Did you think anti-nuclear crusaders would pause to catch their breath for at least a moment after President Obama deserted them on nuclear power last week? Well guess again.
Matthew Wald, the New York Times’s venerable anti-nuclear reporter, had this to offer over the weekend: “Steelworkers Say Reactors Will Create Overseas Jobs.”
Actually, it’s not steelworkers who say that. It’s the union president, Leo W. Gerard, who works in Washington and has obviously drunk deep from the lethean waters of environmentalism:
The United Steelworkers union has complained that a government-backed plan to build two nuclear reactors in Georgia will create jobs overseas that should go to American workers. . . .
In a letter sent to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the international president of the union, Leo W. Gerard, said that he was concerned about “the potential foreign sourcing of components for these reactors,” which he said “limits our nation’s ability to address our unacceptably high unemployment rate.”
In the letter, Mr. Gerard also expressed concern that if the parts were manufactured in China, substandard quality might pose a safety issue. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission oversees the safety of nuclear reactors.
Let’s do a little background here: Five years ago, when reactor construction began to rev up worldwide, there was only one steel factory in the world capable of forging the three-story pressure vessel that sits at the core of the reactor, housing the fuel rods — Japan Steel Works (JSW). But the company had an annual production capacity of only four pressure vessels a year, and by 2006 its orders were backed up by four years.
Industry folks began to fret — and environmentalists gloat — that JSW would prove to be a bottleneck for any nuclear revival. In the face of this chorus of despair, JSW did the obvious, sensible thing: It invested $800 million to triple its capacity. By 2012, the company hopes to be turning out twelve vessels per year. And that was just the beginning for the nuclear industrial capacity.
China, with 21 reactors under construction and 40 more planned, recognized that it would need its own supply of pressure vessels. So the Chinese constructed their own forge in two years, turning out their first ingots last June. Now they’re building two pressure vessels of their own. The Russians have begun to do the same thing — planning to double their nuclear capacity by 2030 to free up natural gas that can be sold in Western Europe at six times its domestic price. India is also building a new forge, South Korea has one on the drawing boards, and Britain and France are planning the same thing. The whole world is moving on to a new generation of steel mills that will service the nuclear renaissance.
American environmentalists, meanwhile, are urging us to replace nuclear and coal with natural-gas plants, festooned with a few windmills and solar collectors so they can be dubbed “renewable and sustainable.” They fantasize about living effortlessly on wind, sun, and biofuels while they draft their lawsuits and compose their environmental-impact statements.
As David Crane, CEO of NRG Energy, puts it, “We don’t make anything in this country anymore.” Crane has the audacity to think he can build a pair of nuclear reactors in Texas with private money. (As a merchant energy company, NRG will not be able to incorporate construction costs in any rate base, which makes it a very risky undertaking.) But Crane has discovered that U.S. manufacturing is now about a decade behind that in the rest of the world, so that even the simplest industrial parts must be imported. In fact, the entire nuclear industry (most of it foreign-owned) acknowledges that when the first new reactors are built here, 70 percent of the parts will be imported. This is not unique to nuclear.
What few people want to acknowledge is that anything to do with manufacturing in this country is now stifled by environmental regulations. Two weeks ago, I was in Cincinnati for an all-day tea-party conference on energy and global warming. (Unfortunately, it was cancelled at the last minute because of snow.) One of the hosts, who works in the pulp-and-paper industry, told me at one point: “People say reactors take forever to build, but we can’t build anything in our industry either. It takes at least seven years to put up a new pull-and-paper mill. First you have to collect your baseline environmental data. That means taking soil, air, and water samples for two years. Then you can start your environmental-impact statement. After that, it’s anybody’s guess. If somebody comes in and challenges your EIS, you can spend the next decade in court. It’s much easier just to build abroad.”
That’s one good thing about reactors — at least they have to be assembled on-site, creating thousands of job opportunities for highly skilled construction workers. (Windmills and solar collectors are now routinely outsourced: Evergreen Solar in Massachusetts — commonly touted as the ideal “green jobs” company — just moved its manufacturing to China.) But here’s Mr. Gerard of the United Steelworkers telling us that that’s not good enough. “No Nukes” is better than foreign-made nukes.
If Gerard were really concerned about the interests of steelworkers — rather than the political agenda of his union-friendly president — he’d have a very different reaction: “Let’s build some new steel plants in this country so we can manufacture those pressure vessels ourselves!” He has obviously spent too much time hobnobbing with the snobs of the environmental movement. That’s how you get headlines in the New York Times.
So the anti-nuclear crusade is wounded, but it’s not dead. Don’t worry, though, the revival is going to happen anyway. The advantages of nuclear — economic and environmental — are so overwhelming that it will keep rolling of its own accord.
– William Tucker is author of Terrestrial Energy: How Nuclear Power Will Lead the Green Revolution and End America’s Long Energy Odyssey.