Nuclear power has elicited strong controversy since its beginnings.  The public first learned of the power of splitting an atom when the U.S. military devastated targets in Japan during World War II.  In the midst of the nuclear power era, the public was shocked again in 1979 by the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, in Middleton Pennsylvania, and the 1985 Chernobyl Disaster in Ukraine, which caused immediate deaths and has been linked to cancers found in local residents.

Although nuclear technology has an infamous history, today, nuclear power plants generate 20% of the the electricity produced by the U.S. electric power industry.  There are currently 104 licensed to operate nuclear power plants in the United States, and the electricity sold by these reactors accounts for billions of dollars in revenue each year.  Nuclear power is heavily embedded in the U.S. economy, and cutting nuclear electricity production would require massive investment in other generating technologies.

That said, there are fundamental problems with nuclear power generation that have brought construction of nuclear power plants to a halt.  There are various reasons why construction of nuclear power plants has stalled – among them: availability of financing, insurance costs, state and federal regulatory hurdles, and the threat and perceived threat of a meltdown.  But perhaps that most straightforward debate, and maybe the most important is that which concerns the disposal of nuclear waste.  The United States doesn’t know what to do with it.  By cutting funding, the Obama administration has effectively axed the Yucca Mountain project, which, up until this year, was the country’s number 1 option.  Currently, most nuclear power plants keep spent nuclear fuel in temporary-storage steel-lined concrete casks…

…But is this an acceptable solution?  Academics and anti-nuclear groups have questioned the ethics of temporary-storage because it places a significant burden on future generations, and also assumes some form of continued institutional control.  Should we continue to generate electricity from a source of power that generates extremely hazardous waste, and for which, we have no means of disposing of?  These are hard questions – especially hard since our society continues to use greater amounts of electricity – but this doesn’t seem like the time to eliminate a major source of energy.

Since passage of the Nuclear Policy Act of 1982, but U.S. goverment has failed to develop a functioning program for nuclear storage.  The U.S. capitalist economy allows informed investors to decide what technologies to go forward with, but these decisions do not necessarilly coincide with long term societal interests or negative externalities.  So what to do?  Well, the decision on whether to increase or decrease the use of nuclear power is too big for this blog, and therefore, I open it up for debate!  All readers are invited to post there opinion on this important issue, and I look forward to hearing your responses!