NUCLEAR energy is like abortion. If you have a view, you probably feel passionately about it, are convinced you are right and dismiss the other side as morally reprehensible. Passions ran high last week when, in Business Day, energy expert Anton Eberhard denounced nuclear energy as “Neanderthal” and said “it is time for the gloves to come off”. Chris Yelland vilified “nuclear evangelists”. Clive Ferreira lamented “nuclear diehards”.

In the other corner, we find equally dogmatic experts. Andrew Kenny says “Eberhard is deluded”. Nuclear Energy Corporation chairperson Kelvin Kemm regards Mr Eberhard’s column as having “so many holes it looks like a fishing net”. The acrimony, obfuscation and conflicting claims are bewildering, yet the underlying facts are not complicated.

Lest there be any doubt of the kind my earlier column generated, I agree with antinukes that the government should not proceed with the proposed 9,600MW nuclear deal. And I agree with pronukes that nuclear power should be “part of the mix”.

The trendiest antinuclear argument is not about viability or safety, but fear of corruption. Mr Eberhard wants opponents to “demonstrate that the initiative is not corrupt.” Why? Clean government is the responsibility of procurement and law enforcement institutions.

Since both sides assume that nuclear power is legitimately a government decision, they squabble about which bureaucratic blunder will be least calamitous. They learnt nothing from the government’s gargantuan electricity failure. They ignore the fact that perpetuation of the Neanderthal Eskom monopoly makes us trillions of rand poorer than we would have been with energy sufficiency.

Mr Eberhard is a formidable academic, yet is so emotional that he confuses supply and demand. “Electricity demand is … lower than … a decade ago”, he says. But he has no way of knowing what demand was, is or would have been had there been adequate supply. Had pre-crisis trends continued, we would be producing and consuming more power than the maximum envisaged by Eberhard. Economist Dawie Roodt’s calculations suggest that, with energy sufficiency, we could have been 10% wealthier annually, with millions more jobs and substantially higher living standards.

What we do know from the world’s experience is that there is a near-perfect correlation between energy supply and economic growth, that the former tends to precede the latter, and that technology causes the latter to outgrow the former. In other words, we cannot prosper without there being much more energy than Eberhard suggests.

Nuclear safety neurotics spew scary mantras despite the fact that the debate was conclusively settled by the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami. The World Health Organisation and the Japanese government found that there were no radiation casualties. Nuclear is the safest and environmentally most friendly form of energy. Excessive pre-Fukushima standards waste half the cost of nuclear power. Appropriately relaxed standards would make nuclear much cheaper.

Eberhard rightly argues that our government cannot afford large power stations. It does not need to. It can afford small ones and procure large supplies of power on the same basis that it procures other “renewables” (wind and solar).

If the government wants prosperity — perversely, it might not — it should emulate prosperous coal-rich developing countries such as our Brics partners, India and China. It should unbundle Eskom, deregulate energy (with or without privatisation), and promote a rationally balanced energy “mix”. According to a United Nations’ energy forecast, the mix should include a declining proportion of fossil fuel and an increasing proportion of nuclear and other “renewables”.

Our government has a simple choice: it can perpetuate its energy catastrophe or join the twentieth century before it is too far behind us. If it wants us to be a modern, energy-rich country, it should repeal the ban on electricity trade, and let buyers, including municipalities and “intensive” users, decide whose power to buy.

* Louw is executive director of the Free Market Foundation