In reply to:


That's because the NRC has made it next to impossible to build any new nuclear power plants. It's good that there are safety regulations and checks and balances to prevent another Chernobyl, but I think they've overstepped their bounds in many areas and completely stifled the motivation to research new, better, and safer forms of nuclear engergy production.



The reason why nuclear power plants are no longer built in the US and most other countries in the world is that experience over the last 40+ years has showed that the Nuclear power industry has failed to live up to most of its promises.

Talk of "power too cheap to meter" in the fifties and sixties overlooked the real long term costs of building, operating and then safely decommisioning (and then safely storing the radioactive wastes produced during the operation and decomissioning phases) any nuclear power plant.

A nuclear power plant may operate for 25 years and produce lots of electricity during that time - but the cost of decommisioning the plant (and then storing the left over radioactive waste produced from it) is a substantial portion of (if not more than) the value of the electricity generated in that time.

The current method of dealing with most nuclear plants that have reached the end of their operating lives is to remove all radioactive fuel from the power core, then leave it for future generations to deal with.

The UK government is still coming to grips with the cost of cleaning up the sites where existing power plants are operating (or have ceased operating).

The length of time until the site is rendered a 'green fields' site again is generally placed at a hundred or more years in the future and the cost in decomissioning a plant is literally staggering.

Its so large, the UK government (i.e. UK taxpayers) will likely to have to pay for this cost even though many of these nuclear power plants were privatised in the 90's by the then government of the day.

This is not my opinion - these are agreed facts by experts in nuclear power, there are numerous sources where the costs of decomissioning is openly discussed.
And many places where the costs are not so openly discussed.

As far as I know there is no country in the world that has sucessfully fully decommissioned a commercial nuclear power plant - the costs of doing so are too high and/or unknown for anyone comtemplate doing so in the short to medium term.
[and no, simply putting a concrete 'tomb' around a nuclear power plant ala Chernobyl is not fixing the problem - its merely delaying it].

So future generations (our descendents) will have to pay for the true costs of the power generated now (and in the recent past) using nuclear power.

The long term costs of nuclear power generation may exceed the costs of developing and using other clean energy sources (or even cleaning up existing 'dirty' energy sources e.g. coal) instead.

BTW: I used to be very pro-Nuclear power, however once you do some reading and understand the true facts and costs of the situation, its hard to conclude that nuclear is a valid option, or that it ever was. In truth, many nuclear power plants were built to help increase (albeit in a small way) the stockpiles of fissile nuclear material (e.g. Plutonium) for nuclear weapons, generating power was a useful cover story.

Now, some people are proposing building more nuclear power plants to be able to 'burn' up the Plutonium no longer required for nuclear weapons - which sounds to me like digging a bigger hole to fill in the smaller hole you created earlier.