The Nuclear Whistleblower Renaissance

You can't have a Nuclear Renaissance without a Nuclear Whistleblower Renaissance.
A lot of people aren't going to understand what just happened in Iran.
Russian scientists working on-site blew the whistle on a number of serious safety problems.
They appealed directly to the Kremlin to intervene, warning of "another Chernobyl".
Their warning was reported by major news media around the world.
And now apparently the Kremlin has intervened.
The fuel rods are being removed for inspection.

These expensive delays and repairs are not caused by "anti-nukes" or "environmentalists".
These expensive delays are caused by the inherently dangerous process of generating electricity using nuclear fission.

Conservative "pro-nukes" try to blame the collapse of the US nuclear industry on Jimmy Carter, Amory Lovins, Jane Fonda, and other Democrats, environmentalists, and "Hollywood libruls".
The fact is that orders for new reactors collapsed in 1974, and cancellations for existing orders began to skyrocket in 1974.
Jimmy Carter wasn't inaugurated until January 1977 - three years after reactor orders collapsed.
Amory Lovins famous "Road Not Taken" Foreign Affairs article was in 1976 - two years after reactor orders collapsed.
Jane Fonda's movie "The China Syndrome" wasn't until 1979 - 5 years after reactor orders collapsed.
And most of the environmental protests were in the late 1970s and 1980s, years after reactor orders collapsed.

These new delays at Bushehr aren't caused by Jimmy Carter, Jane Fonda, or Amory Lovins,
although I won't be surprised if conservative idiots try to blame them for it.
We don't know if the Kremlin was embarrassed into taking action by the news reports, or if it was going to take action anyway. But the news reports certainly put the pressure on all levels of management to respect the whistleblowers.

Nuclear energy isn't needed to solve global warming - as Al Gore says, we have enough resources to solve two or three climate crises.
Nuclear energy isn't needed to solve peak oil - even M.K. Hubbert became strongly anti-nuclear and pro-solar when he realized just how difficult the problems with nuclear energy are.

To pretend otherwise is dishonest.

http://www.itar-tass.com/eng/level2.html?NewsID=15997701&PageNum=0

MOSCOW, February 28 (Itar-Tass) -- Nuclear fuel will be removed from the reactor at the Bushehr nuclear power plant because of damage to internal elements of pumps used for cleaning the internal surface of the reactor from foreign particles.

“The unloading of the fuel from the power unit at Bushehr is a necessary measure of precaution because internal elements were found to be damaged in one of the four cooling pumps. This raised suspicions that metal particles could get into the reactor with water and reach the fuel assembly after passing through the internal elements of the reactor,” Rosatom said on Monday, February 28.
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Not surprisingly (considering Moscow's huge push to sell reactors to anyone) they don't mention the real problem at all. I'm guessing the Stuxnet virus is an all-too-real example of why these facilities are accurately described as predeployed weapons of mass destruction for terrorists and enemies.

Reactor orders collapsed because of a lack of demand in electricity.

Reactors that were ordered had to scrapped because of everything you mentioned. In the face of that, no one tried to build new reactors for 30 years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_canceled_nuclear_plants_in_the_United_States