Solving ‘Fission Impossible’

We all know that $30-a-barrel isn't coming back. Just as we know that simply turning off a few lights won't halt global warming. Yet the search for a low-emission, non-fossil-fuel source of energy has been a bit like "American Idol": every now and then, another fresh-faced alternative-energy rock star wanna-be is eliminated. Wind and solar are nice and clean—but the sun doesn't work 24/7 and the wind is fickle. Ethanol offers politicians the irresistible combination of grow-your-own energy independence and the potential to make primary voters in Iowa rich. But because it's corrosive and soluble in water, it's hard to transport ethanol over long distances through pipelines. Besides, to raise a crop sufficient to meet our gasoline thirst, we'd have to plant the entire continental United States with maize, leaving only a small corner of Delaware for bedrooms and a den.

As contestants are eliminated, it's worth looking at the geezer in the bunch: nuclear power. Nearly 50 years after the Shipping port Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania became the first commercial power plant to hit critical mass, the New Jersey-based utility NRG last month filed papers seeking permission to build a nuclear power plant in Texas. This represents the first such new application since 1979, nuclear's annus horribilis. Two weeks after the debut of the fear-inducing nuclear-disaster flick "The China Syndrome,"life imitated art, as the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania suffered a partial meltdown. That effectively forestalled the creation of new nuclear power plants for a generation. The last reactor to come online was the Watts Bar reactor in Tennessee, in May 1996.

So what's changed? Thirty years of safe operations have helped pave the way for NRG, and for a couple of dozen other possible plants in the works. Indeed, even as they're mocked in popular culture—like on "The Simpsons"—the nation's 104 commercial nuclear generating units have been quietly humming along without significant incident. "The Bureau of Labor Statistics will tell you that the nuclear industry is the safest place to work—safer than real estate and Wall Street," former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman tells NEWSWEEK. (You remember her—she played the environmentalist in the first Bush term). Through the first half of this year, nukes provided 19.8 percent of U.S. electricity generation, about the same proportion as they did in 1990.

More important, thanks to developments in the broader environment, many longtime critics are changing their tune. As a cofounder of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore used to call nuclear energy "synonymous with nuclear holocaust." But he now believes "nuclear is the cleanest, safest and has the smallest footprint" of any major energy-alternative source. He says that nukes are cheap and reliable, unlike alternative-energy sources like wind and solar. Neither do nuclear plants spew sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, like coal-powered plants do, or create massive volumes of CO2 emissions, like gas-fired plants do. The attitude of Moore, who co-chairs the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, an industry-backed supporter of nuclear energy, is virtually indistinguishable from that of David Crane, chief executive officer of NRG: "Advanced nuclear technology is the only currently viable large-scale alternative to traditional coal-fueled generation to produce none of the traditional air emissions—and most importantly in this age of climate change—no carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases."

Another megatrend is working in nuclear's favor: demographics. In 2006, an estimated 41.3 percent of the population was below 30. Which is to say that the percentage and number of Americans who remember the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl decline with every passing year.

To be sure—in any article dealing with alternative energy, there's always a "to be sure" section—nuclear power has some serious problems. It takes a lot of money, and a long time to build new capacity. NRG says that if all goes well, its new nuclear units, which could power 2 million homes, may come online in 2014 and 2015. And investors aren't eager to commit billions of dollars to controversial long-term projects that might never get built. The government is trying to help by providing risk insurance and streamlining the approval process.