Word: reactors
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...speech Tuesday, Obama acknowledged "some serious drawbacks with respect to nuclear energy," but the drawbacks he mentioned - waste disposal and reactor safety - are not the real obstacles to a rebirth. It would be nice to have a permanent Yucca Mountain-style repository for spent nuclear fuel, but for now plants have been storing their waste on-site without major problems. And the nuclear industry's safety record has improved dramatically in the 30 years since the Three Mile Island meltdown, although there are still occasional blips like the recent radioactive leak at a Vermont plant. The NRC is not exactly...
...want to understand why the U.S. hasn't built a nuclear reactor in three decades, the Vogtle power plant outside Atlanta is an excellent reminder of the insanity of nuclear economics. The plant's original cost estimate was less than $1 billion for four reactors. Its eventual price tag in 1989 was nearly $9 billion, for only two reactors. But now there's widespread chatter about a nuclear renaissance, so the Southern Co. is finally trying to build the other two reactors at Vogtle. The estimated cost: $14 billion. And you can be sure that number...
...That's why no Wall Street moneyman in his right mind would finance a new reactor. But President Obama has located an alternative financier: you. On Tuesday he announced an $8.33 billion loan guarantee for the new Vogtle reactors, the first step in the Administration's push to jump-start the nuclear construction industry. Obama also urged Congress to set aside political differences and triple the budget for nuclear loan guarantees. "On an issue that affects our economy, our security, and the future of our planet, we can't keep on being mired in the same old stale debates between...
Maybe it's that simple to President Obama - whose Administration estimates that the two new reactors in Georgia, which will receive the federal loan guarantees, will generate nearly 800 new jobs - but many greens feel uneasy about a policy that diverts scarce federal energy funds toward a technology that still has unresolved environmental risks and that has struggled for years to attract private capital. "The Department of Energy is putting taxpayers on the hook for bailing out costly and dangerous nuclear-reactor projects when the loans used to finance those projects default," said Ben Schreiber, the climate- and energy...
...opponents at home and abroad. On Monday, Iran notified the International Atomic Energy Agency that it would begin enriching its uranium stockpiles to 20% concentration, from its current level of 4%. Though the government says the higher level of enriched uranium would be used to fuel a medical reactor, each step Iran takes in advancing its nuclear-development program increases international suspicion that it intends to build a nuclear weapon...