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August 2009—Q&A with Patrick Moore, CASEnergy Coalition co-chair

Q: What are some reactions to what you’ve been doing with the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, and changes you are seeing in the public’s view toward nuclear energy?

Moore: When we started three years ago with CASEnergy Coalition, it was common to find fairly hostile journalists interviewing you on the subject. Recently, it’s hard to find a media person who’s against nuclear energy anymore. There’s been a big switch there in editorial slant in journalists who are doing interviews. I do not get the sort of hostility and the questioning of your credibility. The second important thing is the mainstream environmental groups are not making a big push against nuclear energy. It’s a few radicals and grassroots groups of 60-year-old hippies that are doing that.



Q: You have had a chance to have conversations with members of Congress. What do you see happening with climate change legislation in Congress? 

Moore: It strikes me that there are only two approaches to this. One is to actually move to restrict carbon by increasing its price, which pushes the market towards clean, more expensive technologies. The other is to incentivize clean technologies and forget about punishing carbon.

On the one hand, you have some of the environmentalists who favor cap and trade, but are against nuclear. And on the other side, you have what I would call the realists on this issue recognizing that it is, in fact, a technological choice and that a command and control cap and trade or carbon tax is not really the right way to go. And one of the reasons it’s not the way to go is because it doesn’t have the votes to pass…that was proven during the Clinton administration. You can’t get anti-carbon legislation like Kyoto through the Senate, so why keep beating your head against the wall?  Given the fact that there is a majority of the people in the country in favor of nuclear energy and a majority of congressmen in favor of nuclear energy, surely the way to go is to incentivize nuclear energy somehow.

Q: What you’ve struck on is the ideological backing of various groups on this issue, the fact that there has to be some way to work those things out to where there’s a majority who support a bill that limits carbon and protects the consumer and the economy.

Moore: The logical thing would be to find a compromise where you do not increase the price of carbon fuel. Somehow, you have to make the main thrust of a bill to support clean energy that is cost effective, and that comes down to nuclear energy.

Q: Some groups, such as the American Association of Blacks in Engineering, point to the fact that a cap and trade system could disadvantage low-income households.  Do you get an urgent sense of the potential impacts of carbon legislation when you’re talking to various groups?

Moore: Well, what I have a clear sense of is a strong pushback by women on a lot of levels. And as a labor fellow from the Building and Construction Trades Department said, it’s time to wake up and smell the coffee here. He made that point abundantly clear about solar and wind. Solar isn’t in the ballpark in terms of costs compared to other electricity sources. Germany is paying 50 Euro cents per kilowatt-hour for solar power. They have spent $3 billion a year on solar energy acquisition into their grid and it’s less than one percent of their electricity. And just that little bit of solar bumped up the price of power in Germany. Wind, on the other hand, is down in price, but still twice as much as baseload sources, so you can have more of it incrementally without bumping up the price of electricity as much as solar would implement.

It seems fairly clear that the Germans are getting a bit sick of the price of wind. Spain already has. They basically collapsed their support for renewables after finding out how much it costs. Spain doesn’t have the GDP per capita that Germany has to support basically wasting money on politically correct energy. And now, the U.S. has already installed more wind than Germany in capacity.

It is easy to build natural gas and wind because they go in within a year or two. That’s where the competition is. In building new nuclear plants, in terms of cost per kilowatt-hour of construction, this could be cheaper to the consumer than wind.  A number of states have passed resolutions or adopted policies so that consumers will pay as those plants get built. They will be increasing the electricity rates in order to build the plant.  There’s no doubt about it that if you don’t do that, if you make the utility borrow the money all the way through the construction phase, it’s going to take a lot more to service that debt than if they had collected it as they went. Paying as you go is cheaper for consumers, it’s cheaper for utilities. It’s cheaper for everybody. 

Q: Looking at environmental groups on one hand and anti-nuclear groups on the other, is there a distinction being made between the two as we move forward on environmental policy?

Moore: I think it’s fair to say that most environmental groups are, in principal, opposed to nuclear energy under the present circumstance. Some of them will say, well, if you solve safety, waste disposal, proliferation concerns, then we can consider supporting nuclear energy.  You get the feeling that they will never consider those problems solved.

In many ways it’s an attitudinal thing and a positioning thing. I know how to explain all of those things as having been solved or being solvable, but there are other people who are content to frame them all as irresolvable. So you get into a debate on these issues and then the people who are listening to the debate have to decide which they think is most reasonable. So it’s a public policy debate that has so far resulted in a large majority of the American people thinking that nuclear energy is the way to go. This gives you some faith in the general public’s ability to see through and separate the wheat from the chaff in all of this.

Q: How do you see that public support manifested in the policy discussions about nuclear energy?

Moore: In the relicensing meetings I’ve been in, including some like Indian Point in New York and Vermont Yankee, there’s a lot of pro-nuclear sentiment that comes out. A lot of it has legitimacy, like chambers of commerce, mayors, and representatives of groups like the NAACP who are representing a lot of people. Most of the opposition is from a small crew of individuals who are on an anti-nuclear bandwagon. 

There’s a lot of pro-nuclear sentiment and I’ve seen it in many of the places I’ve visited. Even in places like Indian Point, it is only controversial because it’s close to Manhattan (35 miles away) and Bobby Kennedy and Riverkeeper have targeted it. At the same time, a majority of people in Westchester County, which is where the plant is located, are in favor of it.

