nuclear-news

Nuclear power – the economic and safety facts

The Truth About Nuclear Power emphasizes the economic and safety aspects by showing that

1. modern nuclear power plants are uneconomic to operate compared to natural gas and wind energy,
2.  they produce preposterous pricing if they are the sole power source for a grid,
3.  they cost far too much to construct,
4.  use far more water for cooling, 4 times as much, than better alternatives,
5.  nuclear fuel makes them difficult to shut down and requires very costly safeguards,
6.  they are built to huge scale of 1,000 to 1,600 MWe or greater to attempt to reduce costs via economy of scale,
7. an all-nuclear grid will lose customers to self-generation,
8.  smaller and modular nuclear plants have no benefits due to reverse economy of scale,
9. large-scale plants have very long construction schedules even without lawsuits that delay construction,
10.  nuclear plants do not reach 50 or 60 years life because they require costly upgrades after 20 to 30 years that do not always perform as designed,
11. France has 85 percent of its electricity produced via nuclear power but it is subsidized, is still almost twice as expensive as prices in the US, and is only viable due to exporting power at night rather than throttling back the plants during low demand,
12. nuclear plants cannot provide cheap power on small islands,
13.  US nuclear plants are heavily subsidized but still cannot compete,
14.  projects are cancelled due to unfavorable economics, reactor vendors are desperate for sales, nuclear advocates tout low operating costs and ignore capital costs, nuclear utilities never ask for a rate decrease when building a new nuclear plant, and high nuclear costs are buried in a large customer base,
15. safety regulations are routinely relaxed to allow the plants to continue operating without spending the funds to bring them into compliance,
16. many, many near-misses occur each year in nuclear power, approximately one every 3 weeks,
17. safety issues with short term, and long-term, storage of spent fuel,
18. safety hazards of spent fuel reprocessing,
19. health effects on people and other living things,
20. nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island,
21.   nuclear meltdowns at Fukushima,
22.   nuclear meltdowns at Fukushima,
23. near-disaster at San Onofre,
24. the looming disaster at St. Lucie,
25.  the inherently unsafe characteristics of nuclear power plants required government shielding from liability, or subsidy, for the costs of a nuclear accident via the Price-Anderson Act, and
26. the serious public impacts of large-scale population evacuation and relocation after a major incident, or “extraordinary nuclear occurrence” in the language used by the Price-Anderson Act.  Additional articles will include
27. the future of nuclear fusion,
28. future of thorium reactors,
29. future of high-temperature gas nuclear reactors, and
30. a concluding chapter with a world-wide economic analysis of nuclear reactors and why countries build them.  Links to each article in TANP series are included at the end of this article. http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com.au/2014/07/the-truth-about-nuclear-power-part-28.html

June 27, 2015 - Posted by Christina MacPherson | general