting more ships, even if they required refueling every few days. From the mid 1970s until just recently, it has been generally easy for Navy budgeters to convince Congress to provide operational funds for fuel each year and more difficult to educate them on the investment benefits of nuclear power. (BTW – please do not attempt to accuse me of ignorance on this particular issue.)

Interestingly enough, in the 1970s, the SINGLE largest customer for the oil industry in the US was the US Navy.

#Technology has reduced NOx emissions down to almost insignificant levels (from 100 to 200 ppb to almost 4 ppb).

#Methane, the actual fuel, is not a ‘product’ but is often released when starting up a gas fired power plant or purging it and shutting down. This is especially true for Gas Turbines.

#H20 in the form of condensed steam is a major out put of any NG combustion. It is actually a by produce of hydrocarbon production and is what is the visible effluent coming out of any plant stack.

#CO is the product of NG production albeit at very small levels if the unit is tuned correctly. It usually represents a serious safety consideration when firing a conventional boiler.

#CO2 is *substantial* in an NG fuel power plant. That’s less than coal is obvious but that it is still a major stationary source of CO2 cannot and should not be overlooked.

#Particulate. This isn’t talked about much *except* if you live within a few thousand feet of a NG power plant. The “Particulate Micron 5″ or “…2.5″ or “…10″ are all causes of various respiratory illness and represents, usually, the major objection by local communities down wind from any NG power plant.

David Walters
24 years of NG fired boiler experience

If you knew how emissions trading works, you’d know that natgas plants generally don’t need to buy credits because they can burn so clean.

Emission credits do not currently cover CO2 emissions. If the true “cost” of an activity includes its external cost, and the external cost of CO2 emissions are very high due to global warming, then the cost natural gas is much higher than just its commodities price would suggest.

In the case of nuclear power, the cost of the uranium fuel is trivial compared to the cost of the plant itself. The primary cost of the plant today, under real world conditions, is the cost of capital. That cost in turn is high due to the unpredictable delays and even outright termination risk poised by the current legal/political climate.

As the comparing the cost of between two energy sources is tricky. Based just on technology, natural gas is slightly cheaper than nuclear. All other factors combined, nuclear is much cheaper.

Actually, if you took the time to look through this blog’s archives you might find a number of relevant posts.

Natural gas is mostly methane and does indeed burn cleanly. However, the products of burning methane are water and carbon dioxide, so what are talking about? You seem to be confusing CO2 emissions with NOx and soot. Shannon was referring specifically to the kinds of emissions that global-warming enthusiasts worry about, which in this case would be CO2.

BTW, is your PhD in sociology or women’s studies?

Sign carrying, tie died leftists do not really have much political or economic power.

They have enormous power. They control academia and exert enormous influence over the media and entertainment. They wield the power that comes from being the ones that create the stories we tell ourselves about our lives and society. They get to define what society views as good and bad.

According to all of the recent polls, there are not all that many ordinary people who have a hysterical fear of nuclear power and there never really were.

Things were different circa 1980. Anti-nuclear hysteria was so bad that hundreds of people within 50 miles of Three Mile Island died of stress induced by the fear nuclear contamination.

The “dash to gas” in electrical power production in the 1990s and 2000s did not happen by accident …

That dash started 20 years after nuclear power was shutdown. Natural gas and alternative energy are only on the table because we took nuclear power off. Your looking back at the past with the advantage of hindsight. Nobody in public life circa 1980, not even those in the oil industry (who should have known better) believed that we would have any fossil fuels in the future. Anyone who walked into any public or private meeting during the heart of the energy crises and said, “hey, we don’t need nuclear, we can can burn oil and gas to generate electricity!” would have been considered stark raving mad.

The people that decided to stop building new nuclear plants and who continue to resist making commitments to order them sit in large, well appointed offices and chat with each other at industry conferences and cocktail parties.

No, they sit in grubbing little offices screaming to get $10,000 in donations so that they can file lawsuits that can block construction on a $4 billion dollar plant for two years. I know because I knew people who actually did that.

It was also enabled by the way that fuel is treated as a pass through cost in most regulated states.

It’s called cost plus pricing and all utilities and most companies under contract to the government use it. When you cannot predict future cost under price controls you sign a contract setting the price at your cost but a fixed percentage of profit. It’s the only way anyone will invest money in something like a regulated utility.

If you wonder who the major players are in the American Gas Association…

I don’t much care because they weren’t players circa 1980 when all this happened.

BTW – the nuclear power industry was never shut down – its growth was restricted for a time that so far has not been all that unusual compared to other new technologies.

Twenty years went by without a single new plant coming online that wasn’t already long in the pipeline. That is unprecedented in the history of technology.

One more thing – if you think that ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, Anadarko, Gazprom, Aramaco, Total, Eni, Chesapeake Energy, Halliburton, and hundreds of other energy companies benefit from low energy prices, you evidently cannot read a balance sheet or income statement and have no idea how to correlate them with published energy prices over time.

