One of the ways you can tell when Democrats are out of even remotely plausible arguments is that they turn to cost. They never give a damn what anything costs, until they’ve run out of reasons to hate whatever it is they hate for whatever reason: military projects, school-choice programs, etc.
You’ll recall congressional Democrats raising an unholy fuss over the fact that the Benghazi investigation cost a little over $4 million; the federal government currently spends about $7 million a minute, 24/7/365. You could fund a dozen Benghazi investigations with whatever the government spends in the time it takes Hillary Rodham Clinton to find her glasses on the nightstand at 4 a.m.
No surprise then to find our friends at ThinkProgress (h/t Heather Boulware) arguing that nuclear power, the cleanest form of reliable electricity generation currently known to man, is just “too expensive” to play a role in reducing carbon-dioxide emissions in the campaign against global warming. About that: The International Energy Agency forecasts the price of switching to low-carbon energy sources at $44 trillion over the next 35 years or so. You could build a lot of nuclear plants for $44 trillion.
How many? ThinkProgress cites a study that nuclear “decarbonization” would require building about 115 new nuclear plants a year between now and 2050. If we take the IEA’s $44 trillion and divide it by the total number of new plants in that scenario, that’s about $11 billion per new nuclear plant, which is a bit more than they average now. (Never mind, for the moment, that the cost of building a new nuclear plant is a relatively small part of the cost of building a new nuclear plant, regulatory payoffs and the like representing an enormous share of the expense.) Looks like a few billion left over for spillage, to me.
I don’t know whether nuclear power is the right solution to our future power needs; I am generally suspicious of the notion that there is a single “right” solution, and deeply suspicious of the notion that politicians and activists are well-positioned to discern it should it exist. But we are constantly being told that there is no price too high to pay to prevent global warming . . . except whatever it costs to build nuclear plants that progressives hate for reasons that have nothing to do with cost.