NEI Nuclear Notes

In the March 2008 issue of Gentlemen's Quarterly , Wyl S. Hylton wrote a great, balanced piece on the current state of the nuclear industry . His main topics centered around the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania and Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Below are some highlights (bold edits are mine). On Three Mile Island: Over the past ten years, the plant [Three Mile Island] has become famous for its constancy, setting records for continuous operation. The latest, among more than 250 similar reactors worldwide, was 689 days without pause or fail. What all this amounts to, in a typical year, is about 7.2 million megawatt hours of electricity, or enough to satisfy the needs of 800,000 homes. By way of comparison, to produce the same amount of electricity, a coal-fired power plant would have to incinerate more than 3 million metric tons of fuel, producing 500 pounds of carbon dioxide per second, as well as 1,200 pounds of ash per minute and 750 pounds of sulfur dioxide every five...