Nuclear? We Can't Afford It!

Last July's two nuclear spills in France can be traced to --
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facilities owned by Paris-based Areva, which has U.S. headquarters in Bethesda, Md. and Lynchburg, Va. and is working with Maryland-based Constellation Energy to market its reactors in the United States.
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Excerpts below from an ISS article about the GOP efforts to promote dirty nuclear energy as a solution to our problems without gathering the facts, or maybe they're just ignoring them [emphasis mine]--

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U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee delivered the weekly Republican radio address Saturday, using the occasion to call on the United States to build new nuclear power plants. And not just a few plants, mind you, or even a few dozen: a hundred brand-new nuclear plants.
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GOP lawmakers are expected to try to add provisions offering more subsidies for coal as well as nuclear power. Gearing up for a fight, sustainable energy advocates are holding a national call-in to Congress today against additional coal and nuclear subsidies.In his address, Alexander criticized Democrats' for proposing billions of dollars in subsidies for renewable energy -- but he failed to note that nuclear power is already
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the most heavily subsidized industry in the energy sector.

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In 2005, Congress handed the
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nuclear power industry $13 billion in federal aid,

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and two years later went on to approve
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an additional $20.5 billion in loan guarantees,

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making U.S. taxpayers the cosigners on loans for new nuclear projects --
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half of which are expected to end in defaults.

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Taxpayers and ratepayers have also forked over
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$11 billion for the Yucca Mountain high-level waste disposal dump,

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which the Obama administration recently scrapped over concerns about long-term safety.
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Clean? Hardly. Low cost?
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At an estimated $6 billion per reactor, nuclear can't seriously be considered "low cost," nor can the estimated power generation costs from new nuclear plants of 25 to 30 cents per kilowatt-hour -- triple current U.S. rates.
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Vive la nukes? Quelle horreur.
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If Alternative Energy received this level of federal subsidies, we would all have solar collectors on our roofs.