NRC Report on Hidden Costs of Energy Production and Use is Admirable, but Limited
Last month the National Research Council (NRC) released Hidden Costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use. Properly understood, the NRC report is an admirable attempt to bring the consequences of energy use into sharp focus by putting those consequences into terms that are readily understandable by the general public. The NRC recognizes that the report is limited because it was unable to quantify and monetize all the impacts of energy production and use, thereby significantly understating their full costs. But the problem is worse: Even where the NRC did attempt to quantify and monetize the costs associated with energy, the methods that it used systematically understate the costs of those impacts.
According to the NRC report, the “cost” of energy production and use was at least $120 billion in 2005. The report reached this result by identifying and quantifying many of the impacts of energy production and use before converting those impacts into monetary terms. The NRC cautioned that “this aggregate total substantially underestimates the damages” because many impacts could not be quantified and/or monetized due to challenges like insufficient data. (See pages 4 and 16 of the report.)
To its credit, NRC acknowledges that its …
Cross-posted from Legal Planet.
Apparently, substantially safer designs for nuclear reactors are now available. But the safe storage and disposal of nuclear waste is a significant challenge and a yet unresolved problem. Presently, waste is stored at over a hundred facilities across the country, within seventy-five miles of the homes of 161 million people.
The major problem is the longevity of the waste – plutonium will be dangerous for 250,000 years. Although we may be able to model the geologic and physical processes at some geographic sites over such time periods, no one seems to have a clue about how to model possible changes in human behavior and society. Thus, by producing nuclear waste, we are leaving our descendants with a dangerous problem, while having no real idea how competent they will be to handle it. Assuming we care about their welfare, we seem to be taking …
A little bragging is in order this morning. Last week, CPR Member Scholars Tom McGarity and Wendy Wagner won the University of Texas’s Hamilton Book Author Award for their book, Bending Science: How Special Interests Corrupt Public Health Research. The award is given to the author(s) of what is judged the best book by University of Texas faculty in the previous year.
Published by Harvard University Press, Bending Science takes a hard look at the ways and extent to which scientific data are misused and abused in regulatory and tort law, focusing in on misdeeds by corporations, plaintiff attorneys, think tanks, and government agencies. Using case studies, the authors dissect the techniques by which perpetrators create research tailored to their commercial or political needs, conceal unwelcome data, spin public perception about matters of science, discredit legitimate but “inconvenient” research, and bully the scientists who produce …
