How To Build 6,000 Nuclear Plants By 2050
by James Muckerheide
In 1997-1998, I made an estimate of how many nuclear plants would be needed by 2050. It reflects an economy that is directed to provide the energy necessary to meet basic human needs, especially for the developing regions. The initiative required is not unlike what the U.S. government did under Roosevelt to bring electric power to rural areas; to provide transportation by building roads and highways, canals, railroads, and airlines; to develop water supplies and irrigation systems, to provide telephone service, medical, and hospital services; and many other programs that were essential to lift regions out of poverty. That is, to meet the needs of people outside of the mainstream of economic life, even if those people are the farmers providing our food and clothing, miners providing our coal and steel, and so on. However, as economist Lyndon LaRouche has proposed, we need to do more to meet those needs, both within the United States and for the developing world, to bring those people into the economic mainstream, instead of leaving them just as cheap sources of our labor and raw materials.
At the same time, in the last five years, we have seen greater worldwide recognition that nuclear power is essential. There is increasing support by industry and governments, compounded by recent changes in oil and gas supplies and costs, and there is increasing recognition of the essential role of nuclear energy by some responsible environmentalists. Initiatives in industry and the political environment are gearing up to implement nuclear power. But they are timid and leaderless in the United States and Europe compared to most of the rest of the world.
Unfortunately, current economic concepts expect that such decisions are to be made for individual plants, one at a time, by private interests, only when they are assured that they will be competitive (that is, assured to be profitable). Attempting to make such decisions, even with “guarantees,” must therefore compete for private financial resources. But those resources can see greater returns in making movies or reselling mortgages. Such decisions are therefore going to be too little (too little energy), and too late (too little lead time) to adequately address national and international infrastructure requirements. Government and industry leadership that is directed to meet the national interest must make the public interest decisions to produce essential infrastructure, instead of being limited to providing small, incremental, ad hoc profit opportunities. They must enable the critical private interests and industries, which must do the work, to get on with the business of competing to deliver the essential technology and services. The great manufacturing, materials, construction, and services enterprises can produce the infrastructure required to engage the world population in tremendous economic growth, modelled on the U.S. growth of the mid- to late-19th Century, and the mid-20th Century, which would pale in comparison...
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