Environment & Energy

NNadir

(36,439 posts) Thu Aug 14, 2025, 01:42 PM Aug 14

An Economic Argument That the Three Mile Island Meltdown Cost the US 14 Trillion Dollars [View all]

If you watch historian talks on line or attend live lectures by historians - as I do - you will often hear them express, often in the Q&A sessions when they are asked to make a contrafactual argument, complaints that contrafactual arguments are unwise or even illegitimate, and then after so demurring then launch into making a contrafactual argument.

Keep the audience happy, I guess.

The paper I'll discuss in this post makes a contrafactual argument, and is written not by historians - although it summarizes some technological history in what I regard as a satisfactory way - but by economists at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. One of the authors is a recent Ph.D., the other a Ph.D graduate student.

The paper is from the preprint service SSRN and is here: Poberejsky, Roma and Gex, Guillaume, The Effect of TMI on the Electric Grid or: How We Did Not Learn to Stop Worrying and Love Nuclear Power (August 05, 2024).

The full paper is open sourced, anyone can read it for free. I'll offer a few excerpts anyway.

Besides the argument about cost - something about which antinukes in my experience discuss insipidly as I'll discuss in a future post citing work by another recent Economics Ph.D. from Rice University increasingly being cited who distinguishes LCOE (Levelized Cost of Energy) from LFSCOE (Levelized Full System Cost of Energy) - the paper cited above also claims that the cost of the Three Mile Island Accident included the addition of 55 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere as well as 2.3 million deaths.

In my experience antinukes couldn't care less about extreme global heating, nor about the deaths from fossil fuel waste, primarily but not limited to air pollution. They're a pretty bourgeois bunch too, they like to carry on endlessly about money and sometimes express the attitude one can find written by other morons - Ayn Rand comes to mind - saying that it's a good thing to tear the shit out wilderness for industrial parks, mines and what have you. Like Ayn Rand, they just don't give a flying fuck about environmental issues, other than offering lip service. (One can see examples here, where they cite climate scientist James Hansen, for instance, while ignoring his call for expanded nuclear energy.)

Back in the old days, before I was banned from Daily Kos for making a true statement, that opposition to nuclear power kills people, there were a lot of airheads over there who used to carry on about Three Mile Island (TMI), as if it had or was going to wipe out all of Harrisburg Pennsylvania, make three headed cows, mutant sheep and chickens, elsewhere in Pennsylvania and beyond and so on. You can still encounter some of these functional tiresome idiots almost half a century later. There is no evidence that the radiation leaked from TMI killed anyone, but even if it had, it is, in my view, an immoral argument to state that if anyone dies from radiation exposure, say in Harrisburg PA, it is therefore OK for millions - tens of millions - of people to die from dangerous fossil fuel waste, and the air pollution resulting from the fires from collapse of the planetary atmosphere that so called "renewable energy" did nothing to prevent or even ameliorate.

As I often say, nuclear energy need not be risk free to be vastly superior to everything else. It only needs to be superior to everything else, which it is.

By the way, I live relatively close to Harrisburg PA, and I've passed through it many times. It's still there and it does seem that there are hundreds of thousands of people living there living useful and productive lives.

Anyway, to turn to the full paper, the abstract summarizes the full argument:

With the goal of 1000 nuclear power plants by the year 2000, the US was on the path to energy independence. However, the 1979 Three Mile Island accident turned public opinion against nuclear energy and spelled decades of stagnation for the industry. We show that the accident both halted the growth of the US reactor fleet, and stifled innovation in nuclear physics. We propose a mechanism by which accumulated scientific knowledge determines the capacity of nuclear reactors, and find that some 55 billion tons of CO2 emissions, 2.3 million premature deaths, and 14 trillion USD in health costs could have been avoided, had we displaced fossil fuels with nuclear power.

From the introductory text to the paper:

The atomic age began with the detonation of the first nuclear bomb in 1945, sparking an arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, and raising immense public concern. In the famous 1953 “Atoms for Peace” speech, president Eisenhower called instead for the development of nuclear power for peaceful purposes, and the two superpowers began to share nuclear technology with other countries. The international cooperation that followed improved safety protocols and standards, and eventually led to the establishment of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 1957, and to the signing of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968. Soon after the speech, the new technology has been put to use for civilian purposes of electricity generation, with the construction of the first reactors in the 1950s. The first power plants were built in the USSR and UK in the early 1950s, and were primarily experimental, but by 1957 the first full-scale nuclear power plant came online in the United States...

The paper then makes reference to the famous "too cheap to meter" claim made by the neofascist Lewis Strauss - the villain in the excellent recent Oppenheimer movie - that all of our antinukes like to cite. Strauss was not an engineer, nor was he a scientist, although he, like, in my view, antinukes, loved to disparage scientists, notably Oppenheimer. It strikes me as telling that antinukes love this phrase. By the way, there is no source of energy on this planet that is "too cheap to meter" and, in fact, energy is extremely expensive, especially if one counts the cost of the destruction of the planetary atmosphere in the calculation. Like the focus on the cost of nuclear power, nuclear accidents, and so called "nuclear waste," this nonsensical argument relies wholly on selective attention. Fossil fuel waste kills people, on a scale of around 20,000 people every damned day. There is no evidence that the storage of used nuclear fuel has ever killed anyone.

