Obama has just announced an effort to build nuclear power generating plants, long overdue in my opinion. "To meet our growing energy needs and prevent the worst consequences of climate change, we'll need to increase our supply of nuclear power," said Obama. That said I have some serious reservations.
1) The last nuclear power plant built in the United States started construction in 1977, 33 years ago. So it’s fairly safe to say most of the construction workers skilled in this technology are retired.
2) Where to go to get the special material needed, certainly not here in the US as suppliers have long since gone out of business or shifted to other sources of revenue.
3) Is this going to turn into another one of those “see we created jobs” fiasco as in fact 80% of the material needed to build wind power farms are from foreign sources which create an even bigger trade deficit. Fare trade means 50/50 not 20/80.
So ask yourself this question. Do you want most of the US Tax Dollars flowing out of the US to build a new nuke?
I heard that lead makes for good shielding of radiation, so maybe we should buy the material from China, they are already pretty good at shipping lead tainted items in one form or another to us already.