The President reiterated a campaign viewpoint to revive nuclear power in the United States in his State of the Union Address, and this is expected to be made tangible by a reservation of billion in the 2011 budget for loans to nuclear developers looking to break new ground.
For some background, the establishment of nuclear power plants in the US (responsible for 20% of the nation’s electricity, and about 70% of its non-polluting energy) has a troubled history, starting up very optimistically in the 1960s and basically flatlining around the early 1980s, with very few plants having been built in the decades following. The movement was killed largely out of slowdowns spurred by public resistance (nuclear power was developed haphazardly quickly during the Cold War, resulting in highly public and easily preventable disasters on both sides of the war), with this slowdown interfering with the streamlining of the economic process and eventually resulting in prohibitive costs to establishing new plants.
My view on nuclear energy, as well as that of most physicists, is a temporarily positive one: in the next century, we’ll doubtlessly see the development of new power sources that will simply be without many of the problems of our current options, but currently, nuclear fission is one of our best options in terms of both environmentalism (it doesn’t burn fossil fuels or emit pollutants, and unlike during the cold war era, nuclear waste storage isn’t quite the scary, uncertain problem it used to be) and economic feasibility (globe-spanning solar cells are a pretty idea, but, at least currently, are economic fiction).
But that’s my take. Politically speaking, I’m not sure if outspoken support for new nuclear development is a good idea or not. What’s your take on it?
In the interest of making this category-appropriate: given that my gonads are external and therefore more vulnerable to high-frequency radiation than women’s, is nuclear fallout sexist? 🙂