Bust follow booms, the higher the boom, the lower the bust. It’s been that way for over a century. During the “energy crisis” of the ’73-’83, the oil companies only made money the last 3 years after the lifting of price controls and windfall profits tax. The bust in late 83 was absolutely devastating to the oil business wiping out most of the gains from the previous three years. The oil industry like moderately high prices but hates really high prices because those prices trigger counteractions, such as recessions, which in turn trigger a bust.

Actually, the definition of “conspiracy” includes not only the requirement for “secret” activity, but also for that activity to be illegal.

In this context, it means deception and under handed activities. It means hiding your influence to trick people who believe that they’re striking a blow against capitalism. You’re arguing that apparent history of the anti-nuclear movement in which leftist shutdown nuclear power isn’t the real story but rather that a secret cabal of economic competitors actually shut nukes down. That is the very definition of an economic conspiracy.

It means secretly financing radical leftist to protest, make movies, file lawsuits and pass ridiculous laws requiring plans for evacuating millions of people in 8 hours. It means secretly getting people like Jane “China Syndrome” Fonda and Tom Harkin to advance your economic interest.

I am asserting that efforts to restrict the growth of a competitor with enormous technical advantages was part of a long-term marketing campaign…

For which you have zero evidence save for your dubious argument of economic motive. You don’t have public statement, confessions of people who regretted their actions, canceled checks, autobiographies, meeting notes etc. I on the other hand have all those things in abundance.

Without knowing who the enemies are, any strategy for success is bound to fail.

Exactly, ignoring the social/political/cultural dimension of anti-nuclear activity dooms us to failure. We can defeat the arguments of economic competitors with rational discussions on the technical merits of the respective technology. We can’t easily defeat irrational fear whipped up by those in pursuit power.

Economic actors seeking to advance their own products and undercut those of the competition are perfectly ordinary actions that occur in the history of every technology and indeed every facet of economic life. They require no special attention or action. Their effects are naturally factored into the decision making system.

Answer this: If we accept your supposition, what actions should we take? How does that in anyway change the strategy for advancing nuclear power? I can’t see it changes anything.

The actions of the left, however, are show stopping. We can’t get around the hysteria they generate without first educating people that their fears are in fact unfounded.

This is the problem: a lot of debate without much facts to go on. Garbage in, garbage out.

If you knew how emissions trading works, you’d know that natgas plants generally don’t need to buy credits because they can burn so clean. I’m not saying there are no emissions, just very few ‘greenhouse gases.’ You were given a quote on natgas from the NYMEX; for a cost on nuclear fuels, you might have started by looking at the NYMEX website. Guess what? They trade uranium. Hey, while you’re there, why not look up heating oil (which kerosene and diesel are priced off of) and coal. Then, go over to the CCX (that’s Chicago Climate Exchange) and price up some emissions credits.

How many credits to buy? Well, poke around in some electricity generator reports.

Sheesh. Less than a year with a PhD from the UofC and already the alumni have me embarrassed. What? Are you guys MBA grads? None of you have even mentioned that Chicago gets 75% of its electricity from nuclear. Go back to arguing something which doesn’t involve details; a few of you are in over your heads.

You wrote:

Advancing the idea that the apparent dynamics of the anti-nuclear movement i.e. people motivated by a fear of nuclear weapons and a hatred of capitalism, is not the true driver of the anti-nuke movement but rather that someone operating in secret, in this case the oil companies, is the very definition of a conspiracy. Ask yourself, if this is not the assertion of an economic conspiracy, what would such an assertion look like?

Actually, the definition of “conspiracy” includes not only the requirement for “secret” activity, but also for that activity to be illegal. I am not asserting that the fossil fuel interests met in secret and devised illegal means of maintaining their market position. I am asserting that efforts to restrict the growth of a competitor with enormous technical advantages was part of a long-term marketing campaign to keep as much market share as possible by spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt about that competitor and by assisting others who were already spreading that FUD. (As business executives learn in their training and reading programs – “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”)

The fossil fuel industry meets all the time, often behind closed doors. Nothing unusual or nefarious about that, all industries do it. If they did not, convention centers would not exist.

The industry’s market share protection effort included lobbying campaigns to erect barriers to entry and to try to obtain as much assistance for their own product offerings as possible.

Nothing illegal there, but certainly nothing that really seeks to benefit customers by providing the best possible product at the lowest possible cost.

For any more open minded readers of this thread, please remember that I continue to use a much more broad term – fossil fuel interests – than what Shannon uses – oil companies – in her rebuttals. My effort is not aimed boogymen like “Big Oil”; its purpose is to help people who favor the use of nuclear power to realize that there are many natural enemies (competitors).

