Big Nuke & Innovation

In a free market what is introduced is originally not very good, expensive, few options and slow to acquire. The market in time, in the measure the market in the category is free,  makes later iterations more better cheaper faster.  If this is not the case, it is a dead giveaway the market is not free.  Nuclear power is a cartel, an industry in lockdown.  Nuclear power is a hallmark of capitalism, inasmuch as we could not have such nukes without capitalism.  So I am a free market anti-capitalist, because capitalism stops innovation.

Japan spent the last twenty years trying to kick start their economy again, contra demographics and economic policies, by building projects of bridges to nowhere and highways for no one.  How come they did not replace the worn out nuke plants, the very ones they are struggling with right now?  The nuke plants were poorly designed, in retrospect, and poorly situated, yet it did not occur to anyone to replace those rather than build more stadiums?

Big nuke power came out of big war nuke power, and is sustainable only by massive concentrations of capital, and a combination of taxes and fees.  It looks good on paper, but I wonder if a cost benefit of nuke power, that included Chernobyl, Three Mile island, and Fukushima factored in, would still show on paper what the cost per KW Hour did lo those many years ago.  Of course, you cannot price illness and death from disaster into the spreadsheet, but it would be interesting.

Another factor in econ analysis is what we do not see.  A huge hydroelectric dam offers cheap electricity.  We all see that.  But it so attenuates fish runs that we cannot quite count the cost to fisheries industries, and the drop in omega three in local diets does to health and productivity.  Next, what to do with the hazmat from smelting bauxite into aluminum?  The answer is call it flouride (yes, but not the good for teeth flouride) and dump it in drinking water.  (One solution to pollution is dilution.)  The cost in disease from flouridation is incalculable.  Next, now that we have cheap aluminum, we have cheap packaging, and longer shipping distances are affordable, so we have more packaging in landfills.  What does that cost?

Progressive rant at capitalism, the means that generate these results, but of course acquiesce as long as the powers that be shave off a few bucks for their welfare plantations.  So the result is we have a symbiotic relation between the capitalists and the progressives, each exempt from the horrors of their systems and policies, but each in charge, and thus with no incentive to ameliorate.

These ancient nuke power plants were not touched by progress because they are a cash cow for GE, and Japan has enough Harvard MBAs with USA Harvard MBAs making policy to assure those plants were not touched.  And this in spite of the fact that Toshiba has safe, small, cheap nuke plants for sale.  Nothing in that for GE.  Think if the markets were free in Japan.  Japan would have converted from big nuke to small dispersed nuke.  And the natural disaster would have been limited to water over the berms...

Economics is subset of ethics, a subset of philosophy, the area of how people treat people in the market place.  Capitalism is antihuman.  In the measure we embrace free markets is the measure we get more better cheaper faster for the masses.

Bookmark this post --- Email this post