Expensive Energy: Trash & Plutonium

Nuclear energy and waste incinerators have recently been in the news and advocates have touted them as environmentally friendly sources of energy.  The darling of the energy generation industry forty years ago, the economic realities of nuclear energy slowed industry growth to a crawl over the last quarter century.  When the National Regulatory Commission (NRC) approved the Vogtle nuclear reactors in Georgia last February, it marked the first permit approval since 1978, a year before the Three Mile Island accident. 

While environmentalists were protesting that the energy source was environmentally undesirable, it was the economics that was torpedoing the industry.  Interestingly, it was Forbes magazine, not an environmental organization that described the struggles of the industry in 1985.  "The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale…only the blind, or the biased, can now think that the money has been well spent."  Alternative energy and conservation advocate Amory Lovins notes that one in five nuclear plants "were permanently and prematurely closed due to reliability or cost problems…"

Beyond those operational difficulties and the financial troubles they bring, many critics believe that the greatest cost is a long term one.  The legacy costs associated with the storage of the very toxic and radioactive waste are unknown.  The costs of the long term damage from nuclear accidents are also proving to be overwhelming.  Japanese scientists fear that the radioactivity from the Fukushima power plant will make the fish near the plant inedible for a decade.  Many of the 80,000 refugees evacuated from their homes near the facility remain in legal limbo.  Cleanup of eleven nearby towns, originally projected to  be completed  next March, has been indefinitely postponed.

More than a quarter century after the Chernobyl accident in Ukraine, towns 25 miles away are still.  Even the closure of facility that has operated without incident is expensive.  The San Onofre plant in California will cost $4 billion and it's uncertain who will foot the bill.  Though not as astronomically expensive as nuclear power plants, waste-to-energy (WTE) trash incinerators still require a substantial capital investment.  The WTE industry has experienced the same sorts of financial challenges as nuclear power.  WTE was an attractive waste management and energy producing option in the seventies and eighties and many counties and waste authorities built the expensive plants in those years.  But like nuclear, the boom passed, the financial risks became evident and plant construction nearly ceased.  Annual debt service on WTE plants can be over $10 million and it takes a great deal of waste to feed such a beast.

The Harrisburg, PA incinerator long plagued by chronic emission problems (like many older WTE plants) had been one of the dirtiest in the country.  Meanwhile, the plant has lost millions of dollars, helping to drive Harrisburg to financially distressed status.  WTE opponents, like those fighting a facility in Frederick County, MD believe that they could develop a top-notch recycling system for a fraction of the money of the incinerator.  Greener energy and better recycling would make environmental sense.  It would seem it might also make economic sense.