Naked City

Illustration By Doug Potter

Great news: The South Texas Project is really, really cheap!

In a July 25 press release, STP (formerly South Texas Nuclear Project, aka Mother of All Boondoggles) proudly trumpeted that "The South Texas Project nuclear power plant has the lowest average fuel cost of any electricity producer in the U.S."

Tom Smith of Public Citizen doesn't dispute this. "The fuel is cheap," agrees Smith, "but they conveniently forget to tell us the environmental costs of mining, maintenance, and eventual disposal of the waste, and maintaining watch over it for hundreds of thousands of years. It's a high price for low-cost fuel."

We ran the numbers through our supercomputers and came up with this graph to put things in clearer perspective.