While we at the Heartland Institute do not believe that any energy sources should be subsidized, if the federal government is going to support energy, it should support sources that are reliable and dispatchable.

With that in mind, it is absolutely insane that Uncle Sam gives billions in tax credits to wind and solar projects when this sort of funding could go toward more effective, energy-dense, dispatchable sources.  The so-called "Inflation Reduction Act" continues this madness; one analysis found that under the bill, wind and solar will receive an additional $113 billion in tax credits by 2031.  By comparison, the bill provides about $29 billion to oil and gas activities and $3.4 billion for nuclear power. 

Modern environmentalists are all about paving over rangeland and animal habitats with ugly, polluting solar farms and noisy wind turbines that disrupt wildlife habitat and kill protected and endangered species.  Simultaneously, most radical environmentalists seem unalterably opposed to nuclear power despite the fact that modern reactors are safe, the fuel used is energy-dense, and the power plants and storage for spent fuel don't take up as much land, and thus don't disrupt wildlife habitats as much as renewable energy.

The low proportion of energy spending devoted to nuclear is especially strange, considering the recent Pentagon approval of a plug-and-play microreactor that fits in a semi truck and provides up to 20 megawatts of power and lasts continuously for 10 years without needing to be refueled.  Refueling is simple, and then the reactor can go back into use.  These are being promoted as great sources of energy for remote locations and emergency power after natural disasters.

Looking at wind power for comparison, industrial wind turbines produce roughly 2.5 megawatts under ideal wind conditions, which is not all that common.  Even then, that "nameplate" capacity is rarely reached; the real capacity factor is usually more like 30 to 40 percent of nameplate, and that is being generous.  Most turbines last only 12 years and then need to be dismantled and disposed of, which is not a simple task, and replaced.

Offshore turbines are said to have a 14.7-megawatt nameplate capacity, but the expense is much higher per megawatt-hour.

To put it in perspective, a mid-sized 600-megawatt fossil energy plant takes up 250 to 750 acres of land, while an equivalent wind development requires 40,000 to 50,000 acres.

Is such colossal land use by so-called renewable wind really acceptable?

Robert Bryce, a pro-nuclear contributor at Forbes, recently described the virtues of the new Rolls-Royce Small Modular Reactor (SMR) design and pointed out the disconnect between proponents of renewables and their stated environmental goals.

The power density of the nuclear plants Rolls-Royce plans to build will need 10,000 times less land than a wind project and about 1,000 times less land than what will be required by a solar project," wrote Bryce. "Due to their astonishingly high power density, the new nuclear plants will need far fewer resources like land, steel, neodymium, copper, and concrete[.]

Maybe the pro-green stance is merely a symptom of what I'll call "metropolitan brain fog," where city-dwelling environmentalists like the idea of covering a landmass twice the size of California to run the country on wind.  However, they might change their mind if they had to look at it all day.

While the cost of start-up nuclear is high, so is the cost of putting in thousands of offshore wind turbines that may disturb whales.  The federal government's own analysis indicates that offshore wind is likely to be among the highest-cost sources of electricity, with nuclear being among the lowest-cost sources, with the price as well as supply of electricity from nuclear being much more stable.  Even onshore wind and solar cost more than nuclear power.  To claim that the price tag is an issue is laughable, considering the nonsense that our government throws billions of dollars at.

Once again, I'm not saying the government should subsidize any source of electric power, but if it chooses to do so, it should be the source that delivers the most bang for the buck, which, moving forward, is likely nuclear, especially with new small scale modular reactor designs coming online.

We can split an atom for continuous energy, but environmentalists would rather burn wood or rely on intermittent bird-shredders.

Linnea Lueken (llueken@heartland.org) is a research fellow with the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research center headquartered in Arlington Heights, Illinois.

Image: Z22.