The U.S. should substantially increase Nuclear energy. No What if arguements please.

Hello, my fellow debaters. In today's argument, I shall show why the U.S. should not substantially increase nuclear energy. There are a multitude of reasons not to seriously consider nuclear power beyond those installations already in place. I will address some of the major ones, and in addition, provide better alternatives to nuclear power for your comparison. 1.) Nuclear power is expensive. Nuclear power has never, ever been cost-efficient on a private-sector basis, and there is no nuclear plant in the entire world capable of operating without very large government subsidy. This does not apply to solar or wind or any renewable energy source worth considering. On a cents per kilowatt-hour scale, nuclear energy tends to linger around 12 to 15 cents. Compare that to wind energy, 4-7 cents, or tidal energy, 2-3 cents, nuclear energy seems like a joke. Solar energy two years ago was approximately 15-20 cents, and with recent advances in solar technology making it vastly more efficient(1), and with cheap fuel cell technology recently being essentially perfected(2) allowing us to more or less store solar energy overnight, the costs of solar energy are going to drop exponentially in the very near future. 2) Nuclear power is a mature technology and it doesn't work with economies of scale. To put it more bluntly - nuclear energy is not going to get any cheaper because of scientific advances (pebble bed reactors are still going to cost buckets of money), and it's not going to get cheaper if we make a lot of them. On the contrary, all evidence points to the fact that nuclear plants actually get more expensive the more of them you build. On top of that, nuclear plants represent massive infrastructure investments that just don't exist for the likes of solar and wind. 3.) Nuclear plants require constant supervision. Nuclear plants are not like solar panels or windmills, which you basically just set up and then check on every once in a while. Nuclear plants are gigantic complicated things that require continuous expert staffing for good reasons (most of which involve the word "radioactivity"). And we all want safer nuclear plants, but the problem is that safer nuclear plants means more oversight, complicated devices, and staffing - meaning that the safer you want the plant, the more expensive it is to operate. 4.) Nuclear plants need enriched uranium to use as fuel. Nuclear energy fans, when discussing the prospects for nuclear fuel, typically point out that there is loads of uranium left on the planet. The problem is that we've already used up most of the naturally occurring enriched uranium in nuclear plants already, and most of what's left isn't easily accessible. This means for the long term, we have two options: 1.) strip-mining to get at the last naturally enriched uranium, and 2.) refining the raw, low-grade uranium that is most of our planet's supply into fuel-grade uranium. Either of these skyrockets the cost of nuclear power, making economically inefficient. 5.) The new "safer" reactors nuclear energy fans love to talk about barely exist. Pebble-bed reactors are still an experimental technology. We are decades away from mass installation of pebble-bed reactors. Now let's take that pin out of the meltdown and waste issues and discuss it rationally without talking about two-headed mutant babies. We don't have a foolproof way of burying nuclear waste that can prevent it from seeping into groundwater; even if we did, what you're then talking about is yet another additional cost assigned to nuclear power that solar and wind do not have in any meaningful context. Likewise, the necessity of preventing meltdowns greatly increases nuclear energy's cost. Even before we consider things like radioactive risk, nuclear energy is just a bad deal. Now, the nuke-fan might respond by saying "well it doesn't matter if it's expensive or not - wind and solar can't do the job themselves." Wind can't do the job itself, that's true (it can probably do a good chunk of it, say twenty percent or so, but that's probably about it at present). Solar, however, can. If you don't believe me, go ask Popular Mechanics (3), who used a very conservative plan (which, incidentally, is already outdated less than a year later as scientific advances have rendered solar collection more efficient) and determined that the USA could be fully solar-powered by 2050 for an investment cost of about $1 billion per year. In conclusion, I have proven that while alternative energies are needed to secure the U.S.'s energy future, nuclear is not a viable method. My opponent's first and third contentions have been addresses through my references to solar and wind energy, and the second contention blatantly disproved. Nuclear energy is inefficient, expensive, and dangerous, and there are much better alternatives available. Clearly, the only intelligent choice is to vote for CON. Sources: Arguments taken from http://mightygodking.com... 1) http://www.sciencecentric.com... 2) http://web.mit.edu... 3) http://www.sciam.com...