Stop worrying and love the reactor

At the risk of having this become the Matt Yglesias Shadow Blog (yeah, like it hasn't happened already), here's an Yglesias post with which I strongly disagree. The issue is nuclear power. Yglesias writes:

Adam Blinick, upset at John Edwards' anti-nuclear stance, asserts that "nuclear power is the only environmentally friendly, economic, and efficient source of energy that can help the U.S. wean itself off foreign oil." We'll be weaned off the dastardly power, perhaps, with nuclear powered cars?

This amounts to feigning ignorance. Obviously, cars will be fully or partially electric in the fairly near future. They'll be powered off the grid. Currently we fuel the grid with a lot of fossil fuels - nuclear power is one substitute. Duh.

I have no problem with the idea that putting a proper price on carbon might lead to good things for the nuclear power industry, but the issue in practice is that nuclear advocates are busy demanding large subsidies.

This is correct. Subsidizing nuclear power - making it cheaper - will just encourage more energy consumption, some of which will come from fossil fuels. A carbon tax is definitely the way to go. But then Yglesias sets up this straw man:

The idea that dastardly anti-nuclear activists are the main thing standing between us and a halt to global warming is, I guess, a neat contrarian conceit but it really doesn't stand up to much scrutiny.

I don't think anyone, including the blogger Yglesias links to, is making that argument. However, what IS true is that if we had more nuclear power today, we wouldn't be so dependent on oil (and shifting to electric cars would reduce greenhouse emissions faster). And one of the big reasons we DON'T have nuclear power today is that people opposed it.

Now, that doesn't mean people were wrong to oppose it, after things like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. But if people hadn't opposed nuclear power so much back then, the industry might have had more of a financial incentive to make it safer and safer, so that by now it would be safer than it is. Well, that's all in the past - people didn't foresee all the problems we now have with fossil fuels.

What's true now is that concerted opposition to nuclear power will prolong the day when we are free of fossil fuels. Yglesias is just being silly by trying to obscure that important point.