Zell, Chris wrote:
>Nuclear power plants have been rejected by power companies, not
>citizens.
Are you serious? Is this a joke? Do protests mean nothing?
Political pressure? Lawsuits? Earth First vandalism?
None of that makes any difference at all to large power corporations.
They kill 20,000 people year burning coal, and they stole billions of
dollars from the citizens and government of California without
blinking an eye. The only thing that matters to them is money. The
Three Mile Island meltdown was the most expensive industrial accident
in US history, and the accidents at Brown's Ferry, Rancho Seco, and
Connecticut Yankee also nearly bankrupted the power companies
involved. Even though the government pays for the insurance cost of
nuclear power, no power executive in his right mind would invest in
it as long as the power reactors are likely to meltdown and cost $10
billion before breakfast. Next-generation power reactors may be much
more reliable. (It is hard to imagine how they could be made less reliable.)
If you have any doubt about that, I suggest you read the detailed
histories of TMI, Brown's Ferry, Rancho Seco, and Connecticut Yankee,
and the other serious accidents. They did not kill anyone, but they
demonstrated that the operators are incompetent and criminally
dishonest at times, and the reactor designs are shockingly bad.
Overall, the nuclear industry probably killed a few thousand people
in the US. Not from the operation of the reactors but from uranium
mining and production. Despite this, the industry is safer than coal,
and modern mining techniques are a lot safer than they were back in
the 1950s when uranium miners were killed by long-term exposure to radiation.
- Jed
