Here’s another, often overlooked reason why nuclear energy is a bad thing
Germany’s decision to close its last nuclear plants in April, in contrast to pro-nuclear France, highlights “the other problem” of nuclear energy: not only is it neither renewable nor clean, it’s very dangerous (there have been several hushed up incidents; while a single reactor creates up to 30 tons of high-intensity waste that nobody knows what to do with. And just as importantly, it distorts electricity markets.
Once commissioned, a nuclear power plant cannot be shut down without incurring enormous costs. This results in a contribution to the energy fabric of a country that is virtually constant, predictable and generally considered to be cheap. In reality, the price assigned to nuclear power is a trap, because it ignores the fact that the “payback time” for a nuclear power plant is between 10 and 18 years, depending on the quality of the uranium ores used as fuel. This means that a nuclear power plant must operate for at least a decade before all the energy consumed to build and fuel it has been recovered and the plant starts producing net power. That figure that is reduced to one year for wind power and less than three for solar power.
But beyond the considerations about its danger or its cost, which is already two huge elephants in the room, we have something else: what effect does having…
