The Nuclear Power Dilemma

Why Nuclear Power when there are more safe and efficient processes?

Clearly because the features/benefits ratio has been sold (or successfully lobbied) to those who make the decisions. Let’s look at them for a moment:

Features:

• Ever-growing and always underestimated costs

•  Questionable safety

•  Old and un-advanced technology

•  Site-location protests worldwide 

•  Cost per kilowatt hour dependent upon changing market prices 

•  Short, 40 year life-cycle

•  Massive maintenance costs 

• An end product fuel-rods disposal issue the world has yet to solve

•  Uranium-dependent, a scarce and expensive diminishing resource

Benefits:

• Not coal, oil or natural gas dependent 

• Therefore, a cleaner environment

Sounds like a highly dubious tradeoff to me, at a time when technology offers so many better options. As my engineer-brother once said dryly, “it’s a hell of a dangerous way to boil water,” which indeed it is. When these things go wrong, as at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, the results are socially disastro…