![]() ![]() Olkiluoto in Finland and Flamanville, France, have both soared billions over budget. Two nukes being built at Hinckley, England, are already far behind schedule and soaring in cost (so far more than 元2 billion and counting)…with serious questions about their eventual safety and ability to operate. Inaugural kilowatt/hour costs far exceed local renewables The two at Vogtle, Georgia, coming in seven years late, cost far beyond $34 billion-more than double the original promised price of $14 billion. At least one utility executive has gone to prison. Single nukes in Finland and France, and double projects in England, South Carolina and Georgia, have all gone unimaginably over budget.Īfter years under construction, the two at VC Summer in South Carolina have been cancelled outright, wasting more than $10 billion. ![]() lįinancial disaster has defined the last eight big Euro-American reactor projects. Given the realities of a radioactive cloud blowing into Los Angeles, Chicago or Atlanta, or permanently contaminating a few thousand square miles of prime farm and forestland, there are no odds that can counter-balance any possible benefit from the risks being taken to extend the licenses of our current reactor fleet, or to undertake building a new generation whose safety again can’t be guaranteed, and whose costs, deployment times and real risks remain serious unknowns.Įspecially when all this comes in the shadow of an astonishingly successful revolution in renewable generation, battery storage and increased efficiency. ![]() Nor has it solved its forever problem of safely managing its uniquely dangerous wastes. Major disasters at six reactors-Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and the four at Fukushima-have been accompanied by a bevvy of smaller disasters whose impacts have nonetheless been substantial.Īfter sixty years of operations, the Peaceful Atom still can’t get meaningful private disaster insurance. In fact our existing reactors are so hideously complex it’s impossible to meaningfully calculate the odds on which one will explode next …and when. The Renaissance’s key illusion is that atomic reactors are some kind of magical unicorns, generating limitless cheap clean power while never aging, breaking down, emitting heat, carbon or radiation…and certainly never ever blowing up. But a major meltdown/explosion could threaten millions of lives and inflict apocalyptic health, ecological and economic harm. None have significant private accident insurance. They are structurally dubious, seriously under-maintained and inherently unsafe. They are dangerously decayed, with an average age of around 40. Most US nukes were designed in the pre-digital 1960s and ‘70s. The “Renaissance’s” prime medieval reality is the escalated likelihood of another Three Mile Island-Chernobyl-Fukushima disaster at one of America’s lingering 94 reactors. “Nuclear Renaissance (version 4.0)” is the centralized corporate power industry’s final grab at mega-sums of public money and total control of energy.įacing a definitive tsunami of cheaper, cleaner, safer, faster-to-deploy renewables, it’s meant primarily to serve the nuclear weapons complex while insulating entrenched centralized power against distributed green social democracy. Photograph Source: Stefan Kühn – CC BY-SA 3.0 ![]()
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