But, as Peter Huber and Mark Mills remind us in The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why we will Never Run out of Energy . . . the substitution has been outrageously wasteful. It takes four tons of coal to satisfy the power needs of one inhabitant of Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive for a year. A few ounces of uranium could cover the same need.
Then there is the matter of damage to the environment. The central hypocrisy of the green movement is that antinuclear policy has driven the US to use the hydrocarbon fuels so much opposed by the movement against global warming.
But the mood is changing and energy options open today are far more numerous than in the 1970s or 1980s. Scarcity, once the premise of all energy policy, can now be questioned: new technologies mean that the US may never run out of energy.
Huber and Mills are not without their critics, as we saw yesterday. Read the rest of Shlaes' piece now.
Technorati tags: Nuclear Energy, Environment, Energy, Politics, Technology, Economics
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