Nuclear power economics and prospects

The costs of nuclear power in the United States have escalated far more rapidly than inflation in recent years. As a result, no new nuclear power plants have been started since 1975, and in the 1990s electricity may be twice as expensive in the United States as in Europe. The cause of this price escalation is traced largely to constant tightening of safety requirements in spite of new scientific and technical developments favorable to more relaxed safety requirements. For example, the LOFT program has shown that the emergency core cooling system performs much better than expected in preventing a meltdown; and chemistry studies have found that iodine and some other elements would be released almost totally in nonvolatile form in any catastrophic accident, which reduces the expected number of deaths manyfold