America Needs Nuclear Power

America Needs Nuclear Power

“The opposition to nuclear power is based, not on science, but on a hostility to science, technology and capitalism” - Travis Norsen, Ph.D. Nuclear Physics

As Congress ponders how the country can avoid an energy crisis like the one that has affected California, many people believe that only science-fiction can offer a long-term solution--a solution in which discoveries in theoretical physics would lead to a new energy-producing technology. The fuel for this technology, as they imagine it, would be abundantly available, safe, inexpensive and clean.

It may surprise those people to learn that the only fiction here is the belief that this is some future fantasy. Actually, the relevant discoveries in physics happened nearly a century ago, and the resulting technology--nuclear power--is now almost 50 years old. But the fact that this valuable technology is playing a diminishing role in our economy reveals something very important--not about nuclear power itself, but about the motives of its militant opponents.

Nuclear power provides a cheap alternative to fossil-fuel-based sources of electricity. With comparable capital and operating costs, and a mere fraction of the fuel costs, it can provide electricity at 5080 percent of the price of traditional sources. It is extremely reliable, and is by far the cleanest of any viable energy source currently known.

Its safety record is also exemplary. In America today, the nuclear industry ranks among the safest places to work. It experiences only 0.34 accidents resulting in lost work time per 200,000 worker-hours, compared with a 3.1 average throughout private industry. While during the past 40 years, hundreds of thousands have died as a result, direc...

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...upplies of electricity.

The opposition to nuclear power represents a political, not a scientific, viewpoint. The anti-nuclear groups, and the broader environmentalist movement of which they are a part, are fundamentally hostile to capitalism and production. They are against nuclear power, not on any sound scientific grounds, but for the same reason they consistently oppose logging and oil drilling and dam construction--because they want to reverse the progress we have made in conquering nature to serve man's interests.

They do not seek a better means of generating energy--they want us to "conserve" and to do with less. Their goal is to turn out the lights on our industrial society. What the defenders of nuclear energy need, therefore, is to defend that industrial society--by upholding man's moral right to produce the wealth on which his values and life depend.