Nuclear Power
"The Long Island Lighting Company spent twenty-five years and $6 billion-eighty times the original estimate-trying to get the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant up and running. But it was never licensed to operate. The debacle saddled Long Island residents with some of the nation’s highest electricity rates and pushed the regional economy to the brink of ruin.
"As problems piled up, the market for new reactors collapsed. Between 1973 and 1978 the number of annual orders dwindled from thirty-eight to two. Some utilities began canceling reactor plans or abandoning half-built projects. In the mid-1980s, the Washington Public Power Supply System walked away from two unfinished reactors and $2.25 billion in bonds, the largest municipal bond default on the books. Another major utility was forced into bankruptcy. In 1985, Forbes magazine surveyed the wreckage of the nuclear power industry and described it as "the greatest managerial disaster in business history."
"Although public opposition and safety concerns played a role in the industry’s undoing-especially after the partial meltdown at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island plant in 1979-the primary stumbling blocks were economics and an unworkable business model...
"All told, the nuclear power sector has secured more than $100 billion in federal support, at least $25 billion of it in the last four years alone, according to the nonpartisan group Taxpayers for Common Sense. That’s far more than renewable energy sources."
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2009/0901.blake.html
"Nuclear power is exorbitantly expensive, and notoriously unreliable. Wall Street is deeply reluctant to re-involve itself in any nuclear investment, despite the fact that in the 2005 Energy Bill the U.S. Congress allocated $13 billion in subsidies to revive a moribund nuclear power industry... Nuclear power is not “clean and green,” as the industry claims, because large amounts of traditional fossil fuels are required to mine and refine the uranium needed to run nuclear power reactors, to construct the massive concrete reactor buildings, and to transport and store the toxic radioactive waste created by the nuclear process...
"While currently the creation of nuclear electricity produces only one-third the amount of CO2 emitted from a similar-sized, conventional gas generator, this is a transitory statistic. Over several decades, as the concentration of available uranium ore declines, more fossil fuels will be required to extract the ore from less concentrated ore veins. Within ten to twenty years, nuclear reactors will produce no net energy because of the massive amounts of fossil fuel that will be necessary to mine and to enrich the remaining poor grades of uranium...
"Contrary to the nuclear industry claims, smoothly running nuclear power plants are also not emission free. Government regulations allow nuclear plants “routinely” to emit hundreds of thousands of curies of radioactive gases and other radioactive elements into the environment every year. Thousands of tons of solid radioactive waste are presently accumulating in the cooling pools beside the 103 operating nuclear plants in the United States and hundreds of others throughout the world. This waste contains extremely toxic elements that will inevitably pollute the environment and human food chains, a legacy that will lead to epidemics of cancer, leukemia, and genetic disease in populations living near nuclear power plants or radioactive waste facilities for many generations to come."
http://calitreview.com/19
"The people saying nuclear is the best option are not biologists, they're not geneticists, they're not physicians. In other words, they don't know what they're talking about. First of all, every reactor produces ~20-30 tons of highly radioactive waste a year. The majority of it is very long-lived & will have to be isolated from the ecosphere for hundreds of thousands of years ... As it leaks into the environment, it will bio-concentrate by orders of magnitude at each step of the food chain: algae, crustaceans, little fish, big fish, us.
"It takes a single mutation in a single gene in a single cell to kill you. The most common plutonium isotope has a half-life of 24,400 years. Every male in the Northern Hemisphere has a small load of plutonium in his gonads. What that means to future generations God only knows-- and we're not the only species with testicles. We're degrading evolution, & not many people understand that."
http://www.shareguide.com/Caldicott.html