...Fast forward to today, we need to “prevent worsening and potentially irreversible effects of climate change”1 by limiting global warming to 1.5◦C. This requires the world to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, a goal that looks increasingly more challenging as years go by and negative global warming headlines accumulate. The results of a recent Lancet study (Hickman et al. 2021) on climate anxiety among young people (16-25 years of age) are disturbing: 62% and 39% feel anxious or depressed about climate change, respectively. 39% are hesitant to have children and 76% think the future is frightening.2 Remarks from the UN secretary general, António Guterres, were hardly soothing, stating that “the era of global warming has ended, the era of global boiling has arrived, the air is unbreathable, the heat is unbearable.”3

Yet, perhaps the next Lancet study should include ‘regret’ in its climate change related emotions. This paper explores the plausibility of a ‘what if?’ scenario, in which nuclear power does not achieve the ‘successful failure’ status described by Vaclav Smil. We consider a plausible scenario where nuclear power would have been a significant part of the solution to the energy transition; one which does not require, for example, unreasonable reduction in construction costs...

Before referring to the following text, I need to say something, since it involves Richard Nixon, who has been rescued from the title of the Worst President in the Last 100 years by the orange pedophile now in the White House.

The fossil fuel industry likes to run barely disguised greenwashing ads here rebranding fossil fuels as "hydrogen." Included in some of these ads here is reference to the fact that a very stupid person, the orange pedophile in the White House, is against hydrogen fuels, leading to a claim that therefore hydrogen fuels are a good thing. The orange pedophile doesn't know shit about hydrogen or anything else about energy technology, and probably therefore doesn't realize that hydrogen is overwhelmingly made from fossil fuels, with exergy destruction, thus increasing the use of fossil fuels. Negative appeal to the orange pedophiles opposition to hydrogen makes hydrogen a good thing is an example of a common logical fallacy, generally used to express a negative value but can be reversed to make something into a positive value by stating that a person viewed negatively opposes something, therefore it is good.. My favorite example of this type of argument, based on a true statement of fact about the Volkswagen Bug goes like this: "Adolf Hitler ordered the development of the Volkswagen Bug (a true fact), therefore the Volkswagen Bug is a bad car." The second statement does not follow from the first.

Now the bit about Richard Nixon's policies toward energy independence, which did not originate with Jimmy Carter (who advocated for Fischer Tropsch coal to oil processes as a path to energy independence). That Jimmy Carter advocated for Fischer Tropsch does not make Fischer Tropsch either wise or "green." That Richard Nixon (or the orange pedophile) argued for the expansion of nuclear energy does not make nuclear power a bad thing:

...Technological advances in nuclear physics and engineering indeed showed great promise in providing a cheap, clean, and abundant source of electricity, and many countries invested in a fleet of nuclear power plants, helping to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels and to mitigate the environmental impact of electricity generation. Another boost to nuclear power in the US came in the 1970s, when the Nixon administration announced ‘Project Independence’ - an initiative aimed to make the United States energy independent by 1980. In response to the 1973 oil crisis, the plan called for a massive expansion of nuclear power, and the construction of 1000 plants by the year 2000. However, the promise of nuclear energy was not to be fulfilled. The 1979 Three Mile Island accident in the United States fundamentally turned public opinion against nuclear energy, and together with the 1986 Chernobyl disaster spelled decades of stagnation for the industry...

I'll excerpt one more bit from the full paper since it references the antinuke asshole Benjamin Sovacool, who makes a disgusting argument that it is OK to rip the shit out of the seafloor (if it's "regulated" ) for so called "renewable energy" because he thinks that nuclear power is "too dangerous" and the collapse of the planetary atmosphere that he and his ilk have done so much to engineer with bad thinking is not "too dangerous."

...This paper contributes to several strands of literature. The first relates to the energy economics literature on nuclear power, which has focused on the cost of construction and operation (Shirvan 2022) and why they increased so markedly (Eash-Gates et al. 2020). It also considers the impact of nuclear power on electricity prices (Nestle 2012). Scholars of environmental and energy economics devote considerable attention to the energy transition and the optimal power grid (Sepulveda et al. 2018), focusing mostly on phasing-out fossil fuels for renewable energy sources, like wind and solar (Hansen, Breyer, and Lund 2019). The role of nuclear power in the transition has been largely overlooked at best, and at worst deemed to be part of the problem (Sovacool et al. 2020; Dittmar 2012). The energy mix in power generation has obvious implications for emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG), but also on electricity costs and prices for which the assessment is controversial and challenging (Paul L. Joskow 2011; Hirth 2013). This paper aims to fill this gap by providing a counterfactual scenario for the US power grid, suggesting that nuclear power can be a significant part of the solution to the energy transition...

Sovacool's outrageously obscene paper (my view) can be found here:

Sustainable minerals and metals for a low-carbon future

Subtitle:

Policy coordination is needed for global supply chains.

Sovacool's full of shit, by the way, that so called "renewable energy" has a single fucking to do with low carbon energy. It doesn't. As I often point out, we have spent trillions of dollars on solar and wind crap in this century - all of which will need to be replaced in 20 to 30 years - without making a single dent in the accelerating rate of accumulation in the planetary atmosphere:

Once again:

To find out about the acceleration of the rate of decay of the atmosphere, the following graphic from the NOAA Mauna Loa Carbon Dioxide Observatory says it all:

The absolute numbers can be discerned by calculating from data on the Mauna Loa website's data pages:

CO2 Observatory Data Pages

The claim that so called "renewable energy" has anything to do with addressing fossil fuels is a delusional add on. Beginning with Three Mile Island, and perhaps before, the purpose of the reactionary call for so called "renewable energy" was all about attacking nuclear energy.

The success of that attack is measured in planetary scale in the data at Mauna Loa, the fires breaking out all over the planet, severe water depletion etc., etc.

The full paper is available for reading if one is interested. It strikes me as a novel argument, albeit one that should have occurred to me but didn’t. The authors are young, early in their careers, and it is a pleasure to cite young people, the people we - my generation - have screwed royally, leaving them a planet in flames, the best ores facing depletion, consumer debris widely scattered, toxic fluoropolymers and metals ubiquitous, vast mining pits and so on and on...

History will not forgive us, nor should it.