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April 04, 2011

Nuclear Energy's Money Pit: An Energy Sinkhole?


The payoff?













Wait a minute, so you're saying nuclear energy - touted by conservatives as environmentally friendly - requires taxpayer subsidies to operate affordably? And the industry and taxpayers furthermore need to spend money forever to store waste?

This all sounds a little bit like Socialism. Oh, the tragedy to be a conservative!

SRAT, where did you get that from?

Uh, no, the point of this story isn't that the nuclear industry needs subsidies to operate affordably. It's that the ratepayers paid into a fund to dispose of the spent fuel, and the federal government broke a promise to take the waste and dispose of it.

Oh, the tragedy of being an Obama supporter! I didn't think I was voting for a guy who supported nuclear energy! Nor did I think I was supporting a guy who'd cave in to Harry Reid and leave me with spent nuclear fuel rods indefinitely!

Where do you want to start with the problems here? Yucca Mountain, which was formed by volcanic activity and sits along fault lines? That's not the only reason the spent fuel isn't being shipped there right now. How do you propose safely transporting all the accumulated spent fuel rods to the site? Any way you look at it, it's a Sy-Fy movie waiting to happen. Hell, just leaving them where they are is a Sy-Fy movie waiting to happen. While reactors are built to withstand things like earthquakes and terrorists flying planes into buildings, the spent fuel ponds just sit out in the open, unprotected. If anything happens to these ponds, you trigger multiple meltdowns and the release of elements into the environment that could remain radioactive for half a million years (yay, plutonium!).

And hey, there's also the fact the entire industry is heavily subsidized by taxpayers. It's so expensive, the companies operating the plants can't even afford insurance without subsidies. So if anything goes wrong, we end up paying for it.

Oh, the tragedy of nuclear power.

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