Does Investing in Nuclear Power Generation make Sense Anymore?
The General Electric-designed nuclear powered reactors in Japan are still burning and exploding now and again. No one really knows what precisely to do when such fuming pot of radioactive explosives sits there waiting to blow up. When it occurred in Chernobyl a quarter-century ago, the world did not really know what to make of it. The world did not even get to hear about it until Sweden, 800 miles away, began to measure dangerously high levels of radiation. It was in the time of the Soviet Union, and they were not about to let the world feast on one of their failures. No really began to question the power-generation capabilities of nuclear technology at the time because they didn’t really know plenty about the disaster.
Things are different today. We know everything of what’s happening in Japan. The thing is, as popular as nuclear-power generation seems to be around the world (power starved developing countries are commissioning them faster than ever), in America, the country where all the reactors and the equipment get built for deployment around the world,nuclear power is rapidly becoming a sad footnote in the country’s history. The old reactors in our country are being recognized to be as dangerous as the one in Japan, and they’re getting decommissioned at a rapid pace. And new ones are not getting built at all. Everyone realized one thing – nuclear-power generating stations are so costly to build that they just aren’t worth it. For all the trouble that it takes, nuclear power does not even produce all that much a power.
The near future of power generation belongs to natural gas.
Power generation with natural gas is easy to get online. It’s easy to maintain, and if something explodes, you just turn off the gas pipe. When they overcome the current disaster, Japan will be anticipating to build new power generation stations somewhere. It’s almost a sure thing that they’ll use natural gas and not nuclear-power generation.
It’s already happening elsewhere; Germany has refused to expand the operating licenses of all of its nuclear-power generation reactors. Surely, if Japan is going to be embarking on a huge public works project in power generation, it’s about time that all of us interested in investing money became attentive to all the stuff that goes into the building of natural-gas power systems. Investing in aluminum shares, steel companies and electronic infrastructure – that’s where your money should probably go. For where your investment dollars go, nuclear-power generation is decidedly history.
There will not be any new nuclear power plants built in Europe or North America in our lifetime. The plants take between 6 years and 8 years to build. Nuclear power is only calculated as being the most economic form of generating electricity if externalities are excluded. However, if radiation leaks and radiation containment costs are included then nuclear power is even more expensive than power from coal using futuristic carbon capture technology. The majority now agree that GE and Siemens combined cycle power plants are the way forward, at 60% efficiency, supplemented with offshore wind turbines.