Nuclear Energy = Fool's Gold

There are many arguments in favor of nuclear energy.  None of them holds up to scrutiny. 

"It's carbon neutral."  This is the closest to a true statement but it isn't true.  Tons of oil and coal will be burnt in the extraction, refinement, and transportation of nuclear fuel.  Compared with your average fossil fuel burning power plant it isn't much but I don't think I'm splitting hairs by pointing out that nuclear energy is not carbon neutral.

"It's cheap."  Someone please point to a nuclear plant that hasn't over-run projected costs by billions of dollars or has actually lowered anyone's electric bill.  I'll wait.

"It's safe." or "Technology and design has improved to such a degree that a failure is impossible."  To that I'd like start by saying, "See BP."  All technology has a chance of failure.  This chance is almost always much greater than those designing and building the technology think it is.  The safest cars' accelerator pedals stick, skyscrapers designed to withstand an airplane collision collapse after a collision and an intense fire, deep water drilling rigs claiming to have no chance of an accident explode and kill the Gulf of Mexico, two space shuttles fall to the earth in flames.  Anything made by humans will fail eventually.  And as recent events have shown us when a "low possibility" event occurs in a very complex situation, the result is usually a catastrophe many times greater than any "plausible" worst case scenario accepted before the event. 

The very idea that we believe we can store radioactive waste for over 100,000 years while it decays to a safe state is astonishing.  The same people that built Three Mile Island or Chernobyl are going to build the chambers where we house the waste from nuclear reactors.  We can't even get short term storage right, apparently.  Tritium has been leaking from the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant for some time and it will probably end up in the drinking water of New York.  We can't keep very good track of the deadliest poison known to man, plutonium, which has a half life of 24,000 years.  As far as humanity is concerned the life span of plutonium or any other slowly decaying radioactive material is infinite.  We will not be here 100,000 years from now.  Some other form of us or some other creature will have taken our place long before the poison ceases to be deadly.  Cultures and societies will rise and fall violently and to think we can guard this horrendous danger against those future persons is laughable.  An oil spill, no matter how immense, is finite.  For the human race, the radioactive material we are making today will last beyond forever.