Nuclear power? Yes, please.

MY grandfather was a coal miner. My father was an electrical engineer. Energy appears to be in my blood. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when I was growing up in the north of England, we seemed to be heading for a new age of energy production. Just to the south of us was a community called Seaton Carew, in the county of Durham. It needed more electricity, and a new coal-fired power station was proposed. The people objected. As Ian Fells, emeritus professor of energy conversion at the nearby University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne puts it, they said, "Why can't we have one of those new, clean nuclear power stations?" My neighbors got their wish. In 1969, work began on the Hartlepool Nuclear Plant. Since 1983, it has provided 3 percent of the United Kingdom's energy.

Next year, decommissioning work will begin on the plant. The local people are opposed to a replacement nuclear facility. What happened? The answer is strangely universal. Around the Western world, environmentalists did what they do best: They exploited fear and massaged science to make nuclear power morally unacceptable, impeding progress and innovation. Y et today they find their case weakened--perhaps fatally--by another concern born from another campaign of fear: global warming. The hysteria environmentalists have built up around carbon emissions may lead to a new dawn for nuclear power. Given that, the case for new nuclear is almost unassailable.

Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was considerable technical discussion about the safety of nuclear power throughout the world, and local court cases against new construction had been common. The Calvert Cliffs Coordinating Committee, for example, delayed the building of a reactor in Maryland after a court victory over the Atomic Energy Commission in 1971. Construction on subsequent projects slowed as a result. Mass popular opposition to the "new, clean nuclear power stations" worldwide, however, seems to have begun in Germany. Shortly after work started in Hartlepool, a new plant was proposed for the tiny southwest German village of Wyhl. Opposition grew and, by the time work began in 1975, a mass movement was ready. Thirty thousand protesters gathered, seized control of the site, and occupied it. The plant was never built.

The German protesters did not rest on their laurels after this victory. In 1977, 20,000 people protested the use of salt mines at Gorleben for nuclear-waste storage. Growing bolder, they turned to open violence. At Brokdorf in 1981, 100,000 demonstrators surrounded the site of a proposed nuclear plant, confronting 10,000 police. According to the New York Times report, "groups of hundreds of demonstrators armed with gasoline bombs, sticks, stones and high-powered slingshots" attacked the police, injuring 21 of them.

It was about this time that I noticed a cultural invasion of England by Germany. Dozens of students at my high school started sporting large yellow buttons depicting a smiley-faced sun surrounded by the German words "ATOMKRAFT? NEIN DANKE!" ("Nuclear power? No thanks!") In 1979, the movement had reached such levels of power that it was able to establish its own sustainable political party. Die Grunen (the Greens) had among their early leaders a roll call of radical leftists. Among them was the tiny and articulate Petra Kelly, a former European Commission bureaucrat who had been educated in the United States and had worked on the Robert F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey campaigns in 1968. Others included former student radical Rudi Dutschke, who followed Gramsci in advocating a "long march through the institutions," the novelist Heinrich Boll, and the artist Joseph Beuys. Anti-nuclear activism was the core of their appeal and remains a central plank today. They have indeed marched through the institutions, even claiming the foreign ministry from 1998 to 2005 and entering into a state-level coalition with Germany's nominal conservatives, the Christian Democrats. The Green virus spread dramatically out from Germany, infecting the politics of most developed nations.

I have spent a little time outlining this early history because it is important to recognize that the anti-nuclear movement was already ascendant before the Three Mile Island incident in 1979. On May 2, 1977, no doubt inspired by the German protesters, 1,414 people were arrested protesting a nuclear plant in Seabrook, N.H. Three Mile Island merely galvanized an already-active movement. Nuclear-plant orders had in fact peaked in 1973, and fell off sharply after 1974 as energy-conservation concerns reigned supreme in the wake of the Arab oil embargo (see chart). The anti-nuclear movement's achievement was not to stop nuclear power, but to take it off the table as an option after 1979.

