nuclear-news

Enormous costs of the global fraud that is nuclear power

The world has since lost over $1,000 billion in subsidies, cash losses, abandoned projects and other damage from nuclear power. Decontaminating Fukushima alone is estimated to cost $623 billion, not counting treatment costs for thousands of likely cancers.

The end of the nuclear illusion,   The Daily Star, Praful Bidwai, 20 March 12A year after the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe began in Japan, the world has a historic chance to end one of the biggest-ever frauds played on the public to promote a patently unsafe, accident-prone, expensive and centralised form of energy generation based upon
splitting the atom to boil water and spin a turbine. Candidly, that’s what nuclear power generation is all about.

The promise of boundless, universal prosperity based on cheap, safe
and abundant energy through “Atoms for Peace,” held out by US
President Dwight Eisenhower in 1953, was deceptive and meant to temper
the prevalent perception of atomic energy as a malign force following
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Eisenhower was a hawk committed to building up the US nuclear arsenal
from under 1,500 to over 20,000 warheads. He sought to “compensate”
for this by dressing up nuclear energy as a positive force and
camouflage the huge US military build-up.
The nuclear promise was based on unrealistic assumptions about safety
and being “too cheap even to metre.” The US Navy transferred reactor
designs developed for nuclear-propelled submarines to General Electric
and Westinghouse for free. The US also limited the nuclear industry’s
accident liability to a ludicrously low level.

The world has since lost over $1,000 billion in subsidies, cash losses, abandoned projects and other damage from nuclear power. Decontaminating Fukushima alone is estimated to cost $623 billion, not counting treatment costs for thousands of likely cancers.

All of the world’s 400-odd reactors can undergo a catastrophic
accident. They will remain a liability until decommissioned (entombed
in concrete) at huge public expense — one-third to one-half of the
cost of building them. They will also leave behind nuclear waste,
which remains hazardous for thousands of years, and which science has
no way of storing safely.

All this for a technology which contributes just 2% of global final
energy consumption!. Even the Economist magazine, which long backed
nuclear power, calls it “the dream that failed.”
Nuclear power declined on its home ground because it became too risky
and “too costly to hook to a metre.” The US hasn’t ordered a new
reactor since 1973. Western Europe hasn’t completed a new reactor
since Chernobyl (1986).

As a former member of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission says: “The
abiding lesson [from Three Mile Island meltdown (1979)]… was that…
reactor operators…could turn a $2 billion asset into a $1 billion
cleanup job in about 90 minutes.”… . http://www.thedailystar.net/newDesign/news-details.php?nid=226925

March 20, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, business and costs, spinbuster