The True Cost of Nuclear Power

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The Trojan Nuclear Power Plant in Portland, Ore. is a testament to the cost of nuclear power. It began operation in 1976 but was plagued by structural problems before it was closed in 1992. The cartoon show
The Trojan Nuclear Power Plant in Portland, Ore. is a testament to the cost of nuclear power. It began operation in 1976 but was plagued by structural problems before it was closed in 1992. The cartoon show "The Simpsons" used it as a symbol of greed, evil and environmental negligence.
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The reactor from the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant in Portland, Ore., is positioned for burial at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation near Richland, Wash.
The reactor from the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant in Portland, Ore., is positioned for burial at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation near Richland, Wash.
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A construction worker walks through the main tunnel inside Yucca Mountain in Nevada, which the U.S. government has proposed as the long-term storage facility for spent nuclear fuel and other high-level radioactive waste. The repository is tentatively scheduled to begin accepting waste in 2012, but it is widely opposed by Nevada residents because of safety issues, security concerns and seismic activity inside the mountain.
A construction worker walks through the main tunnel inside Yucca Mountain in Nevada, which the U.S. government has proposed as the long-term storage facility for spent nuclear fuel and other high-level radioactive waste. The repository is tentatively scheduled to begin accepting waste in 2012, but it is widely opposed by Nevada residents because of safety issues, security concerns and seismic activity inside the mountain.
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More than 200 solar panels generate power outside an abandoned nuclear power plant near Richland, Wash. This solar project is an exploration into renewable energy by the public power agency Energy Northwest, which provides electricity to public utilities in the Northwest.
More than 200 solar panels generate power outside an abandoned nuclear power plant near Richland, Wash. This solar project is an exploration into renewable energy by the public power agency Energy Northwest, which provides electricity to public utilities in the Northwest.

During a July 2005 lecture in San Francisco, Jared Diamond, author of the best-selling book Guns, Germs and Steel, became the latest and most prominent environmental intellectual to endorse nuclear power as a necessary response to global warming.

Addressing an overflow crowd at the Cowell Theater about why some societies fail and others don’t (the theme of his most recent book, Collapse), Diamond three times cited global warming as a threat that could ruin modern civilization. During the question period, Diamond was asked if he agrees with Stewart Brand, whose Long Now Foundation sponsored the lecture, that global warming poses such a grave threat that humanity should embrace nuclear power. It was a delicate moment, because Brand the former editor of The Whole Earth Catalog was on stage with Diamond.

“I did not know that Stewart Brand said that,” Diamond replied. “But yes, to deal with our energy problems we need everything available to us, including nuclear power.” Nuclear power, he added, should simply be “done carefully, like they do in France, where there have been no accidents.”

“I did not expect that answer,” Brand said. Neither, it seemed, did much of the audience. Overwhelmingly white and affluent, most audience members had nodded reverentially at everything Diamond had said thus far about the self-destructiveness of ancient civilizations that leveled forests (Easter Island) or eroded soils (the Mayans) in pursuit of short-term gain; and about the need for the United States to rethink its core value of consumerism if it hopes to survive. They had clapped when Diamond mocked President Bush’s see-no-evil approach to environmental protection. Yet now Diamond was urging an expansion of nuclear power, a technology most environmentalists regard as irredeemably evil.

“Deal with it,” crowed Brand as the crowd sat in stunned silence.

  • Published on Apr 1, 2006
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