The current plan to bury waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada has been compromised by politicians who chose to halt studies of other potential sites with stronger political protectors. Now, nearly 40 years into the nuclear power era, the U.S. government says it will be at least another decade before permanent waste disposal can begin. Many independent observers doubt that an underground repository will ever be finished, and some utilities are making plans to turn today's nuclear reactors into above-ground waste sites. The market test As serious as these problems are, however, they are secondary to the most fundamental problem with nuclear energy-it is simply not an economically competitive means of generating electricity. In the 1960s and 1970s nuclear was touted as the low-cost power option.
Nuclear power requires the installation of complex and expensive safety systems.
And after Three Mile Island, even more costly control systems were added. By the late 1980s, severe market pressures had forced most U.S. utilities out of the nuclear construction business. And in a 1995 poll, only 2 percent of U.S. utility executives said they would even consider ordering a nuclear plant. This is no longer the case. The efficiency of gas turbine-based power plants, for example, has risen 50 percent in a decade, while their costs have been cut in half.