Fossil fuel bogeyman a fantasy

Some thoughts loosely tied together by the theme of nuclear power:

❚ U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva wrote a curious column about his bill to permanently ban uranium mining near the Grand Canyon. The bill passed the House last week.

It, of course, is not curious that Grijalva wants to prohibit uranium mining in that area, something he says he has been working on since 2008.

What was curious was how he described the opposition to the bill and those pressing to reopen the land to such mining. He referred to them as “fossil fuel corporations.”

There is currently a temporary ban imposed by the Obama administration.

Grijalva frets that the “fossil fuel lobbyists” in key posts in the Trump administration will lift the ban.

Now, uranium isn’t a fossil fuel. It is used to generate electricity from nuclear power plants.

Nuclear power competes with fossil fuels.

And it produces no carbon emissions, so it is environmentally friendly.

In short, the fossil fuel industry has no reason to oppose Grijalva’s bill or push to open up the area to uranium mining. If anything, Grijalva’s efforts disadvantage a competitor.

So, why did Grijalva misrepresent the nature of the opposition to banning uranium mining near the Grand Canyon?

It doesn’t seem necessary to advance his case. Surely, uranium mining companies could serve as bogeyman enough.

Such gratuitous misdirections are so common among politicians of all stripes that they almost seem instinctual rather than calculating.

I’ve never really understood the phenomenon. Why make stuff up when you would have just as good of a chance of prevailing with the truth?

❚ This isn’t a brief for nuclear power. Or uranium mining near the Grand Canyon for that matter.

Some on the right want to see nuclear power expanded as a clean energy source without the intermittency problems of solar and wind.

Sen. Martha McSally has a bill to assist the expansion and modernization of the industry.

However, nuclear power has always required federal taxpayers to provide a liability backstop. Otherwise, private investors won’t stump up the capital to build them.

It’s wrong to ask taxpayers to assume a risk that’s too much for private investors and insurance companies to stomach.

All subsidies for energy production should be eliminated. Impose a small carbon tax to create the infrastructure for dealing with climate change, and then let the market determine the energy mix.

The United States does import roughly 90 percent of the uranium we use, and some of it is from unreliable sources such as Kazakhstan and Russia. But friendly allies such as Canada and Australia have ample reserves in the event of a pinch.

In general, the restrictions on natural resource production on public lands are excessive. But there isn’t an urgent need to boost uranium mining in the United States.

❚ While taxpayers shouldn’t be asked to backstop the liability on new nuclear power plants, there’s no reason not to maximize production from the plants that already exist, and for which such a backstop is already in place.

That’s why I found a recent report by the Arizona Republic’s Ryan Randazzo so jaw-dropping.

According to the news account, production from the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station west of Phoenix may need to be curtailed. Why? Because of too much solar power on the grid.

To be blunt, this is nuts. Nuclear power is steady as she goes, sunshine or rain. Solar power is variable and intermittent. How much will be produced and when is not totally predictable.

Nuclear power emits no greenhouse gases. From an environmental perspective, there’s no reason to prefer electricity from utility-scale solar plants to that from Palo Verde.

There may be reason to prefer new capacity to come from solar rather than nuclear. But substituting new solar for existing nuclear makes no sense. Yet that, apparently, is what we’re doing.

Nuclear plants aren’t like natural gas generators, easy to turn off and on. So, to keep Palo Verde operating at full capacity, there’s discussion of using the plant to convert water into hydrogen fuel for other generators.

This too is nuts. Arizona needs to use its water as, well, water.

Someone — at Arizona Public Service or the Arizona Corporation Commission — should have fired off warning flares well before we reached this point.