What would help our economy create hundreds of thousands of well-paying jobs, bring millions of dollars to federal and state treasuries, provide clean air, reduce our trade deficit and enable America to be less dependent on foreign oil? Building more nuclear plants. Granted, the cost of building new nuclear plants is high, but comparatively low nuclear-fuel costs yield a significant savings over a plant’s lifetime. According to the most recent data, the average cost of producing nuclear energy was 1.87 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared with 2.75 cents for coal, 8.09 cents for natural gas and 17.26 cents for petroleum. Based on experience, it’s estimated that each new plant will produce $430 million annually in spending on goods, services and labor. And each new plant will generate $20 million a year in state and local tax revenue and $75 million in federal tax payments. Americans also will benefit environmentally since carbon-free nuclear plants don’t create any air pollution. — Mark Perry, University of Michigan-Flint
For many, the main attraction of nuclear power is that it can meet rising energy demand without burning fossil fuels. However, it also is very expensive, with new plants costing upward of $6 billion to $9 billion each. Moreover, there is still no long-term strategy for handling the toxic nuclear waste that it produces. The new plants will be so expensive and risk of failure potentially so great — as high as 50 percent, according to the Government Accountability Office — that, in effect, building the plants is not economically feasible without a federal loan guarantee. Yet some estimates suggest that the federal government’s long-term financial obligations under a nuclear-power loan guarantee program could be enormous — in the hundreds of billions of dollars. This is far more than it would cost to gain the same amount of electricity from improvements in energy conservation and efficiency, and development of renewable energy sources such as wind, solar or biomass — or from conventional power plants that burn relatively cheap natural gas. — Michael Kraft, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
