energy generated over a plant’s lifetime. The costs and risks are generally offloaded to the ratepayers, who remain on the hook for indeterminate future costs, whatever they may be. ● If there is a catastrophic failure, it tends to fall upon those in proximity to the plant (as opposed to the more generalized catastrophe of CO 2 from fossil energy, which is distributed worldwide). The plant owners are “let off the hook” for it, and the public takes the hit. This has the effect of taking “risk” off th e table as a consideration for those wishing to construct plants, since they tend not to live in proximity to the plants they are building.
● Like all large long-term construction projects in an age of complexity- creep and receding horizons, a plant’s cost tends to go wildly overbudget, with the costs falling on ratepayers who have no alternative but to pay for electricity.
● There is a carbon footprint, and potentially a significant one; not only is there a lot of concrete used in a fission plant, but the enrichment of uranium is very energy costly. If this enrichment is done using fossil fuels, it’s a cryptic carbon footprint. In principle, it could be powered by fission, though. The mining and other fuel costs, less so. Nuclear is still far less CO 2 -intensive than coal. It may actually even emit less radioactivity than coal (and certainly no mercury compounds). 198 ● The industry has historically piggybacked on the military desire to build fission and fusion bombs, so the historic cost of the fission industry has been to some degree obscured and bootstrapped by military expenditures. Indeed, between lobbyists pro and con, and the military uses folded in, it’s difficult to get a broad -boundary handle on what the EROEI of fission power really is. High enough to power a civilization? Probably. High enough to power the current civilization by itself? Unlikely. ● It doesn’t take much U235 or Plutonium to make a warhead these days, nor is the “how” all that difficult or secret. So massively scaling up fission reactors for CO 2 reasons would require far better control over the reprocessing of spent fuel to prevent a lot more actors from acquiring them. A “dirty” contamination weapon using spent fuel would take no skill at all. And current “spent fuel pools” are almost
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