Why California Counts on Renewables, is Nuclear Now?

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By Anne Gonzales

Nuclear energy? Didn’t that go out with fins on Cadillacs? Maybe so, but after trying the alternatives, nuclear is like a Cher farewell tour: back in vogue.     
     In the 1950s, nuclear power was touted as “too cheap to meter,” a safe, clean and limitless energy to usher the United States into a glorious age of post-war growth.     
     By the 1980s, however, the shining promise of nuclear energy was all but dead in America, thanks to an infamous accident, fears about weapons proliferation and the high cost of running reactors. Add in the issue of where to put the nasty radioactive waste from spent fuel and it was a recipe for an industry downfall.     
     As a nation turned against nuclear, Sacramento’s nuclear power plant, Rancho Seco, was shuttered by public referendum in 1989. No new nuclear reactors have been ordered in the United States since 1974.
     But with coal-fired plants spewing out poisons and heating up the planet, nuclear is getting a second look these days. “There’s a very real resurgence in the nuclear industry right now,” says Steve Kerekes, a spokesman with the Nuclear Energy Institute in Washington, D.C.  

A Comeback for California?
Is it time for America to dust off the notion of nukes as an energy source?     
Continued...

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