Reply #3: Here's another experiment [View All]

[jpak]

Use the entire expertise and industrial infrastructure of the Manhattan Project and Naval Reactor Program to produce civilian power reactors.

Provide government uranium enrichment services to the private commercial nucuclar industry for 35 years at cost (until Ronald Reagan ended the practice).

PAY nuclear plant operators for plutonium they accumulated in spent fuel.

Then spend >$66 billion each year on nuclear power research and subsidies over 60 years

What do you get????

103 reactors built - with the last few taking >20 years to build at final costs of $5-7 billion each.

110 canceled reactors that saddled rate payers with >$112 billion in stranded costs.

Two meltdowns (TMI and Fermi 1) and a near catastrophic fire (Browns Ferry) that cost tax and ratepayers billions.

A failed commercial reprocessing plant that will cost taxpayers (not the failed plant owners) $4-8 billion to decommission and clean up.

750,000 tons of toxic corrosive UF6 stored in tens of thousands of corroding containers that will take 25 years to dispose and bury at a cost to taxpayers of $4 billion.

Hundreds of millions of dollars spent to compensate thousands of uranium workers for morbidity and mortality DIRECTLY related to the exposure to uranium and beryllium at mines, mills and enrichment plants.

A failed privatized United States Uranium Enrichment Corporation that cannot compete with foreign uranium enrichment consortiums that has cost taxpayers hundred of millions of dollars to keep afloat.

75,000 tons of spent fuel that NO ONE wants - that will cost federal taxpayers >$30 billion to bury in a state that did not want it (also, it will cost Nevada several billion dollars to provide security and other costs for Yucca Mountain).

A collapsed domestic uranium mining industry that can provide <4% of US uranium requirements resulting in an energy industry nearly wholly dependent on uranium imports.

and how does one build a new nucular power plant in Bushamerika????

Get Dick Cheney to meet with the nucular industry behind closed doors.

Get them to throw millions at the GOP

and pay them back with $9-12 billion to build 6 new nucular plants BY 2030.

and then PAY each plant up to $2 billions to produce electricity to be sold back to the taxpayers (who paid to build the plants in the first place).

This experiment has FAILED

QED