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FEAR AND LOATHING 

How did they succeed? By creating a global zeitgeist--an appropriately German word--holding as an article of faith that nuclear power is a severe danger in all sorts of ways. Their arguments revolved around three main propositions: that nuclear plants are dangerous because they can blow up or melt down; that nuclear waste is extremely and persistently dangerous; and that nuclear power and nuclear weapons are intrinsically linked. All these arguments are overstated.

As to the safety of nuclear power stations, there is now a significant history to demonstrate that these concerns are no longer justified, even if they may have had some precautionary legitimacy in the 1970s. It has long been recognized that the Chernobyl accident was caused by features unique to the Soviet-style RBMK (reaktor bolshoy moshchnosti kanalniy--high-power channel reactor). When reactors of that sort get too hot, the rate of the nuclear reaction increases--the reverse of what happens in most Western reactors. Moreover, RBMK reactors do not have containment shells that prevent radioactive material from getting out. The worse incident in the history of nuclear power, Chernobyl killed just 56 people and made 20 square miles of land uninhabitable. (The exclusion zone has now become a haven for wildlife, which is thriving.) There are suggestions that hundreds or thousands more may die because of long-term effects, but these estimates are based on the controversial Linear Non-Threshold (LNT) theory about the effects of radiation.

Official EPA doctrine, based on the LNT theory, holds that no level of radiation is safe, and that the maximum allowable exposure to radiation is an extremely stringent 15 millirems (mrem) per year. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, researchers discovered that 600,000 mrem was a sufficient dose of radiation to kill anyone exposed to it, and 400,000 mrem killed half the people exposed. Symptoms of radiation sickness develop at 75,000--100,000 mrem. By extrapolating linearly, the model holds that there is no level of radiation at which someone is not adversely affected (hence "non-threshold"). Therefore, if a million people are exposed to a very low dose of radiation--say 500 mrem--then 6,250 of them will die of cancer brought on by the exposure. At least according to the theory.

But this is mere assumption, with no epidemiological evidence to back it up. As Prof. Donald W. Miller Jr. of the University of Washington School of Medicine wrote in 2004, "Known and documented health-damaging effects of radiation--radiation sickness, leukemia, and death--are only seen with doses greater than 100 rem [which is to say, 100,000 mrem]. The risk of doses less than 100 rem is a black box into which regulators extend 'extrapolated data.' There are no valid epidemiologic or experimental data to support linearly extrapolated predictions of cancer resulting from low doses of radiation."

In fact, Americans are naturally exposed to around 200 mrem a year of background radiation. In some places around the world that background level is much higher. In Ramsar, Iran, thanks to the presence of natural radium in the vicinity, residents get 26,000 mrem a year, but there is no increased incidence of cancer or shortened lifespan. This is a real problem for the LNT theory. The predicted deaths and cancer cases haven't materialized.

In Britain, much hay was made by Greenpeace and other organizations of the emergence of greater incidences of leukemia in children living near the nuclear-reprocessing plant at Sellafield in the early 1990s. But such "cancer clusters" appear all over the place, and are just as likely to appear next to an organic farm--to borrow the formulation of British environment writer Rob Johnston--as next to a nuclear facility. There does not appear to be any greater incidence of leukemia in the children of those who work in the nuclear industry. In fact, there is so little evidence of significant safety risks related to nuclear power that the British government "continues to believe that new nuclear power stations would pose very small risks to safety, security, health and proliferation," according to a recent analysis it undertook. It also believes that "these risks are minimized and sensibly managed by industry."

Nuclear waste is a stickier problem, but one that can be safely managed. In most American reactors, fuel rods need to be replaced every 18 months or so. When they are taken out, they contain large amounts of radioactive fission products and produce enough heat that they need to be cooled in water. Radioactivity declines as the isotopes decay and the rods produce less heat. It is the very nature of radioactivity that, as materials decay, they become less dangerous and easier to handle. The question is what to do with the waste when space runs out.

