Throwing out the baby with the (oily) bath water

Posted by Mitch Kokai at 08:05 AM

In the latest Fortune, Allan Sloan warns us to expect an overreaction to the big Gulf oil spill.

Yeah, I may sound a little over the top. But as someone who used to write about regulated utilities for a living, I can't help but remember the damage we did to ourselves as a nation because of the partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear generating plant near Harrisburg, Pa., in 1979. It was a terrifying incident, but it turned out that there was only minimal damage to the environment and probably none to the local citizenry -- other than scaring them half to death.

The only economic damage of consequence was to the plant's owner, General Public Utilities. But there was huge collateral damage to our country. The environmental and regulatory fallout (pun intended) from TMI led us to shun new nuclear plants for almost 30 years. Although some of the nukes under construction at the time were completed, it wasn't until 2007 -- that's 28 years after the incident -- that we got our first post-TMI application to build a new one.

Meanwhile, we grew increasingly dependent on coal, oil, and natural gas to generate electricity.

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