In upstate New York, in Oswego, they are clamoring for a new nuclear plant there. Even in California, there’s a slim majority of Californians in favor of nuclear power. So the meter has moved considerably in the last three years. I think the public’s support is becoming more a matter of fact now.


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Q: What are the drivers for that?

Moore: For a lot of people, it is climate change. A lot of people see that connection between nuclear energy and reducing greenhouse gases. Some still haven’t recognized that nuclear power is nearly 75 percent of the clean electricity and is the most important carbon-free technology.

It’s clear to me that the big change that needs to be made is in clean electricity, which means reducing the use of fossil fuels and increasing nuclear energy with a bit of wind power in the mix. The clean energy can then be used to run geothermal heat pumps in all our buildings, eliminating fossil fuels for heating, cooling, and hot water. The clean electricity can also be used to charge batteries in plug-in electric hybrid cars that are coming along soon. If we actually did just those three things, we could move into a far less carbon intensive world without huge economic pain. 

Electric hybrid vehicles are going to come down in price; geothermal heat pumps are already reasonable in price. They actually pay for themselves rather rapidly. The question is: will we go in that direction? For me, it’s a bit frustrating because I have a really clear picture in my mind of which technology changes are the best ones to make right away and it isn’t wind and it isn’t solar. Yet, there’s a whole cadre out there that is saying that those are the solutions.  We know from looking at Germany and Denmark that they’re not. They’re simply not the total solution. Denmark has quit its wind program. They know they overbuilt it. I think Germany is beginning to realize the same thing.

I just think that everybody should study France, which uses nuclear energy for 80 percent of its electricity, versus Germany in terms of energy and climate policy and the results in per capita emissions. Just look at the numbers and the current trends in those countries and decide which model is best from an air pollution point of view, from a greenhouse gas point of view, from a geopolitical point of view, you name it. France wins hands down.

Q: Looking at public opinion research, we saw in a recent survey roughly two-thirds of the public who associated nuclear energy at some level with climate change solution. Does that surprise you?

Moore: No it doesn’t. I think that people understand that nuclear energy is not a carbon dioxide emitter. On the other hand, there’s a recent Gallup poll showing that only about a third of Americans think that climate change is caused by people. I’ve always maintained that we don’t know where the science of climate change is going to go. We can’t actually predict the future; we’re simply using computer models.

The actual truth will come out as time goes on as to which way the climate is going to go. Hopefully our knowledge of what drives climate change will increase now that we have developed such a strong focus on it. Unfortunately, I’m afraid that a lot of money is going into self-fulfilling prophecy in the climate area.

I don’t think that the nuclear industry should hang its hat entirely on the climate change issue. It’s always seemed to me that there are other really good reasons to move to an energy policy that is much more sustainable, a long-term energy supply that doesn’t just burn up all of our fossil fuels. To me, the air quality, conservation and geopolitical factors should drive people toward nuclear power being the smartest thing to do in energy. It would be a good idea to use nuclear energy for baseload power and save fossil fuels for plastics and for liquid fuels instead of using it all to make electricity in baseload plants.

Q: Should the United States consider recycling uranium fuel?

Moore: The United States authorized Japan to build a $30 billion recycling plant for nuclear fuel, but we can’t get one of our own going here. It’s becoming very logical to a lot of people that recycling is the way to go. I know a lot of people have been counting on Yucca Mountain as a disposal facility, but I think that the delay there is a silver lining in that it is causing us to rethink the whole back end of the fuel cycle and to face up to the recycling issue rather than just thinking about putting fuel rods in Nevada.

Q: What would you do to change the public’s perception of the nuclear energy industry?

Moore: I think we’re on the right track in changing public opinion and understanding with the CASEnergy Coalition and with the other public education initiatives that are going forward. People are learning at a very fast rate. Almost three years ago, no one knew that France has 80 percent nuclear energy and now everybody who reads or keeps up with current events knows this. So there’s been lots of progress made on that front.

It’s just about straight forward communications to the public. There’s no substitute for that. Everybody is aware of environmental issues and everybody is working on those things.  Yet the haulers of wood and drawers of water in this world are portrayed by the urban environmental activists as being the enemy of the planet.

In industrial countries, most consumers live in the urban centers and they vastly outnumber the people who are providing them with all of the materials and food and energy from out there in the great hinterland. This is why it has been easy for urban environmental elites to work on this vast majority of city people who don’t know where milk, steel, concrete and electricity actually come from. They can color their impression of the destruction that is being wrought on the planet out there by these extractors of materials, which are actually being done for those who live in the city.

I’ve always seen that because I grew up in a small resource community and then went to the university and got some science training. I could see the connection all my life, but most people don’t. That to me is something that, on a general level, needs to be conveyed more accurately: The fact that electricity doesn’t come from the plug, but from the use of nuclear energy or the burning of fossil fuels or from renewables. 

Ecology and environmentalism are about knowing where things come from before you use them and where they go after you finish with them. It’s the full life cycle analysis. Awareness of the full life cycle gives you a holistic understanding of how the world works rather than just being in your little world.  It’s hard to correct that, or to develop any measure that does vastly increase people’s understanding of where they fit in the world.  Energy is a classic example in that it underlies virtually every good and service there is in the world. It’s the most ubiquitous of all the commodities and yet the most invisible.  We don’t even think about it until it’s not there when we need it.

—Read more articles in Nuclear Energy Insight and Insight Web Extra.

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