Only a few wealthy countries have spent hundreds of billions of dollars subsidizing what they call “renewable energy” in the name of “carbon-free electricity” that is unreliable and weather dependent. Yet, despite picking our pockets through taxes and borrowing to support humongous subsidies for wind and solar, our direct costs are rising for electricity, our electric grid is becoming more failure-prone, and we still live with a monopolistic system called utilities of marketing electricity.
There is nothing more critical to our quality of life than all the 6,000 products made from oil derivatives manufactured from raw crude oil and continuous and uninterruptible electricity. So, what good has all our tax money done for everyday citizens to ease their lives as those renewables only generate electricity but CANNOT make any products demanded by our materialistic society?
The best way to ensure delivery and low prices of electricity for our materialistic society is a free enterprise system free of useless and expensive regulations. So why are we allowing electricity to be marketed to us in the most expensive and precarious way imaginable?
It is common sense that if huge subsidies are needed to make a commodity viable in the market, then such a commodity is not viable in a free market. So, why do we pay such excess levies? Indeed, why are there subsidies for renewable electricity at all when about 80% of the global population of 8 billion people are living in less developed countries?
We have pointed out that nuclear power, when marketed in a levelized free-enterprise system with fair laws for all, is by far the cheapest way to produce electricity that is safe, continuous, uninterruptible, emission-free, and utilizes the least amount of the earth’s natural resources to generate that electricity.
Yet, we continue to trust wealthy country governments’ intervention (remember you pay for all government expenditures) when the result is higher prices, less safe delivery systems, and effectively no lowering of pollution from poorer developing countries. Common sense would tell us that something is wrong.
All of us should be environmentalists at heart. Our daily purchases and actions should contribute to the preservation of clean air and water on the planet. Yet, we also care about our quality of life and our peaceful existence on this planet. So, we make compromises. One such compromise would be to ensure that any replacement for electricity production would be better than what we abandoned. We would also prefer not to abandon an existing solution until an even better solution comes along.
Nuclear power has earned the reputation of being the safest industry in the world. Not a single person has been harmed by a commercial nuclear power plant under normal operation in more than 70 years. About 10% of the world’s electricity and about 20% of the US electricity is produced with nuclear power. That is a lot of production, and such a safety record is certainly worth noting.
Before you write letters, nobody was harmed in Three-Mile Island or Fukushima from a failed reactor, and Chernobyl was not under normal operation when it failed. Perspective is based on perception, and we want to present this perception since so many people seem to believe differently.
Why is your perception so important? If fear drives your perspective, you may tolerate more expensive or environmentally destructive methods of power production that are not to your advantage. This attitude is especially devastating in a monopolistic market in which you are not free to choose the merchant you think is best. You get what you get, and you don’t throw a fit. But we are not kindergarten children; we are thinking, discerning consumers, right?
A common-sense approach would be to have all production facilities in place before we start shutting down existing, perfectly good facilities. We should not change over until we get a cheaper price on the new commodity. Since electricity delivered on the grid is all the same, why would we pay more for something we could get cheaper? Yet, our electricity prices have skyrocketed of late on top of our being forced to expend our hard-earned tax money as well.
We have shown in other articles that recycling slightly used nuclear fuel (SUNF) from existing stockpiles could produce such a volume of electricity that it would be delivered at around a penny per kWh. It is safer, more compact, more available, cleaner, and less imposing than all other forms of electricity generation. Since we are constantly producing more SUNF than we can use, it is also renewable. We still need petroleum for most of the products in our society that did not exist 200 years ago, and aviation, gasoline, and diesel fuels for transportation infrastructure since it is also compact and widely available. So, why are we paying trillions of dollars in subsidies for more expensive and less available electricity? Shouldn’t that be a consumer choice?
Unlike those living in Russia and China, US citizens have a direct choice of who our leaders are. Over the last 60 years, they have bankrupted our treasury while making our quality of life lower, at least in our most important factor, electricity. It may be time to demand a return to free enterprise and away from artificial fear to improve our lives. Consider this perspective and make your desires known. No politician can stand up to popular demand.
For once, let us drive demand instead of being told what we are going to suffer with. Nothing will improve world quality of life in developing countries like free or penny per-kWh electric power and access to the more than 6,000 products being enjoyed by those in the wealthier developed countries. Nuclear technology is here, and we have the time to innovate without disrupting our lives if we only demand our right to free enterprise in electricity production and delivery. We only need the shackles of government subsidy and overregulation to be released to allow it to happen.
First published at America Out Loud News.
