Electricity should be a public good

Electricity should be a public good.

Why? It effects everyone, and benefits everyone. Coal spews carbon dioxide and particulate pollution into the air, influencing global warming (personally I'm not certain of the strength of the coefficient of CO2 on climate change however), and causes 13,000 deaths in the US from particulate pollution per year. A greater number then deaths from Chernobyl or Fukushima. Three Mile Island had no fatalities either.

And Chernobyl was caused by managerial incompetence, it was caused by an experiment on what would happen if the power to the nuclear power plant was cut off. Fukushima was preventable. Three Mile Island was caused by an error, but no one was harmed.

Oil is a scarce commodity, uranium however makes up a small part of a nuclear power plant's O&S costs.

If we subsidized nuclear energy, aggregate supply will increase. No one can disagree that halving or decimating utility bills is desirable. Cogeneration would allow nuclear plants to double as desalination plants, the waste heat is used to distill water.

The great issue I suppose is, is it worth diverting resources from other economic activities to support nuclear power plant construction? Building a nuclear power plant, means a diversion of investment or of consumption. A few less refrigerators and iPhones in short. The French made their decision, 75% (some websites say 80%) of their electricity is from nuclear plants, and they export electricity to Germany, which has closed all their nuclear plants and are moving to solar power.

As much as many would lead you to believe, solar power isn't sustainable. Ask any supporter of renewable energy and ask them, can a factory that produces solar panels or wind mills, be powered only by solar panels or wind turbines? The answer is no. Even with elaborate storage schemes, the factory isn't self-sustaining. A complex that builds nuclear reactors, and mines, processes the uranium from them, can be powered solely through nuclear energy.

The final question you may have is why is a Libertarian supporting the interference of the government into our free market? Because the free market cannot make perfect decisions based on imperfect information (what direction will nuclear regulations go? Will fossil fuel prices go up or down?). The utilities market is inherently monopolistic or oligopolistic as well. There won't be a free exchange of prices and goods, even if we aimed for total privatization.

Nuclear energy is guaranteed to meet our needs, today, tomorrow, and the day after. We can extract uranium from seawater, and nuclear energy will still be profitable. As mentioned before fuel makes up little of a nuclear plant's O&S costs, and nuclear O&S costs are smaller then that of fossil fuels.


Remember, the French aren't afraid of nuclear energy, so why should we be?