Atomic Dreams

Jason Mark, from Earth Island Journal (via Utne Reader), writes:

The debate over nuclear power is, at its heart, part of a larger argument about how to balance ecological sustainability with our lifestyle expectations. …

The very challenges of financing and building new reactors reduce the potential for atomic energy to make a meaningful dent in carbon emissions. Currently, 104 nuclear power plants produce about 20 percent of the United States’ electricity. To make a real reduction in U.S. carbon emissions would require building as many as 250 additional power plants. To make significant cuts in global greenhouse gas emissions, the world’s nations would need to build 21 new reactors every year for the next 50 years. Given that it takes about 10 years to build a nuclear reactor, the first new nuclear plants wouldn’t start contributing to carbon reductions until nearly 2020.

[The price of one new reactor, in 2007 dollars, is between $2.5 and 5 billion.  The last one completed, in Tennessee, cost $7 billion by the time it came on line.  Do the arithmetic, and see if you can't come up with cheaper, quicker, more effective alternatives that don't produce deadly waste that will outlast our Sun.]

Atomic Dreams