After more than nine years of construction. 4.7B dollar in expenses. The Tennessee Valley Authority has just unveiled America’s first new nuclear power plant for the 21st century. The unit two reactor at the Watts Bar Nuclear Power Plant is now operational and the company claims the new plant will provide a carbon free reliable source of power for at least the next 40 years.

To discuss this I was joined earlier by Linda Pence Gunter international specialist with the watchdog group Beyond Nuclear and author of Pandora’s false promises I first asked her to verify what the builders of the plant say was true that they came in under budget and did this expeditiously the price tag for what’s far too which is one that just came on was four point seven billion according to the Tennessee Valley Authority – read more about the uranium resources here. 

There are two actually there Watts Bar one. When you combine the two of them then you get a 12 billion dollar price tag. Well it’s far too took 43 years from start to finish it actually holds the world’s record for the longest time from beginning to end for a nuclear power plant to come online groundbreaking from the moment it was conceptualized and to the moment it came online and its sister plant Watts Bar One took twenty three years and that was the most recent nuclear power plant to come online in this country. And that was 20 years ago. So that doesn’t sound like a boom to me. It’s a very slow process and that is one of the intrinsic problems with nuclear power.

Is Nuclear Energy Eco-Friendly

Now what do you make of the claim that this is the most eco friendly alternative to coal power plants and that this one in particular is modern and cutting edge it’s the best way to provide power. 

Well I’m not sure that anyone is really claiming that it’s modern and cut and it should just because it got turned on the 21st century doesn’t make it a 21st century design. It is of course a 1960s design it’s an ice condenser reactor. So it’s a very old design not a modern design. And frankly nuclear power is not really competing with coal anymore. It is competing if anything with natural gas neither of which are eco friendly. I mean it’s sort of laughable to describe nuclear to me as eco friendly.

This is an industry that mines uranium leaving 90 percent of the radioactive rocks behind contaminating water soil air and then it has a long life. You know the nuclear reactor process is the uranium but it discharges waste which can be deadly for tens even hundreds of thousands of years. And of course as we know from the disasters we’ve already seen if a meltdown happens it releases a huge amount of radioactivity that contaminates vast areas potentially indefinitely as we’ve seen in Fukushima and around Chernobyl. So how that could be described as eco friendly and this we’re really defining the term that’s clearly not the case. 

That also happens as well as you know people redefine terms of what eco friendly is as they go along as needed. But according to you you would never put the term nuclear in eco friendly in the same sentence but does all this expensive technology as it were guarantee at all that you know. Because it’s turned on and finished in the 21st century. Is there any way for them to promise that we won’t see another Fukushima type disaster.

Nuclear energy is expensive because it can not be called safe

Well the reason that nuclear power is friend is not because it’s safe. The reason nuclear power is expensive is because it isn’t safe. And there are so many layers that you have to put in the ups the cost of nuclear power because it is so intrinsically dangerous that we are almost guaranteed unfortunately to see another Fukushima in our lifetime unless we start to shut these down. Certainly Japan should not be restarting any of its nuclear power plants. And the only way to protect against a nuclear power plant action is not to have them running at all. And unless we do that we will almost certainly see another disaster and all this expense is not too. It’s not because it’s state of the art nuke technology it’s because it’s incredibly old technology that needs a lot of safety. 

And now you also say in your report Pandora’s false promises that nuclear technology and as you’ve just stated here is certainly an old technology not the future of energy. That’s what you say in Pandora’s false promises that it should be phased out in it to trade off for renewable energies. Is that a realistic future for us to look forward to. This is what they’re doing in the 21st century. 

It’s actually a realistic present and it’s what’s happening already. So renewable energy is booming in the world. It’s outpacing wind and solar outpacing natural gas. That’s certainly outpacing nuclear which is flatlining and in fact declining globally. And coal has to be phased out clearly because of climate change. So I think that we’re seeing the changing of the guard the nuclear power proponents that but who I was going after and Pandora’s false promises are clinging to aspirations and hopes and prayers in the future. But there is nothing on the table right now that is cutting edge in terms of nuclear power plant design and if there ever is it will be too late for climate change certainly sounds like a minority that is pushing to keep this thing alive.