Last week, Environmental Entrepreneurs, a trade group, announced
that wind and solar projects around the country had created 34,409
new jobs around the country in the second quarter of 2012, with
high concentrations in California, Michigan, Ohio, Florida, and
Colorado.
GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney immediately countered
this by visiting Ohio’s coal country, promising to protect the
industry from the Obama Administration’ “War on Coal.” Not to be
outdone, President Obama was off to Iowa where he even won the
support of Republican Governor Terry Branstad in urging Congress to
renew the production tax credit so that the wind industry can
create even more jobs.
So the great Presidential battle over the future of energy is
shaping up — which can create more jobs, coal or wind? What about
nuclear, which might also be said to have a potential role in the
nation’s energy future? Well, nuclear energy has one great
weakness. It doesn’t create many jobs. All it creates is lots of
energy. And in the contest for which form of energy can employ the
most people, that doesn’t seem to count for much at all.
Let it be said first that the other players missing in action
here are gas and oil. New drilling techniques for shale gas and
tight oil are now creating more jobs and useful energy than all the
other technologies combined. Production from the Marcellus Shale in
Pennsylvania and Ohio is up 82 percent over last year. North
Dakota’s Bakken shale has created the lowest unemployment rate in
the nation. Oklahoma gas fields are complaining they can’t find
enough workers. Any healthy, working-age male could head for any of
these states and find themselves making close to a six-figure
income.
But all this is happening in the private sector so it doesn’t
draw much attention in presidential campaigns. Most of the
Marcellus shale lies under private lands so — blessedly — it can
be done without federal interference. Only New York State has
stopped the show — which is just another reason why upstate New
York, if separated from New York City, ranks as the second-poorest
state in the nation behind only Mississippi.
What attracts politicians to coal and wind is that they involve
the federal government. The EPA is on a campaign to close down 10
percent of the nation’s coal plants and so Romney can win votes by
promising to intervene. The President, on the other hand, continues
his efforts to “harness the sun and the winds and
the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories,” as he put it in
his Inaugural Address. Wind’s production tax credit — which makes
it profitable to erect windmills even if they never produce a
kilowatt of electricity — will be extended into the foreseeable
future. Corn ethanol, which now consumes 40 percent of the corn
crop, will continue to be mandated, even though it is driving up
world food prices and international officials are accusing us of
starving the world’s poor. (The EPA showed its defiance last week
by announcing that sorghum, the nation’s third largest crop, will
also be converted into ethanol.) The military is being instructed
to substitute biofuels for jet fuel, even though it
will cost $59 a gallon. And with nearly half the land west of
the Mississippi still owned by the federal government, the
President is able to commission a 350-square-mile wind farm in
Wyoming and several 20-square-mile solar plants in the Mojave
Desert. All this will create jobs, jobs, jobs.
So how does nuclear stack up against all this? Not very well.
Take the matter of coal mining. There are an estimated 88,000 coal
miners in this country working 1,300 coal mines, most of them in
Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, and Kentucky. There are 400
mines in Kentucky alone. More than half a dozen states identify
themselves as “coal states,” with Indiana, Illinois, Tennessee,
Alabama, Colorado, and Wyoming filling out the list. Montana, the
state with the biggest coal reserves, hasn’t really started
developing them yet.
To this must be added the jobs in the railroad industry. A
1,000-megawatt (MW) coal plant must be replenished by a 110-car
coal train arriving at the plant every 30 hours. A fully loaded
coal “unit” train now leaves the Powder River Basin in Wyoming
every eight minutes. Coal constitutes almost half the freight
aboard the railroads and it is a moot question as to whether the
railroads really own the coal companies or the coal companies own
the railroads. In any case, there are close to 200,000 railroad
workers in the U.S., half of them dedicated to moving coal.
Now compare this to the mining and transport needed to fuel a
nuclear reactor. Because uranium has an energy
density almost 3 million times that of
coal, not much is required. The Uranium Producers Association
reports there are 13 operating uranium mines in the country,
employing 1,360 workers. The annual output of uranium mining would
fill two railroad cars so no railroad traffic either. Actually,
domestic uranium production has been depressed over the last two
decades because of the Megatons-to-Megawatts program that has
recycled 18,000 former Soviet warheads in the greatest
swords-into-plowshares effort in history. (Never heard of it? I
wonder why.) But the treaty ends in 2014 and domestic uranium
production may increase a little. The Russians are now proposing to
supply the entire world with uranium out of one mine in
Siberia.
Because uranium mining is such a small-scale operation, there
are no “nuclear states.” New Mexico’s Pete Domenici was once the
leading advocate in the Senate because of the presence of the Los
Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories. His mantle has been picked
up by Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who has Oak Ridge. But
nuclear has no real constituency in either state and plays very
little in their politics.
Then there is the matter of enriching uranium and preparing it
for use in reactors. That is done at the nation’s only plant in
Paducah, Kentucky, which employs 1,200 people. The U.S. Enrichment
Corporation (USEC) is trying to replace it with a more modern
facility in Piketon, Ohio, but that will employ about the same
amount. How about transporting the fuel rods to the reactors? That
requires a fleet of six trucks making the trip once every 18
months.
Now compare all this with wind, an even bigger vote-getter. Each
45-story windmill produces about 2 MW, which means you need 500 of
them to equal the capacity of a nuclear
reactor. These have to be manufactured and trucked to remote sites
across the country. You’ve probably seen them on the highway. Each
windmill blade is half the length of a football field. But wind
farms only produce electricity 20 percent of the time so you need
five times that number to equal one 1000-MW nuclear plant. That’s
2,500 45-story windmills, which translates into lots of
manufacturing jobs, lots of transport, and lots of on-site
construction. Wind is nothing if not labor intensive.
The job requirements for solar are on the same scale. Each PV
panel or highly polished mirror — several square miles of them —
demands extensive manufacturing and high maintenance. If they are
located in the desert, solar facilities are going to require
constant cleaning and polishing so they do not become covered with
dirt and lose their efficiency. We may have to employ half of
Mexico to do the job. That means even more votes on the way.
Where nuclear does create jobs is in the construction and
operation of reactors. Building a new plant will employ 5,000
construction workers over five years, probably double or triple the
number required for coal or wind. Forbes just
published an article saying that a 1000-MW reactor creates 500
highly skilled operating positions while coal produces 220
less-skilled jobs, wind 90 and natural gas only 60. But these jobs
are highly localized. Bisconti research has found that support for
nuclear regularly exceeds 80 percent in towns where reactors are
located but the benefits do not spread to neighboring areas. The
town of Vernon, population 2,000, which hosts Vermont Yankee, is
almost 100 percent in favor of keeping the reactor operating. But
its interests are swamped by 323,000 other Vermonters who see no
benefits and think they can produce the same amount of energy by
covering the Green Mountains with windmills.
The only way in which nuclear really “creates job” is in
providing clean, cheap electricity to make other manufacturing
operations profitable. Tennessee has refashioned itself into a
major auto manufacturing state, hosting both Nissan and
Volkswagen’s U.S. headquarters and creating 100,000 ancillary jobs,
partly by capitalizing on nuclear electricity from the Tennessee
Valley Authority. IBM, Vermont’s largest employer, has threatened
to leave the state if it loses the cheap power of Vermont
Yankee.
No, when it comes to marshaling the votes of thousands of coal
miners or railroad employees or windmill manufacturers, nuclear
definitely fails the test. All it produces is lots of clean, cheap
energy.
