Seabrook and the West

Early this year PS of NH filed for bankruptcy after a court refused to let it include the costs of the Seabrook nuclear plant in its rate base. Together with the plight of LILCO's Shoreham plant, this has been widely taken as another demonstration that nuclear power is dead or dying.

Nonsense. Power sources are ultimately selected neither by politicians nor by scientists, but by the inexorable logic of facts. That logic can be delayed by a few years, but not elimi-nated for good. Nuclear power must ultimately triumph not, alas, because it is healthier and safer (which it is), but because its competitors will not be able to satisfy the demand.

Omitting Lovins' expensive toys of piddle power, that leaves natural gas, which very likely will become the only major economic competitor of nuclear power for the first decades of the next century.

Seabrook, therefore, will eventually go on line. But there are other lessons in PSNH's bankruptcy.

But the leftist redistributor who wants to coerce society into let-me-sit-on-the-board democracy is not capitalism's only enemy. The other is the capitalist who has found a shortcut to competition: protection by the shadow government. Capital-ism is a system that favors the consumer; it disciplines the capi-talist and may drive him to oppose it. I refer to that as "Foy's principle," [AtE Oct 82], but Milton Friedman said much the same thing, as did Adam Smith himself.

But anti-Japanese protectionism is only the most obvious form of the capitalist's anti-capitalism. A more widespread and insidious form is servile, self-destructive conformity to media-managed attitudes (such as "social responsibility"). It has recently been revealed how the flacks of Ford Motor Co. quite needlessly played guilty about the Pinto, settled out of court with its accusers, and lavished money on the likes of PBS in hopes of making a good impression on the public. That reminded me of nothing so much as of the nuclear flacks after TMI: Instead of celebrating the historic event of 940 MW getting out of control without hurting a living soul (try that with any other energy), they wailed "We have been bad boys, but we will sin no more."

PSNH was finally done in by the media-backed storm-troopers and politicians; but the corporate princes of servility, conformity and benightedness are not without blame.

And there is something more general here. Nuclear power is losing because its custodians let their adversaries' conquer the moral high ground [AtE Oct 87]. But the Western World is losing in the same way. Communism is advancing by its ap-peal, however fraudulent, to morality. Capitalism, the system of voluntary choice and absence of coercion, is losing because its apologetic custodians are too ignorant to realize that it is the most moral system in history.