I knew John McCain liked nuclear energy, but I didn't it know it had captured his heart. I stumbled upon this piece today and found out that McCain wants to build a nuclear plant near you! Here's a snippet from a speech he gave back in April of 2007:
We have in use today a zero emission energy that could provide electricity for millions more homes and businesses than it currently does. Yet it has been over twenty-five years since a nuclear power plant has been constructed. The barriers to nuclear energy are political not technological. We've let the fears of thirty years ago, and an endless political squabble over the storage of nuclear spent fuel make it virtually impossible to build a single new plant that produces a form of energy that is safe and non-polluting. If France can produce 80% of its electricity with nuclear power, why can't we? Is France a more secure, advanced and innovative country than we are? Are France's scientists and entrepreneurs more capable than we are? I need no answer to that rhetorical question. I know my country well enough to know otherwise.
Problem is, when you take into consideration increased energy consumption, replacing old reactors among other factors, we would need to build 700 new reactors to produce that much energy. Who wants a nuclear energy reactor built near their community?
Joseph Romm explains what it would take for the U.S. to become 80% dependent on nuclear energy:
What would it take for us to be 80% Nuclear?
We would have to quadruple the number of reactors to 400, which would take decades even if we could somehow return to -- and sustain -- the fastest decadal rate of U.S. nuclear plant construction. But that wouldn't mean just building 300 new nuclear plants, for several reasons.
First, by 2050, almost all of the existing plants would need to be replaced, so that is another hundred to build if we want to hit the 80% goal.
And then, since McCain is not a big booster of energy efficiency (his McCain-Lieberman climate bill has no substantive energy efficiency provisions in it at all), we have to deal with some 1.1% annual electricity growth, which means we'll need more than 600 nukes in 2050.
Romm also breaks down the cost of building that many new reactors at the bargain price of 4 trillion dollars:
Since $6,000 per kw is $6 billion per GW, 700 GW would require a cost of some $4 trillion, assuming there was no significant cost escalation from production delays and from the serious bottlenecks in the nuclear supply chain
We spent around that much in Iraq right? Why not invest that much money into dirty energy rather than solar and wind power? In the same speech McCain did address the issue of how communities will benefit from safely storing the used nuclear energy:
Let's provide for safe storage of spent nuclear fuel, and give host states or localities a proprietary interest so when advanced recycling technologies turn used fuel into a valuable commodity, the public will share in its economic benefits.
Well, that clears everything up doesn't? I'll make sure to sign my community up for the next nuclear waste repository.