I Am Not a Great Fan of Nuclear Power.

Someone once said, “Using nuclear fission to boil water is like cutting butter with a chainsaw.” In large part, I’m in agreement with that assessment.

If you’re going to use radioactive materials to produce power, however, it seems to me that it would be logical to standardize on a design. The French have done that, and produce 62,466 MW – about 78% of their total production – using 59 identical reactors. The U.S. generates 96,245 MW with 103 reactors – no more than three of which, to my knowledge, are identical to any other. The latest to be commissioned, Watts Bar Unit 1 in Tennessee, was licensed for construction in 1973, and finally came on line in 1996 – 23 years later at a cost of $6.8 billion. It has a maximum output 1,167MW of power. Its operating license expires in 2035. Construction on Unit 2 was stopped by the utility – no word on how much money that ate. The price of power varies with demand, but $60/MW-H is a reasonable working figure.

You calculate the payback.

But nuclear power appears to be, in all honesty, our only option for increasing demands for power generation. Even Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, has not only written a strong defense of nuclear power plants, he has become co-chair of a new industry-funded initiative, the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, to support increased the use of nuclear energy.

It says something when even a staunch tree-hugger embraces the atom.

The only really bad accident the nuclear power industry has suffered is Chernobyl, twenty years ago last April. Three Mile Island was bad, but the containment structure did its job. Chernobyl, however, was a disaster of a plant in the first place – an inherently dangerous design, everyone agrees. However, I’ve seen lately some pieces saying that perhaps the Chernobyl disaster wasn’t all that bad. For example, the Kid of Speed site where a young woman from Kiev motorcycles through the area, and this BBC piece on the hardiness of the local fauna.

Pardon me if I’m a little bit more humanocentric, though. Before we enthusiastically embrace the atom ourselves again, I’d like it if members of Congress, the Executive branch, and the nuclear power industry would sit down for a few minutes and watch this slide show by photographer Paul Fusco concerning the human cost of a serious accident.

I believe nuclear power is necessary. We’ve got to get the cost and time required to build such plants down closer to the range of normal coal or gas plants. But they’ve got to be safe.

I can’t imagine anything better at emphasising that fact than Paul Fusco’s photographs.

Warning: Some of those photographs are disturbing. And they should be.