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The AP1000 is a Gen III reactor and has serious flaws
Here's a PDF documenting the flaws
And a long video that goes over some of the details and some of the politics: http://vimeo.com/31897709
I remember this from another /. thread about nuclear power

Politics and money are going to push through designs we know are not safe.
I hope the Chinese companies designing their own Gen III reactors can do better than Westinghouse.

There are different rationale for subsidies. One is to offset externalized costs such as environmental damage. In that light, nuclear power is deserving. But another is to promote technologies that are not yet economical but may become so. Solar scores on both counts, because it almost defines "sustainable," and because (largely due to government investment) the cost of solar has dropped by about 97% since the mid-70s. In contrast, nuclear is getting more expensive (perhaps not for any reason inherent in the technology). Some claim that solar is now cheaper than nuclear. (Of course nothing can be as cheap as coal - pretty hard to beat "dig it, burn it," if all you care about is short-term expenses and place no value on the air you breathe).

The summary is misleading, and it seems that there is much confusion and emotion regarding this issue.

Let's look at the facts, shall we?

54,79% of Italians voted. Of those, 94,05% voted against nuclear energy.

I can't undertand why, but some slashdotters, despite overwhelming evidence, seem to believe that nuclear power is the only way to solve global warming, that it actually provides a considerable amount of relatively safe and clean energy, and that's it's the future. All of these propositions are wrong, based on the scientific data available.

Nuclear power provides about 6% of the world's energy, whereas about 19% of global final energy consumption comes from renewables.

A study published in July 2010 by John O. Blackburn and Sam Cunningham from Duke University details how electricity from new solar installations is now cheaper than electricity from proposed new nuclear plants.

An analysis published in Energy Policy by researchers from Stanford University and the University of California-Davis and authored by Mark Z. Jacobson and UC-Davis researcher Mark A. Delucchi states: "There are no technological or economic barriers to converting the entire world to clean, renewable energy sources", and to power 100 percent of the world for all purposes from wind, water and solar resources, the footprint needed is about 0.4 percent of the world's land (mostly solar footprint) and the spacing between installations is another 0.6 percent of the world's land (mostly wind-turbine spacing). And we can do it before 2050, Jacobson said.

Another analysis shows how solar will become the cheapest source of energy of all, even chapter than coal, in justa a few years, while nuclear costs will keep rising.

From TFA:

Notice in the first chart how steadily manufacturing costs have come down, from $60 a watt in the mid-1970’s to $1.50 today. People often point to a “Moore’s Law” in solar – meaning that for every cumulative doubling of manufacturing capacity, costs fall 20%. In solar PV manufacturing, costs have fallen about 18% for every doubling of production. “It holds up very closely,” says Solaria’s Shugar.

The “Moore’s Law” analogy doesn’t necessarily work on the installation side, as you have all kinds of variables in permitting, financing and hardware costs. But with incredible advances in web-based tools to make sales and permitting easier; new sophisticated racking, wiring and inverter technologies to make installation faster and cheaper; and all kinds of innovative businesses providing point-of-sale financing (think auto sales), costs on the installation side have fallen steadily as well. The Rocky Mountain Institute projects that these costs will fall by 50% in the next five years.

And here's the paper from The Rocky Mountain Institute.

So, if you are still blinded by your emotional attachment to nuclear and can't seem to reason straight, think about this:

That 17 GW installed in 2010 is the equivalent of 17 nuclear power plants – manufactured, shipped and installed in one year. It can take decades just to install a nuclear plant. Think about that. I heard Bill Gates recently call solar “cute.” Well, that’s 17 GW of “cute” ad

Solar costs 400% more than coal and nuclear. How is that economically viable? You think the average home can afford a $400/month electric bill?

You're misinformed. New commercial solar projects now deliver electricity at 14 cents per kilowatt-hour (page 6), whereas new nuclear plants are projected to cost 16 cents per kilowatt-hour (assuming they get constructed on time and under budget, ha ha) (page 8).

Of course, nuclear power from existing nuclear plants is cheaper, because much of the costs of building that infrastructure have largely already been paid for over the past few decades. So if you live near an existing nuclear reactor, bully for you, you can enjoy the fruits of that investment for as long as the reactor stays operational. On the other hand, many of those reactors are nearing the end of their service life, so it's iffy how long that option will stick around.

