Nuclear power on the comeback trail

If it’s leap year and scarf-wrapped candidates are crunching the new-plowed snows in an attempt to shake the hand of every Dunkin’ Donuts patron in New Hampshire, then the season of the caucus and primary is upon us.

By this arcane if time-honored process of direct democracy, the field of presidential hopefuls will soon be narrowed from a dozen to perhaps three or four.

And the Nuclear Energy Institute — the trade association for those who make their livings peddling nuclear power — is capering like a race track patron who’s managed to get odds on every horse but one.

Former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina — generally perceived to be running third in the Democratic field, even as the race tightens — has come out flatly opposed to the construction of new nuclear power plants.

Otherwise, an industry that has seen no new domestic power plants ordered since the near-meltdown of Pennsylvania’s Three Mile island plant in 1979, followed by the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the Ukraine, has started to tentatively tune up for a rousing chorus of "Everything’s Coming Up Roses."

The reason is the intersection of two potent political currents — the attempt to wean America from partial dependence on imported foreign oil, and the perceived necessity of seeking power sources that don’t contribute to global warming by generating "greenhouse gases."

Whether radical environmentalists like it or not, nuclear power fills both bills.

"If we’re serious about making sure we grow our economy and deal with greenhouse gases," President Bush declared as he signed the latest energy bill into law last month, "we have got to expand nuclear power."

And it’s not just talk. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission received three new applications for nuclear power plants in 2007, and expects to see at least 15 more by the end of 2009.

On the Democratic side, presidential front-runners Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama continue to make politically correct noises about promoting windmills and solar panels, of course. Both also endorse motherhood. But neither will rule out more nukes.

"I think nuclear power has to be part of our energy solution," Sen. Clinton said at a recent campaign rally in South Carolina. "I don’t think we can take nuclear power off the table," agreed Sen. Obama in a recent swing through New Hampshire.

And on the Republican side, the chorus for developing nuclear power "more aggressively" is virtually unanimous.

As it grows obvious that wind and solar and geothermal are unlikely to provide as much as 20 percent of our energy needs in the near future — even if the greens were to surprise everyone by withholding their lawsuits against the environmentally unpleasant new transmission lines and battery farms that must come in the train of such projects — more nuclear power plants will be built. They will generate more nuclear waste. And that will in turn shift the politicians’ attention right back to Nevada, and the planned Yucca Mountain waste depository.

In a recent visit to the Review-Journal, Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney noted that fast-growing Las Vegas needs more water. Perhaps it’s time for the federal government to offer more Colorado River water in exchange for Nevadans’ acceptance of the nation’s spent nuclear fuel, suggested the former governor of Massachusetts, in heavily nuclear dependent New England.

Other offers — less insulting than the paltry payoff of several million dollars per year floated in 2006 by the Nuclear Energy Institute — will doubtless follow.

None will change the fact that the so-called "science" that declares entombment of waste at Yucca Mountain safe for eternity — or until the Democrats next change their stance on Iraq, whichever comes first — has been fatally politicized, from the outset.

Spent fuel rods have proved to be perfectly safe when stored on site, where they were first used, for decades. On the other hand, it’s clear that — at the very least — shipping all the stuff to Nevada will be massively expensive, with the risk of loss to hijackers or simple accident remaining unknown.

In case some of that waste does finally end up here, candidates now hoping for Nevada votes should at least be asked whether it might make more sense to store that spent fuel above ground, where it can be easily accessed once reprocessing technology inevitably improves, rather than entombing the stuff in a vain hope it will never find its way into the groundwater.