As many of you know, John McCain has called for the building of 45 brand new nuclear power plants in the United States.

For those that remember, McCain gave a speech on April 23, 2007, and then continued to repeat the statement that,

We've let the fears of thirty years ago, and an endless political squabble over the storage of nuclear spent fuel make it virtually impossible to build a single new plant that produces a form of energy that is safe and non-polluting. If France can produce 80% of its electricity with nuclear power, why can't we?

The full text of that speech can be found here, taken straight from his own website.

It seems to me that John McCain is under the assumption that France's nuclear power plants are 100% safe. But as we are now seeing, France has had a recent bout of leaks from its nuclear power plants. To quote from the article:

Weeks before, on July 18, France reported its second radioactive leak in a month. Officials said uranium may have leaked for years from a cracked pipe at a plant in southeast France owned by Areva SA. Earlier in July, Paris-based Areva, the world's largest nuclear-reactor maker, closed part of a waste- treatment plant after discovering a uranium leak and radioactive pollution.

McCain spokesman Taylor Griffin said such incidents don't worry the candidate.

``Given our country's stellar record of safety in both the commercial and military sectors, we can be assured of the safety of U.S. nuclear power now and in the future,'' Griffin said.

This is on top of McCain's statement on July 22nd that,

    We have been sailing nuclear ships around the world for 60 years, never had an accident...

As the same Bloomberg article quoted above states,

    Only two days later, the Navy disclosed that one of its nuclear submarines, the USS Houston, had been leaking radioactive coolant for two years as it called on ports in Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Guam and Hawaii. The incident is part of a spate of nuclear accidents on land and sea that may undermine McCain's message.

Despite these issues, McCain has no worries or fears. This is without mention that there is still no properly safe way to dispose of nuclear waste. Obama has already been hitting McCain on this very issue with his Yucca Mountain ad. As I heard on NPR today, this is an issue that France has been struggling with, as it's begun running out of places to store the waste. Rural areas that once allowed storage are refusing to do so.

It makes sense then, considering France's growing concerns over its nuclear program, that McCain has stopped mentioning and touting the France example that he used back in that speech from April, 2007.

I must ask, what exactly is McCain thinking? Expanding out nuclear power is one thing. Obama has proposed it on a much smaller scale. But building 45 new plants by 2030? Does McCain really have any grasp on the idiocy of such a project?

Let us not even mention the cost. According to MarketWatch and the Wall Street Journal, estimates are of building a new nuclear power plant would be anywhere between $5 and $12 billion, far above previous estimates. That's only one new plant. On the low end, and assuming that every power plant cost only $5 billion, that's a whopping $225 billion. And as we can likely assume, the cost would be much, much higher. How, I ask, does McCain intend to pay for these 45 new nuclear plants? Raising taxes? Certainly not. He's a fiscal conservative.

I'm not even going to go in-depth with the fact that market competition for nuclear power is practically nonexistent, and so the Government has had to greatly subsidize nuclear energy. If you want, you can read more over at Salon. But again, more and more Government subsidies? Fiscal conservatism at its best.

There's probably a lot more information out there. I'm only giving the small amount I found. I found it in less than an hour, and going mostly on a hunch (and educated guessing) about the issues with and costs of expanding our nuclear power industry.

In a nutshell, McCain's nuclear proposal is absolute bollocks. For all the reasons I've given, and probably many, many more.