In most of the rest of the world, fuel reprocessing extracts usable uranium and plutonium. The highly radioactive waste that remains is not a large amount. By 2040, Britain will have just 70,000 cubic feet of such waste. This volume could be contained in a cube measuring 42 feet on each side. Moreover, most of Britain's waste is left over from its nuclear-weapons program. The British government has determined that "geological disposal"--burial deep underground--provides the best available approach to dealing with existing and also with new nuclear waste, arguing that "the balance of ethical considerations does not rule out the option of new nuclear power."

In the U.S., unfortunately, reprocessing was stopped during the Carter administration, in the naive belief that other countries would follow suit and thereby reduce the amount of plutonium available for weapons proliferation. For that reason, the U.S. has rather more nuclear waste than any other nation, about 144 million pounds of it. Since 1987, the U.S. has focused its own efforts at geological disposal at a remote Nevada site called Yucca Mountain, located within a former nuclear-test facility.

The story of Yucca Mountain is well-known--it has become a political football as pro- and anti-nuclear forces try to accelerate or delay (or even stop) the facility's commissioning. Legal challenges have focused on the question of how much radiation will escape to the public from the facility--over a timeline of a million years. The Department of Energy has calculated that exposure will be no more than 0.98 mrem per year, up to a million years into the future. Even those who hold to the stringent LNT view of radiation should be satisfied.

With that settled, the Department of Energy announced in 2006 that Yucca Mountain would open for business in 2017. But later that year, when Harry Reid was chosen as Senate majority leader, he announced, "Yucca Mountain is dead. It'll never happen." The project's budget has been slashed. As a result, the question of storing America's nuclear waste remains open, even as more and more of that waste piles up around the country.

On the issue of persistence, bear in mind that reprocessing the fuel means that, after ten years, the fission products are only one-thousandth as radioactive as they were initially. After 500 years, they will be less radioactive than the uranium ore they originally came from. The waste question is therefore simply one of storage. It is a political, not a scientific, dispute.

As for the problem of nuclear proliferation, the unpleasant fact is that every country that has been willing to invest the time and effort required to make a nuclear weapon has succeeded. The existence of nuclear power plants in Western countries has nothing to do with this. In fact, in order to keep plants economical, fuel rods are kept in the reactor long enough that the weapons-grade plutonium, Pu-239, absorbs another neutron and becomes the much less dangerous Pu-240. To be effective in a weapon, a given volume of plutonium must contain no more than 7 percent Pu-240. Spent fuel from civilian nuclear plants is typically composed of about 26 percent Pu240. This makes it extremely difficult even for experts to use in the manufacture of nuclear weapons--and well nigh impossible for amateurs.

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There is some concern that nuclear power plants present an attractive target for terrorists. After the attacks of Osama bin Laden's impromptu air force in 2001, the Department of Energy commissioned a study into the effects of a fully fueled jetliner's hitting a reactor containment vessel at maximum speed. In none of the simulations was containment breached. Given the massive investment that would be needed to compromise a nuclear power station, it is highly unlikely that terrorists would seek to attack such a hard target--especially when their revealed preference has been for soft targets offering the maximum possible loss of civilian life.

The world's experience with nuclear power, therefore, has confounded the arguments of the environmentalists. It has proven safe and reliable--and if you still need convincing of this, remember that the second-worst nuclear incident, Three Mile Island, saw a destroyed reactor confined with no casualties.

ENVIRONMENTAL ECONOMICS

With safety concerns off the table, the real question remaining as to whether we should move forward with nuclear power is one of economics. Up until now, the high costs of construction and decommissioning have made nuclear more expensive than coal and natural gas. That, however, is likely to change, and it is the environmentalists who will have brought about the change.

