While President Bush picked up the offshore-drilling gauntlet yesterday, senator John McCain returned to the charge on nuclear power. He called for the construction of 45 more nuclear reactors by 2030—or a roughly 50% expansion of the current U.S. nuclear reactor fleet.
Now that public support for the stuff appears to be growing, how realistic is Sen. McCain’s faith in nuclear power?
For the folks at the Worldwatch Institute, not very. The D.C.-based environmental thinktank just produced a scorecard on nuclear power’s progress around the world: It’s growing one-tenth as fast as wind power. Last year, just 2 gigawatts of new nuclear power were brought on line, or a 0.5% increase over the world’s existing nuclear capacity.
That’s without mentioning one big bugbear facing nuclear power in the U.S.—what do with all the toxic waste. There’s also the question of where to get the fuel from to run the reactors.
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