Dr. Helen Caldicott, (MD, not Ph.D, not that I don't respect the MD) is <b>not</b> a Nobel peace prize laureate.
International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995, but it is no more valid to say that Dr. Caldicott won the Nobel prize than it is for the 200,000 other IPPNW members to say they won it. Everybody agrees that there aren't 200,000 Nobel laureates out there as a result of the prize being awarded to IPPNW.
Dr. Caldicott, and others like her, do a lot of very good, admirable work with regards to nuclear disarmament - and I've got a lot of respect for that. That's what IPPNW's Nobel Prize was for - these things are very admirable, but they've got absolutely nothing to do with nuclear power, which is a distinct issue.
For all their very admirable work with regards to nuclear disarmament and the prevention of nuclear war, my respect for people like Dr. Caldicott is completely offset by my complete lack of respect for the things that they claim and say with regards to nuclear power, and peaceful, civilian nuclear science and technology.
Anyway, back to the topic.
With regards to the cancer risk from the tritium - you may not have known, but I did quantify it for you in the above post - it's nothing.
The questions that you consider under "Engineering" - those are of course scientific questions. With regards to the net energy yield from nuclear power - that's a scientific question, too. And, yes, there's plenty of energy gain.
All these issues and questions have been asked, and answered, before.
The subsidies are not significant. They're comparable to the subsidies given to other sustainable energy systems. Nuclear electricity generation in the United States is an economically viable, successful commercial business. Yes, the energy companies are in it to make money, and nuclear power makes them money easily.
Yes, it's a for-profit commercial business - but all industry is overseen by the government to make sure that they don't endanger the environment or people.
Nuclear power is too, especially so.
Would it make you feel more comfortable if all nuclear power related industry was government owned, like in France, so that no corporations are making money off it? I don't see why that can't be done, if it makes nuclear energy more acceptable because of people's distrust of the big scary corporations - it works fine in France.
A nuclear power reactor is absolutely nothing at all like a "stationary nuclear bomb", that's just emotional rhetoric with no basis in real world physical facts. They're sufficiently secure, and not targets that terrorists could attack to cause widespread devastation. What exactly might the terrorists actually do?
Fossil fuel facilities and chemical facilities are much easier targets for terrorists, and would be much more likely to be the basis for real destruction.
The reason that nuclear power is so closely associated with terrorism is that terrorism can be accomplished without actually hurting or killing anybody - it's really all in the heads of the victims where terrorism occurs, and enough people let themselves be terrorized by nuclear power, and especially by those that use fear, emotion and rhetoric to campaign against it, that nuclear power is associated with terrorism - because people are scared of it, even though it's the safest form of electricity generation known, and one of the safest commercial industries in existence. Nuclear power has never hurt or killed a single person in the United States.
Social and political systems aren't required to perpetuate the integrity of long-term disposal or storage of radioactive wastes in a deep geological repository - the longevity of that isolation is perpetuated by hundreds of meters of rock, mineral and metal, and by science and engineering today. Once the geological repository is sealed, that's it - it's a solved problem and requires no interference or maintainence by future generations - that's how those deep geological repositories are designed.