Power from coal seems cheaper, but only if you don't factor in the externalized costs (air pollution, climate change, mountaintop removal damage, etc). Whether that matters you personally depends on where you live, but someone will have to pay those costs sooner or later, so they can't just be ignored. Trying to evaluate the external costs is non-trivial, but a 2011 study suggests that the true cost of coal is somewhere between 9 and 27 cents per kilowatt-hour, with a median cost of 18 cents per kilowatt-hour. So in the big picture, coal isn't cheaper either.

Solar costs 400% more than coal and nuclear. How is that economically viable? You think the average home can afford a $400/month electric bill?

You're misinformed. New commercial solar projects now deliver electricity at 14 cents per kilowatt-hour (page 6), whereas new nuclear plants are projected to cost 16 cents per kilowatt-hour (assuming they get constructed on time and under budget, ha ha) (page 8).

Of course, nuclear power from existing nuclear plants is cheaper, because much of the costs of building that infrastructure have largely already been paid for over the past few decades. So if you live near an existing nuclear reactor, bully for you, you can enjoy the fruits of that investment for as long as the reactor stays operational. On the other hand, many of those reactors are nearing the end of their service life, so it's iffy how long that option will stick around.

Power from coal seems cheaper, but only if you don't factor in the externalized costs (air pollution, climate change, mountaintop removal damage, etc). Whether that matters you personally depends on where you live, but someone will have to pay those costs sooner or later, so they can't just be ignored. Trying to evaluate the external costs is non-trivial, but a 2011 study suggests that the true cost of coal is somewhere between 9 and 27 cents per kilowatt-hour, with a median cost of 18 cents per kilowatt-hour. So in the big picture, coal isn't cheaper either.

Uh, it really is dangerous. That's why nuclear power plants are considered terrorist targets.

Be suspicious of any chain of reasoning based on taking what Homeland Security et al think as true. These people are fear mongers, and use artificially created fear to control the masses. For some reason their otherwise incoherent policies always seem to align on one point: they increase the profits of big oil.

While you are correct that Chernobyl was a bad design and an ill-conceived experiment started the disaster, do you recall what caused Three Mile Island or what the consequences might have been had the hydrogen bubble ignited?

Oh come on. The hydrogen did ignite and nothing significant happened. The "bubble" was what was left over after all the hydrogen that could have burned already had. The public and the environment suffered no injury, and the whole thing was blown way out of proportion.

And the bigger problem is the cost and various issues with properly sequestering the waste.

It's only a problem because we have been hornswaggled into thinking of it as "waste" instead of thinking of it as "fuel reserves." If you want to suppress any technology try this simple trick:

• Convince people that some intermediate product of the system is "waste"
• Convince them that the only thing they can do with it is store it
• Point out the logical consequences of these absurd assumptions.

For example, if you could convince people that they could only use 10% of the gas they put in their cars and had to save the other 90% forever, what would happen to the auto industry?

Incidentally, the whole "longer half-life == more dangerous" talking point is stupid. Saying that something has an enormously long half-life is just another way of saying that it is relatively stable. It's the things with the short half-lives you need to worry about. The tungsten in your lightbulbs, for instance, has a half-life of around 1,000,000,000,000,000 years. Buy the backwards logic of the anti-nuke people, it should be terrifying stuff, much more dangerous than uranium with a half-life of only 100,000 to 1,000,000,000 years, right? -- MarkusQ

Now, these exceptionally dangerous plants are not operating by the industry standard -- the density of their spent fuel pools is much higher than in the intended design. But this is the whole problem with nuclear power -- people want it cheap (and lots of it), and they want it safe. You can't have it both ways. The total costs of nuclear power -- including disposing of waste in a safe manner -- need to be accounted for up front, every time. Only then can the public really believe, honestly, that the risks are acceptable.

The fact that the same politicians that support the death penalty and use it as a political scare tactic are loosening enforcement on nuclear power makes my blood boil. The death penalty is another tradeoff where it is possible to reduce the number of innocent people executed, or to reduce the cost to below life incarceration (usually by limiting appeals), but there is no way in hell to do both. Yet the same politicians claim that few innocent people have been executed in the most recent post-1976 round with the death penalty (distinguished from previous experience largely by expensive legal checks and balances), then whine about appeals whenever it is brought up that life in prison is actually cheaper. The death penalty is also a case where ideally you want ZERO error, although the tolerance is certainly larger than for catastrophic nuclear accidents.

You're right about the background radiation from nuclear plants, and about most exposure to radon. Within reason, they are not hazards. Pesticide contamination was a much greater source of carcinogens for decades than radon.