It's become fashionable lately to tack the words "safe and clean" before the words "nuclear energy." It's hard to understand how an industry that creates waste so toxic it has to be buried deep in the heart of a mountain can be described as safe or clean. You'd think a better description would be "dangerous and poisonous."But one word that's never used in connection with nuclear power is "cheap" and it may be that the best kept secret regarding nuclear generation is that it costs taxpayers a huge amount of money. In fact, nuclear power is practically guaranteed to be a money loser -- Wall Street won't finance plants -- and it's almost inevitable that every new generation facility will require an infusion of federal money at some point.
According to the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), "Originally conceived as providing power that would be 'too cheap to meter,' nuclear energy was seen as the future of the electric industry. Reality quickly overtook this utopian vision in what has been called 'the largest managerial disaster in business history,' leading to two bailouts of the industry in the 1980s and 1990s."
In fact, UCS warns that, if we go ahead and expand nuclear power generation to the extent that the industry wants, we'll wind up bailing them out to the possible tune of more than a trillion dollars... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]
