A death announcement last week in the Houston Chronicle caught my eye. I never met the late Stephen Simon, but what I read made me realize that the quiet heroes and heroines of free-market capitalism need to be saluted now and then. For they are the wealth creators and real philanthropists versus the political system’s wealth redistributionists and wealth destroyers.
Here is the essence of this man. An engineer. More than 40 years with a major energy company in a variety of advancing positions at home and abroad. Successful. Private sector philanthropist with his time and money.
And through it all, a “heroic capitalist” in the Smith-Smiles-Rand tradition (see Part I of my Capitalism at Work). A practitioner of Principled Entrepreneurship ™.
Think of what Julian Simon would have said about Stephen Simon (no relation): He created more than he consumed to leave us resource richer.…
Continue ReadingIn quick succession, the Obama administration has dealt a near-death blow to new civilian nuclear reactors in the U.S.
First, the Yucca Mountain Project, a waste storage facility in Nevada, was “zeroed-out” of the 2009 budget. Second, the administration has just ended U.S. participation in a new nuclear fuel recycling project, one that would extract more energy from existing fission energy sources, and reduce sharply the high level nuclear waste from nuclear power.
Presiding over both of these decisions–that effectively terminate the feasibility of new nuclear power plants for the U.S.–is Dr. Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy, Nobel Laureate in Physics, and former director of the Lawrence Berkeley Energy Laboratory.
In contrast to the crowing of Senator Harry Reid about “killing” the Yucca Mountain Waste storage project, Dr. Chu described nuclear fuel recycling as an essential element of nuclear power for the U.S.,…
Continue ReadingAs I posted last week, conventionally sized nuclear power (?750–1,250 MW) is dramatically uncompetitive with coal- and gas-fired electricity generation in light of the huge increase in construction costs recently estimated by various utilities. A typical new coal-fired plant may cost on the order of $2,000/MW compared to new nuclear estimated to cost as much as four or five times more. The lower operating costs of nuclear compared to fossil-fired plants cannot erase this capital-cost premium.
Micro-nuclear, with capacity in the 5–100 MW range, while exciting as a new technology, is no panacea. Actual installed costs are yet to be published. But operating cost estimates of less than ten cents a kilowatt-hour have drawn attention to the designs. But are the scale economies in construction, operations, maintenance, and the fuel cycle considered in these preliminary estimates?…
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