Without knowing who the enemies are, any strategy for success is bound to fail. If you think all you have to do is attack “leftists” for their efforts to slow nuclear power developments you will remain confused about why the nuclear industry has struggled for so long.

The story might be nice and tidy in your closed mind, but those of us who have spent some time on this earth in competitive environments have a different opinion.

Sign carrying, tie died leftists do not really have much political or economic power. If they did, industrial society would have been shut down long ago.

According to all of the recent polls, there are not all that many ordinary people who have a hysterical fear of nuclear power and there never really were. The people that decided to stop building new nuclear plants and who continue to resist making commitments to order them sit in large, well appointed offices and chat with each other at industry conferences and cocktail parties. I know – I have been there off and on for about 15 years.

The “dash to gas” in electrical power production in the 1990s and 2000s did not happen by accident – it was part of a large scale marketing campaign by the natural gas industry to convince Americans and Europeans that gas was a “clean”, “cheap” and easy way to generate electrical power. In the board rooms, the decision to build gas fired power was made easier by generous financing deals by Chevron, Shell, ExxonMobil, and others.

It was also enabled by the way that fuel is treated as a pass through cost in most regulated states. That treatment was not accidental – it was written into the regulations by people who knew exactly what kind of economic advantage it provided to a natural gas fired power plant.

If you wonder who the major players are in the American Gas Association, it is pretty easy to read down the list – if you are a member or know someone who is.

I will give you a hint – some of the names on the list are the same as the brands at your local gasoline filling station.

BTW – the nuclear power industry was never shut down – its growth was restricted for a time that so far has not been all that unusual compared to other new technologies. It has only been 66 years since the very first fission chain reaction took place and only 52 years since the very first large scale use of nuclear fission power in a power plant.

One more thing – if you think that ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, Anadarko, Gazprom, Aramaco, Total, Eni, Chesapeake Energy, Halliburton, and hundreds of other energy companies benefit from low energy prices, you evidently cannot read a balance sheet or income statement and have no idea how to correlate them with published energy prices over time.

I don’t actually care if people selling non-nuclear technology try to sell their technology by public “education” or lobbying. That is the way the process works. We decide which technologies to use by a competitive process, especially in a socialized sector like electricity.

Oil companies…ALL the big ones…basically fought every clean air act, every fuel efficiency standard and of course, even the idea of climate change…but they don’t care about nuclear????

They didn’t back in the 70′s when all this happened. Oil companies stood to earn more from, say, lower manufacturing cost on automobiles due to cheap electricity than they did from shutting down nuclear power.

You simply cannot argue around the fact that we shutdown nuclear power in the 70′s and that many ordinary people today have an hysterical fear of nuclear power due to the efforts of anti-nuclear activist in from the late 60′s to the present day. Any effects from economic competitors is trivial, especially when weighed against the overwhelming interest of all the corporations and individuals who benefit from cheap power. All new technologies face invested interest but nuclear power was the only technology in history to be shutdown by shear political hysteria.

Leftist shutdown nuclear power in a childish attempt to stop the nuclear arms race and from a desire to acquire power by claiming to protect people from the evils of capitalism.

End of story.

#Wind power turbine manufacturers that are exclusively wind production enterprises are generally anti-nuclear and participate in lobbying efforts to that end. Windclipper for one but there are others. (I don’t begrudge them this, btw, it is IN their interest to oppose nuclear even though they don’t really compete as we all know). This is not a secret, it’s open, and there is actually nothing wrong, even from my left wing point of view on this.

#Chesapeake Gas has funded “environmental” goups that also oppose coal and nuclear. They did this in Kansas the most recently but also funded “pro-natural gas” generation adds in local newspapers as the Calvert Cliffs nuclear expansion was being proposed.

#Amory Lovins “doesn’t work for the oil industry”. Please. You don’t have to be an salaried staff member of Chevron to “work for them”. No one is that naive. Secondly, to Lovin’s credit, he’s quite open about it and has never hid this, even his most recent interview with Amy Goodman from WBAI in NY (who is now in jail after her civil rights were violated by the cops in St. Paul). He has “greenwashed” tons of…carbon producing enterprises was the primary consultant for the California swing away from nuclear and toward…natural gas, which he endorses.

Nuclear can replace most natural gas usage in the US and a significant amount of oil for transportation if IV Generation reactors ever get seriously financed. There is at least this competitive aspect of the issue that you are ignoring. Secondly, and we know that the coal industry in Australia has very openly and loudly of late financed ads in the Oz papers about nuclear being a direct threat to coal miners and the coal industry. You assume the “oil industry” is above all that? Seriously?

It’s not a question of ‘conspiracy’, it’s a question of competitive self-interest. Oil companies…ALL the big ones…basically fought every clean air act, every fuel efficiency standard and of course, even the idea of climate change…but they don’t care about nuclear????

David