Once the anti nuclear leftovers from the maoist antiwar subversion campaign by
the heirs of the old Comintern of the 1970's are mostly dead or quiet, and
that is happening now as most of these were drug users and have had short
lives; then the new atmosphere of nuclear common sense will have an even
fairer chance at success.
Opposition from left-wing people has had little or no effect on nuclear reactor construction. The nuclear industry died because power companies do not want it. The reactors are too expensive and unreliable. They would never have been built in the first place in a free market economy, because no insurance company or consortium will cover the risk of an accident. The government stepped in, agreed to pay for accidents, and exempted the industry from liability.
Next generation nuclear reactors may well be cost effective, and they may be reasonably safe, although no one has found a good way to get rid of the waste yet. Existing reactor designs are at least six times more expensive than competing zero-pollution alternatives such as wind power. You would have to be crazy to build a nuclear plant where wind resources are available. The world is now building the equivalent of 3 large nuclear reactors per year in wind farms measured by actual output, not "nameplate" capacity. World growth in 2004 was 7,976 MW nameplate, or 2,658 actual, compared to the average U.S. nuclear plant which is 900 MW actual. See: http://www.awea.org/news/03-04-o5-GlobalWindEnergyMarkets.pdf.
I think wind power is now expanding faster than nuclear capacity did at the peak of the nuclear plant construction in the late 1960s. (Not sure about that.) We could easily find the money and the wind resources to 10 per year, or 50, and that would cost roughly $250 billion than building 50 nuclear reactors. Which would you recommend? If we built 80 per year for 20 years, that would be enough to generate all of the electricity on earth, assuming we can use hydrogen gas or HTSC to move the energy from windy places to places like Georgia.
If the high-altitude kite generator approach works, wind power will cost rough half as much as the cheapest conventional electricity, from coal. We could replace all of the power generators in the world and all of the oil in 20 or 30 years, at cost perhaps 50 times cheaper than nuclear plants. Building nuclear power plants when that option is available would be insanity squared. The only thing crazier would be to build fission reactors after cold fusion is perfected.
The only thing more expensive than conventional uranium fission is the Japanese Monju breeder reactor fission project. If it worked, it would be like burning furniture to heat your house. It would cost roughly a hundred times more than wind power would *today*. Fortunately, the breeder program is a dead duck.
- Jed
