I was just talking with a family member about this last night. He's very conservative and found my anti-nuclear stance amusing, until I started explaining the level of subsidies and told him about the Price-Anderson Act. The public is asked to shoulder a large portion of the costs for plant construction, industry oversight, plant decommissioning, and oversight of waste which lingers for thousands of years. If there's an accident, who really gets socked with the lion's share of the cleanup cost? The taxpayer. In essence, taxpayers are compelled to invest massive amounts of money in propping up a business which then meters and charges us AGAIN for the product, walking away with the profit. All of this to prop up an industry that uses the heat from nuclear fission to boil water, to create steam, to turn a turbine. Not factoring in ANY of the human cost involved in safety issues, it is a huge boondoggle.

Once he felt the hit in his wallet, he stopped laughing and quietly started asking for more information, which I e-mailed him. It's sad that my argument had to be economic in order to open his eyes, but whatever works to start changing people's minds about the nuclear industry needs to be spread far and wide.