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It’s about time to kill off nuclear energy

A short-lived tyranny It’s about time to kill off nuclear energy
OCOLLY.COM  By Brandon McVeyOpinion Columnist : October 06, 2008 Pop Quiz: what source of energy has received the most government subsidies since World War II, has a by-product that has remained dangerous for thousands of years, and is a major component of McCain’s energy proposal?

What I’m talking about is nuclear energy — 1950’s energy of the future. Back then, it was thought that nuclear energy would be the radioactive wave that would carry the world into the atomic age, supplying nearly all of the world’s electricity and a significant portion of its commercial energy. Obviously, nuclear energy has failed to live up to this expectation.

In the United States, no nuclear power plants have been built since the late 1970s. For private investors, the costs of building, maintaining and decommissioning a nuclear power plant overrun each other. Simply put, nuclear energy is a value destroyer that has only been proliferated by billing the American taxpayer. The modern initiatives for nuclear power still fail to recognize many of the flaws of the energy source.

Although electricity produced through nuclear power has been competitive, this price is not representative of all the costs along the nuclear energy value chain. …………………………..we shouldn’t delude ourselves about nuclear.

Maintaining nuclear reactors can be expensive, yet necessary for the reactor to be stable and safe.

Unfortunately, when the companies that manage such nuclear reactors already work with thin profit margins, safety problems can be ignored until the plant has to shut down to address them.

The Union of Concerned Scientists has recorded on its Web site that an outage at a nuclear power plant which lasted more than a year has occurred 51 times at 41 different reactors. While in the 1960s and 1970s the plants were closed primarily for damage recovery, since 1996 all the year-long outages were for safety restoration…………………………There is no agreed-upon method for storing the wastes for 10,000 years, much less 240,000. Currently, many nuclear power plants in the U.S. store these wastes in deep water pools or dry concrete casks. Sabotage, terrorist attacks or earthquakes at one of these sites could release significant amounts of radioactive materials into the troposphere, contaminating large areas for decades……………………………..

America seems to be entering an era of socialistic corporatism. The measures for supporting nuclear energy are much akin to the $700 billion bailout of the financial sector. The government has visibly become an instrument for insuring private profit at public cost.

In reality, nuclear energy in this country is just a zombie kept alive by massive government subsidies.

It’s about time to kill off nuclear energy

Tags: nuclear, antinuclear, radioactive, uranium

October 7, 2008 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs