But what about the nuclear waste issue? The administration is reportedly looking for new waste dump sites now, after rulling out Yucca Mountain in Nevada, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's home state.
I can't quite understand how we can begin building new nuclear power plants across America before we've found a place to dump the radioactive waste that these plants produce. But I guess this waste is now safe, given the president's declaration.
And how about the cost issue? Didn't the building of the Seabrook nuclear plant in New Hampshire bankrupt one New England utility and nearly bankrupt a number of others in the 1980s? Has that problem been solved as well?
And I don't quite understand the politics here. Do the president's political strategists really believe that his support for nuclear power is going to win over Republican votes for Democrats in the mid-term elections? Or Tea Party votes? I don't see it.
What I do see is that this will cost the president the support of environmentally minded people in his base.
1) Unfortunately, this is pretty predictable given Obama’s close ties to the nuclear industry.
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p>2) The bankruptcy problem has “been solved as well,” by using taxpayer and not shareholder money. Socialize the risk, privatize the profit.
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p>3) On that score, $8B is not nearly enough–less than half a nuke. Look for the industry to be back for a full half trillion.
Thus far, after two days of voting, it appears that people are evenly split in guessing that the next nuclear power plant in Massachusetts will either be sited on the South Boston waterfront or somewhere near Sprinfield or North Adams. Given that a total of two votes have been cast, I’d say this poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 49.9.
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p>TMI was in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1985. While it shouldn’t be too difficult to remember them, we ought to do so with perspective: Chernobyl was indeed a poorly built reactor and quite evidence of unsafe practices, in design, construction and management; when it was found that they could no longer control the reaction, it was demonstrated that containment was insufficient.
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p>TMI, on the other hand, while a true emergency, was compounded by conflicting reports and precautionary evacuations of the surrounding area. While significant amounts of radiation did breach the reactor and almost half the fuel melted down, the amount that reached the atmosphere (breached containment) was insignificant. Nor was the crisis a direct result of the core nuclear processes: it was a cooling accident: a consequence of straight-up electrical failure (stuck valve and failed indicator light), violation of regulations (deliberatively inoperative auxiliary valves) and operator confusion. Once the primary pump failed, the reactor started to shut down, as it should, but because of the stuck valve and the fact of the auxiliary valves being closed, coolant was evacuating without being replaced. It was two hours before this was realized, at a shift change. I’m fairly certain that integrated circuitry is many orders of magnitude more reliable today, than in 1978 so I can say, with confidence, that safety is increased… both in terms of component reliability and redundancy in order to present critical information to the operators. But components, however well designed and made, will still fail, which is why the NRC mandated reactor shutdown when the auxiliary valves/pumps go offline (which did not happen here.) Had the maintenance at TMI been done according to regulation, we wouldn’t be talking about it now.