We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

What about the risk premiums for disasters. Isn't it only economical if states accept the cost? If we wouldn't accept an owner of a nuclear power plant to go bankrupt before cleaning up ,after a Fukushima scale accident they'd be forced to either have an insurance that made it uneconomical, or deposit many times more than the reactor costs up front, for cleanup. Neither is viable. It's always subsidized.

The BP logo is a green-yellow sun; it's happy, because it's capitalism-- shiny and happy on the surface, and please don't read the fine print-- whereas most nuclear projects require government involvement, and government doesn't invest money into advertising or branding, preferring quiet competence (when you hear a lot about your government, that's usually because someone screwed up). So, people have a relative over-focus on the problems with nuclear power (which are serious, and need to be addressed) compared to other sources of energy.

The efficiency of public investment is often measured as the ratio of private dollars you can entice someone to invest in return for the public subsidy.

So for example, offer someone a $5,000 tax credit to install $55,000 of solar panels is a 10:1 private investment factor. This has two very important results;

1) If you have a high private investment factor it means that the thing you are subsidizing has substantial positive economic value in the real world. Those private dollars means someone has skin in the game, and actually wants the product they are buying.

2) It means the net total effect of resources being allocated to the industry is much higher per dollar of public funds being invested.

The problem I have with the Green New Deal or similar ideas is they seem to be trying to achieve a specific industrial energy base irrespective of the economic value of that basis, or the current limits of technology.

First, because it’s being driven primarily by public dollars — literally printed money whose only cost is the debasement of all savings. Second, because the goal is not fundamentally economic, it means a significant sustained drag on the economy due to more expensive energy which is a multiplicative negative effect going into the future.

Energy needs to cost less and less going into the future while also being produce cleaner and cleaner. Cheap abundant energy is a necessity for not only a growing economy but even a matter of equitable treatment and human rights.

Over the next 20 years the technological progress in renewables and storage will naturally and fundamentally change our national energy supply. Similar to the mythical man month theory, we can’t spend 10x as much and get there 10x faster.

Smart and efficient public spending with high ratios of private dollar participation has been and will continue to be successful in motivating an economical shift to clean energy. I don’t think we want to or should be spending trillions of dollars here, because frankly most of it will be wasted.

The fundamental solution to cleaner energy is in making the clean energy solutions abundantly cheaper and more reliable. Anything else is akin to trying to stay warm by lighting money on fire.