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Waste and cost raise doubts about nuclear power

Waste and cost raise doubts about nuclear power indyweek.com by Gerry Canavan 22 April 09 “………………………..

Beyond the valid safety arguments (see “New revelations about Three Mile Island disaster raise doubts over nuclear plant safety“), which pro- and anti-nuke contingents have argued bitterly about for four decades, there are other concerns about the nuclear solution: the exorbitant cost to build the plants, their financial risk—fraught with more uncertainty considering the country’s recession, and the absence of a place to dispose of tons of dangerous radioactive waste.

No new nuclear power plants have been constructed in this country in more than 20 years. Yet as of February 2009, there were 22 applications for new and expanded plants before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission—12 of them would be located in the South—but none has yet received permission to proceed with actual construction…………

…………nuclear fuel costs are lower compared to coal, peat, wood and natural gas—but not renewable energy sources. Nor do the overall costs include disposal or recycling (also known as reprocessing) of the radioactive waste. In the 1990s, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences studied the feasibility of recycling plutonium; a report concluded that 62,000 tons of spent fuel would cost $50 billion to $100 billion………..

…………..Under the new Construction Work in Progress guidelines signed into state law in 2007 as part of Senate Bill 3, the bulk of the costs for these proposed plants will be passed on to consumers—even if the plants are never completed.

“Taxpayers and ratepayers have been forced to bail out the nuclear power industry twice in the past 30 years, and if Congress gives the industry the massive loan guarantees it wants, we likely will have to cough up hundreds of billions of dollars to do it yet again,” wrote Ellen Vancko, the nuclear energy and climate change project manager at the Union for Concerned Citizens, in a report on federal loan guarantees commissioned by the group. “The industry has gone from promising electricity ‘too cheap to meter’ to being too costly to consider.”

Waste and cost raise doubts about nuclear power: News: National/ International: Independent Weekly: Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill

April 23, 2009 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, USA | antinuclear, nuclear, nuclear costs, radioactive