Nuclear is about to take off, there is no other option in our quest for green energy. You’re either going to be with it or against it, either way you’re going to have to learn to live with it.

So, as for your job Jack, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. Being an ex-navy nuke, I am curious as to what your ex-navy coworkers say about their job. I can’t imagine any of them having as much love for it as you do. Seeing the situations some 20/21yr old navy kids deal with out at sea doing your job with so many other things factoring in on them is amazing. It blows my mind and I have all the respect in the world for them.

The job wasn’t for me, but knowing that I made it through my entire enlistment with; an honorable discharge, my sanity, all the memories, and knowing how many people (guys and girls) didn’t make it through, make me proud to be a veteran. Completing the nuclear program and fulfilling that commitment lead me to believe I can succeed at what ever my next career is. Good thing is I’ve got something to fall back on in case the situation requires it. Take those guys out for a round of beer (I imagine most of the crap you receive is from them) and let me know. How does it compare? Do they miss it? Why’d they stick with it? Are they actually making way more money?

Good luck to you Jack and congrats on finding a job you love

http://www.canadianbusiness.com/markets/commodities/article.jsp?content=20061009_81255_81255

Private money has never financed the building of a nuclear power plant.

I’ll agree that the plant is operating at a profit but it is not out of the red yet. The operating partnership is making money while the real losers are the taxpayers because they will never recover the capital costs.

http://www.friendsofbruce.ca/IRs/Debt_Freightrain182002.html

http://www.brucepower.com/pagecontent.aspx?navuid=1

Bruce Power, a privately owned company currently provides 20% of Ontario’s power and is planning to open 5 new reactors in Ontario and some in Saskatchewan.

There is no private money because… it is expensive to build a plant. If something goes wrong the private investor is screwed and who knows the amount of money it could take to fix. Private investors typically invest in sure fire bets, which is hard to say about a nuclear plant because there is such a perceived uncertainty with them. The need for the government money is to take fiscal responsibility so that this technology can grow — eventually people will be come educated and learn that there is nothing to fear and private investing will take place.

100 billion? That is peanuts compared to the ongoing bailout, the war, healthcare costs, etc. There are privately run plants after they have been built and they don’t get any government funding and remain very profitable. It will take time but eventually this technology should be fully supported by the public.

I also work for a Nuclear power plant in Design Engineering, I just graduated from school in August with a degree in Electrical Engineering. It is good to see an article like this. Very accurate information, but I have so much more to learn.

Show me a study I’ll show you another. One point you have driven home for me is the point I made in my article where part of my job is dealing with people like you on a daily basis.

This article is about the job – not the technology. If you want to argue the technology then there is no shortage of environmentalists on the net who would love to agree with you.

By the way – Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Namibia, Chile, Venezuela, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Bangladesh, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, Albania, Portugal, Norway, Poland, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Ireland, Turkey, Iran, Yemen, Israel, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Algeria, Morocco

All of those countries are developing nuclear energy – I bet they all have people smarter than us too.

The bottom line is the cost per delivered kWh for nuclear is higher than anything else available regardless of the level of subsidies it gets. Even if the ratio of subsidies is lower for nuclear, you are still paying for it either through taxes or straight out of your pocket. As soon as people get the option to purchase power other than nuclear in markets where nuclear facilities exist, the public will stop personally subsidizing the cost, making it higher for the die-hards like yourself.

Many people much smarter than you or me have studied this and come to the conclusion that it is too expensive and will become even more so as time goes on. Here is another study you can “read”.

http://www.rmi.org/images/PDFs/Energy/E05-08_NukePwrEcon.pdf

Furthermore the political motivation of this article is so blatant it slaps you across the face when you read it. This was written in June, while the presidential election was going on and the very first line of the article basically says “John McCain is wrong about nuclear power!” At the end of the article, in the “about the author” section, it links to the organization the author heads up, http://climateprogress.org/
it takes about 5 seconds looking at that website to realize it also is very politically biased. In short the author obviously has a chip on his shoulder, and I would take everything he wrote with a grain of salt.

I put the links to the data I used for a reason. I understand your reasoning but it’s not that simple. What it’s saying is that a mature industry should be profitable and not relying on government assistance for survival. An emerging industry is expected to need help.

There is a lot more information in the article I linked to that you should read because the figures are more specific. I also doubt your calculations are compelling enough to refute peer reviewed studies performed by a well known think tank and one of the best research institutions in the world.