One Harrisburg is Enough

Harrisburg – now there’s really something: Exactly 30 years after the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history, we’re reminded of the infamous “Three Mile Island” reactor. An “internal breakdown. A small amount of radiation escaped during routine maintenance and 150 employees were sent home Saturday afternoon, but officials hastened to say there was no public health risk.”

In fact, the event isn’t really comparable to the near-worst case scenario that occurred in 1979, when a partial meltdown took place in the second of the two Harrisburg reactors. Without emergency intervention, a disaster similar to Chernobyl might have occurred at Three Mile Island – not in some decaying, shoddily constructed and poorly maintained Soviet nuclear plant, but in a reactor built to Western standards and considered “safe.”

Harrisburg gave the nascent anti-nuclear program an unintentional boost and changed the energy debate – especially in the United States – forever. The clearest indicator of that is that, since that near-worst case scenario in Pennsylvania nearly 30 years ago, not a single new nuclear power plant has come on line in the U.S. Of course, that’s not entirely due to Three Mile Island, but also to the framework of U.S. energy policy. Power-generating companies in the U.S., as well as in Europe, shun the expense of investing billions in building nuclear power plants without government guarantees and subsidies. In increasingly deregulated power markets, large nuclear generators are no longer the dependable money-printing machines they were back in the good old days – actually the bad old days – of monopolies.

Appropriately, on Harrisburg’s 30th anniversary, change may be in the wind. The debate over nuclear power and government subsidies for it is now taking place, absent talk of a “renaissance,” which is just plain twaddle. Obama has been quite reticent about nuclear power for a long time. But, meanwhile, the nuclear industry’s chances of getting several new power plants up and running are looking better than ever because the only chance Obama has of getting his climate reform policies through Congress is if he embraces nuclear energy.

That alone, however, wouldn’t mark a nuclear renaissance. The acid test would be if a new nuclear power facility would be built without direct or indirect government subsidies; the likelihood of that is very small. Even those “shining beacons” of nuclear power, Finland and France, don’t exactly inspire confidence. The Finnish reactor, based on the French European Pressurized Reactor [EPR] model, came in three years later than planned and cost twice as much as originally estimated. And France, with its isolated electricity market controlled by the governmental entity EDF, makes the EPR reactor the only game in town. That’s hardly a pattern worth copying.

To summarize: Atomic power isn’t about to make a clean sweep, however much the powerful industry, with all its great political connections, likes to pretend. In order to save the environment by switching to nuclear power alone, they would have to bring another Three Mile Island plant on line every 10 days from now until 2050. That’s totally unrealistic. And one Harrisburg is already enough.