The Geography of Hope

So I've been thinking alot about nukes the last couple days, in advance of a possible magazine assignment on the subject. I'm already convinced there's no pat answer, and I found some of the evidence and arguments in Wil S. Hylton's feature story "Meltdown" in the current issue of GQ particularly revelatory. Hylton has also written a concise cri de coeur on the subject over at the Huffington Post.

His core rationale - that nuclear plants, problematic as they are, are vastly superior to burning coal for another generation - is, to my mind, unassailable. If you need further convincing, seek out any information you can find on the decapitation of the Appalachian Mountains and/or the mercury poisoning of our food supplies (particularly the parts of it that we drag out of the water).

There was a single passage, though, that popped out of Hylton's otherwise reasonable analysis like it'd been cut-and-pasted from the nuclear industry's own yay-nukes press releases. To wit:

Many people, according to polls, not only oppose building new nuclear plants; they oppose the ones we already have. Unfortunately, since nuclear energy currently makes up about 20 percent of the nation’s electrical supply, in order to eliminate it, the rest of the nation’s power suppliers would have to amplify their own production by 25 percent of existing levels. Since that’s not possible for most current renewables—like wind, solar, and hydroelectric farms, which are already maxed out—the real cost of eliminating today’s nuclear-power supply would be an immediate 30 percent increase in the nation’s coal, gas, and oil plants.

The emphasis here is mine. "Maxed out"? Total installed wind-power capacity in the United States grew by 45 percent in 2007. The U.S. solar industry grew by 33 percent in '06, grew a bit more slowly (just under 20 percent) in '07 do to the global silicon shortage caused by excessive global demand, and is projected to return to greater rates of growth this year.

"Maxed out"? I'd never claim that renewables by themselves are ready to carry the full global energy load just yet, and nuclear power might well have a key role to play in the battle against climate change. But "maxed out"? As the kids say these days: WTF?