The answer is perhaps as high as a hundred billion dollars.

First some background. I testified in front of the Senate Environment and Public Works committee in July. In my testimony, “The High Cost of Nuclear Power,” I pointed out the obvious — that nuclear is a mature source of power that has benefited disproportionately from government support to date:

From 1948 to today, nuclear energy research and development exceeded $70 billion, whereas research and development for renewables was about $10 billion. From 2002 to 2007, fossil fuels received almost $14 billion in electricity-related tax subsides, whereas renewables received under $3 billion.

The Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act caps the liability for claims arising from nuclear incidents. It reduces the insurance nuclear power plants need to buy and requires taxpayers to cover all claims in excess of the cap. The benefit of this indirect subsidy has been estimated at between $237 million and $3.5 billion a year, which suggests that it has been worth many billions of dollars to the industry. It could be argued that the value is considerably larger than that, since the industry might not have existed at all without it: “At the time of the Act’s passing, it was considered necessary as an incentive for the private production of nuclear power … because investors were unwilling to accept the then-unquantified risks of nuclear energy without some limitation on their liability.

One can make a case that such insurance was reasonable for a new, almost completely unknown technology in 1957. Extending it through 2025 is harder to justify. If investors aren’t willing to accept the risks of nuclear energy now, without taxpayers liable for any major catastrophe, perhaps the technology no longer deserves government support.

A certain senior member of the minority known for climate denial just submitted two (silly) written questions to me for the record on this:

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On the Diane Rehm radio show yesterday, senior John McCain (R-AZ) adviser and former Koch Industries lobbyist Nancy Pfotenhauer defended McCain’s flip-flop in support of offshore drilling by repeating the conservative myth that “we survived Hurricanes Katrina and Rita with no significant spills.” She claimed that the technology has been “refined enough” to “protect environmentally sensitive areas”:

And then there was a concern in the past about the technology. Did the technology exist, was it refined enough if you will, no pun intended, to be able to protect environmentally sensitive areas. And so — he’s been a conservationist all his life — he was concerned about that. And I think the things that have happened since then . . . [W]hen we survived Hurricane Katrina and Rita with no significant spills, I think that had a very powerful impact on his feeling about the technology.

Listen here (and watch a photo montage of Katrina’s oil spills):

As these photographs from Katrina Destruction, SkyTruth, and the National Geographic confirm, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita caused an ecological disaster on the scale of the Exxon Valdez. One of the hundreds of spills, the onshore Murphy Oil spill, devastated an entire neighborhood.

McCain’s dirty energy spokeswoman is echoing the false claim she made July 14 on MSNBC:

When Senator McCain opposed lifting the ban in the past, it was because there were concerns about environmental capability. Like, could we do this and still maintain a pristine environmental um uh climate and and area around the drilling? And basically, what we’ve seen is the technology has progressed to the point where we could do that. We withstood Hurricanes Rita and Katrina and didn’t spill a drop.

ThinkProgress reported that MSNBC’s David Schuster confronted her with the facts and forced her to retract her false claim on July 17:

SCHUSTER: In fact, the US Minerals Management Service said that Katrina and Rita caused 124 offshore spills for a total of more than 743,000 gallons of refined products in spills. So Nancy, do you want to take back what you said?

PFOTENHAUER: Well, I actually do. I was misinformed, and my embarrassment aside . . .

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Baseload geothermal power gets all the attention because it has such enormous potential for delivering low-carbon 24/7 power (see “Hot rocks are a rockin’ hot climate solution“).

But geothermal heat pumps (GHPs) are every bit as deserving of attention because they are the most energy efficient form of heating and cooling a building over much of this country [click on figure to enlarge]. And if you power GHPs with a renewable source of electricity, they are probably the best way to eliminate the need for natural gas heating in the winter while at the same time slashing peak demand in the summer.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration released their “Survey of Geothermal Heat Pump Shipments, 2006” last month. It found “that manufacturers shipped 63,682 geothermal heat pumps (GHP) in 2006, a 33 percent increase over the 2005 total of 47,830.”

Here is some background on the technology.

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[This blog focuses on climate and energy issues from the perspective of science, solutions, and politics. Nothing will be more important to the future of climate and energy policy than the 2008 presidential election. And rhetorical strategy is one of my favorite subjects. So very occasionally I will focus more on rhetoric than the policy. I'll keep the content below the jump. Nonetheless, this post does have direct relevance to the climate debate.]

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With the Olympics almost upon us, Science magazine has a cover story on “China’s Environmental Challenges” (subs. req’d). Since Science has been a leader in drawing attention to the threat posed to humanity by accelerating greenhouse gas emissions, you’d think that one of those challenges would be China’s newly achieved leadership in carbon dioxide emissions, how China can developesustainably, and what are the alternatives to their rapacious use of coal.

You would be wrong. Here are the four articles that comprise the magazine’s news focus on China’s environment:

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