The Congressional Budget Office recently released a report finding that nuclear power costs around $72 per megawatt-hour of energy, compared with $55 for coal and $57 for natural gas. But those estimates reflect very high construction costs. When it comes to operating costs, nuclear power is much less expensive. Therefore, the economics of nuclear power depend to a large extent on reducing those construction costs--both the direct costs of building (which is highly dependent on construction time) and the costs of regulation. It should be feasible to reduce significantly the costs of regulation by various means. Under its Nuclear Power 2010 program, for example, the U.S. Department of Energy has offered interested parties the opportunity to operate under a surprisingly non-bureaucratic model for licensing based on the French system. (Less responsibly, for the first six plants, the program also offers to subsidize 25 percent to 50 percent of any construction-cost overruns due to delays.) Nuclear plants have never been built anywhere in an environment of low regulatory costs, so it is hard to estimate to what degree deregulation could reduce expenses without jeopardizing safety.

Those high construction costs have led many to argue that nuclear power is intrinsically uneconomic without subsidy. This is contradicted by the British government's recent analysis, which found that nuclear power is viable without subsidies. The British government received confirmation from potential nuclear operators that subsidy was neither needed nor desired. In the U.S., there have been 30 announcements of plans for new nuclear plants, totaling 40,000 megawatts of capacity, which would power 32 million households.

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In all the hysteria about global warming, environmentalists have, for the most part, agreed on one thing above all--that the use of fossil fuels must be made more expensive. Every proposal currently under consideration for the reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions seeks to raise prices as a brake on emissions, through either a cap-and-trade system or a carbon tax. Once this expense is included in the calculations, nuclear power becomes extremely competitive, and remains considerably cheaper than wind power. The Congressional Budget Office found that nuclear power is the most attractive source of electricity once the price of carbon emissions reaches $45 a ton. If natural-gas prices increase as rapidly as they have done recently, then that figure will come down even further. The British-government review found that nuclear provides "economic benefit regardless of the carbon price." Moreover, it provides carbon reductions much more cheaply than wind power does. Using nuclear power, it costs 60 cents to eliminate a ton of C[O.sub.2] emissions, as opposed to a staggering $100 per ton for onshore wind power. It is true that a carbon tax amounts to a subsidy for nuclear power. But if carbon emissions are to be taxed, then that is the only subsidy that nuclear power will ever need.

Keep in mind that many of the current arguments used against nuclear power by environmentalists are economic in tone--that uranium is running out (not true even in the medium term); that decommissioning is expensive and/or will be a burden on the taxpayer (it is expensive, but the cost could be met by requiring the operator to pay into a fund during the reactor's life); or that building reactors takes too long (true, but most of that is the fault of red tape). The Canadian company ACEL has managed to shorten the time for building a reactor--from groundbreaking to coming online--to four years. Such a schedule should significantly reduce construction costs which, as we have seen, are the main impediment to nuclear cost-effectiveness.

NUCLEAR IS GREENER

Beyond economics, if you take seriously the issue of greenhouse gases--whether as a climate alarmist or as someone with an open mind who believes in a degree of prudence--then the case for nuclear power is unassailable. James Lovelock, famous as the father of the "Gaia Hypothesis," has said nuclear power represents humanity's only hope to escape runaway global warming. Y et most environmental groups refuse to recognize the impracticality of opposing both greenhouse-gas emissions and our most effective way of reducing them. For those groups, the problem isn't "dirty" energy, but energy itself. They presumably agree with one of their sages, Amory Lovins, who told Playboy in 1977, "It'd be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we might do with it."

For the rest of us, what we might do with it is the whole point--we might increase human prosperity and welfare. If we're determined to price coal out of the energy market, then nuclear is it. If we're determined to cure our "addiction to oil," then we will need nuclear facilities to power our plug-in hybrid electric cars or to make the hydrogen for our fuel cells. This is not a green pipe dream. In fact, given the way automotive technology is developing, it is plausible that a majority of vehicles sold in the U.S. by 2020 will use electric power trains, increasing our need for electricity. We might not even need to close our coal mines, since we can get more energy from the uranium found in coal than from burning the coal itself.

Those denizens of Seaton Carew had it right. Nuclear power is clean. In a sense it is still new. Thirty years after their radical predecessors took nuclear energy away from the people of the world, environmentalists might have inadvertently given it back. Atomkraft? Ja, bitte!

Mr. Murray is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the author of The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Won't Tell You About-Because They Helped Cause Them.