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Thirty years after the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown, nuclear power is still a source of deep controversy nationwide. No new reactors have been licensed since the accident, but the 104 existing reactors currently generate about 20 percent of America's electricity.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has approved 51 of those for 20-year license extensions (and refused none), and Three Mile Island's could be next, which would extend operations through 2034.
It's also likely that new nuclear reactors will come online between 2015 and 2018, according to NRC and industry players, and 28 new reactors have already been proposed, with a total of 33 expected by 2010. It's not clear how many of those will be approved, but there are certainly prominent advocates supporting nuclear power as a means to cleaning up our energy grid, while opponents say it only invites more disasters like that at Three Mile Island. They also emphasize the risks involved: what to do with spent nuclear fuel is still an unresolved question after decades of attempts to answer it, and the potential for terrorists to obtain materials they would need to construct bombs.
While advocates say nuclear power is clean, carbon emissions-free and could pave the way to energy independence, opponents weigh in on the unresolved issue of waste—and what to do with the tons and tons of spent fuel generated every year. Scientific American reports: most nuclear facilities are now storing
older spent fuel on dry ground in huge casks, each typically containing 10 tons of waste. Every year a 1,000-megawatt reactor discharges enough fuel to fill two of these casks, each costing about $1 million. But that is not all the industry is doing. U.S. nuclear utilities are suing the federal government, because they would not have incurred such expenses had the U.S. Department of Energy opened the Yucca Mountain repository in 1998 as originally planned. As a result, the government is paying for the casks and associated infrastructure and operations--a bill that is running about $300 million a year.
And nuclear power plants may not be guilty of the same carbon dioxide emissions that, say, coal plants are, but they do come with the significant environmental costs of uranium mining, refining and enriching the fuel, and building and operating the plant. When those factors are accounted for, some estimate that a 1,250 megawatt plant produces the equivalent of 250,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year—that's not exactly the kind of clean energy that will solve the global warming crisis.
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