After reading Sen. Mike Crapo's glowing endorsement of nuclear energy, I feel inspired to remind your readers why no U.S. nuclear power plants have been built in the past 25 years.
To begin with, the enormous financial cost to build a reactor is exceeded only by the cost of decommissioning it once it has depleted its 40- to 60-year life span. Regardless of whatever laws Congress may pass to: (1) subsidize nuclear power plant construction (2) remove standard liability requirements from nuclear construction contractors or (3) force long-lived toxic and radioactive wastes onto less populated states, the fact still remains that nuclear energy is not cheap, clean or safe.
The primary reason nuclear power is being considered at this time is that it carries with it a "scale of economy" that translates into jobs, tax money and economic boon for specific, well-lobbied industries. This all seems so needless in light of life-friendly, alternative energy production technologies that do not place toxic-waste storage burdens, large-scale contamination issues and a mess of other problems and risks onto the environment and future generations.
It is also worth mentioning that nuclear reactors require huge amounts of water for cooling. When so many parts of our country are already experiencing water shortages, I wonder where all this additional precious water will come from?
In conclusion, please consider that we do not actually have an "energy production crisis," as we are led to believe by Sen. Crapo and other proponents of nuclear energy. Hopefully, what Congress and others will soon realize is that this situation could be better resolved if it were defined and approached for what it really is: an inefficient and unnecessary "energy consumption" issue.
John Caccia
Ketchum
