What are the advantages and disadvantages for nuclear power?

Advantages:

• Nuclear power produces fewer carbon emissions than most other traditional energy sources, probably no more than 40% of what natural gas does. Its carbon emissions come from petrochemicals used in the mining, refinement, enrichment, and transportation of fuel, the construction of the power plant, the decommissioning of the power plant, and the disposal of nuclear waste. Some of these are usually neglected altogether when emissions are calculated, so figures should be regarded with healthy skepticism. In particular, the waste disposal is not usually considered, as the emissions cannot be determined accurately.
• One advantage that proponents of nuclear power site is that nuclear plants provide a lot of employment. The Vermont Yankee plant, which is one of the smaller plants around, employs 650 people, to produce 620 megawatts of power.
• Nuclear plants provide baseload power. The plants are always running, except about one month out of every 18 months or so, when they have to shut down for refueling, or when there is some unexpected event.

Disadvantages:

• There is the possibility of environmental contamination for a variety of reasons. One is human error, such as happened at Chernobyl. Another is because radioactivity "poisons" metals, causing pipes, vessels, and so on to weaken and eventually crack, spilling radioactive materials into the environment, which is probably why Vermont Yankee and 26 other plants in the United States have tritium leaks. There have been radiation leaks due to other reasons, in addition, such as unanticipated natural conditions.
• The economic and environmental costs of catastrophic accident are overwhelming. The economic cost of the Chernobyl Disaster has been estimated as high as a trillion 1995 US dollars. The amount of land rendered unusable for at least several years was about a quarter of the size of New England. The area where there were agricultural losses of one sort or another was about an eighth of the size of the United States. The area left permanently uninhabitable was many square miles.
• Nuclear plants cannot be sited just anywhere. They must be sited where there are really good heat sinks. This really means they must be sited where there is a lot of water, such as at a lake, river, or ocean. This, in turn, means that any radioactive materials that are released into the environment are dispersed easily. The plants, together with their waste, can also be subject to floods. The waste storage at some sites is only 3 inches above the 500 year flood level, and coastal plants could be subject to damage from tsunami that could occur at high tide or a mega-tsunami at any time.
• It is impossible for the insurance industry to cover the cost of a catastrophic event at a nuclear site, so the risk is typically covered by the taxpayer, as it is in the United States.
• Nuclear plants are very costly, more costly than any other source of energy widely used commercially, so governments that want nuclear plants have to subsidize them by loans or direct payment, at taxpayer expense.
• Owners of nuclear plants cannot afford to dispose of the high level waste. As a result, this is done at taxpayer expense. No one has ever solved the waste disposal problem. In some countries, the waste is exported to countries poor enough to be willing to be paid to store it. In the United States, the waste is stored at the plants until someone figures out what to do with it. When this is done, it will be done at taxpayer expense.
• The high level waste will be dangerous for over a million years. The time it takes for the waste to be reduced to the radioactivity of uranium ore (which is not all that safe) is approximately six million years. This is a large multiple of the length of human history, and we do not know how to secure it for anything like that length of time.
• There are dangers of radioactivity we do not understand. For example, men who worked in nuclear plants in the UK and subsequently left for other industries, were found to have a significantly increased risk of having children who developed leukemia, even years after their last exposure to the "normal" levels of radioactivity in the plant.
• The cost of decommissioning a nuclear plant is enormous.
• The fuel is running out. We can reprocess fuel, but this is illegal in many countries because of its danger. The fuel willl probably run out at about the same time as oil and well before coal, unless we develop new nuclear technology.
• Nuclear power can be used to build nuclear bombs.