Both. The energy yield is just about positive, but it costs an enormous amount of money.

actually i believe that is part of the problem with nuclear power plants. there are too many old ones buildt in the 60's. There are so many new technologies and ways to make them safer then they used to be built now.

i do believe in using nuclear power, because it is a cheap source of energy. but safety should always be first. and Nuclear power plants that can not whitstand a airplane crash are not safe in this day and age, regardless how many fail safes are in place to eliminate human error.

Until someone can provide an efficient, preferably cost-efficient too, way to create power, nuclear power is the way to go. Sadly the thing is, renewable sources aren't good enough and the others, let's just say that pollution is a real problem.

In defense of the old plants, we do have "outages" every few months.  The plant (or part of it, anyway) is totally powered down and everything is inspected.  Lots of components get replaced or improved.  It's not perfect, by any means.  It's like replacing parts of an old car instead of buying a brand new car.  Still, I've only been there for a couple of years and the amount of changes and improvements that have happened in just that small amount of time (I think I've seen about five outages) is pretty impressive.  And for the record, our plant is reportedly able to withstand earthquakes and a direct hit by a commercial airplane.  The key word is, reportedly--not quit sure how that would hold up in practice.  Most of the key components are in hardened structures far underground with automatic systems designed to kick in if something goes wrong.  I'll quit now because certain things are considered protected information so I won't go into it.  From what I've seen and the propaganda they push on us, we're fine.  Again, I can only speak of our particular plant and not every nuclear plant in the world.

Nuclear Power is OK if the plants aren't built in dangerous areas (Japan). I support nuclear far more than coal which is terrible for the enviroment.

As far as I know there is only 1 fission nuclear, the ITER project in France, and they are still building the facilities. Acording to Wikipedia, the cost is around € 15 billion and allegedly will produce 500 MW while consuming 50 MW.

Ja that's the one they're trying to get working. Those figures are open to speculation though.

Of course, they are =) they were built since 1950s. That wasn't the point.

BTW few years ago it's been reported that Chinese were able to achieve positive energy balance working on EAST tokamak (a distant descendant of T-7) for 5 sec, not sure though why this story appeared in media (afaik there were tests that were proved to achieve positive balance prior to that, though in even shorter span of time).

Nuclear power is fine, and i feel the environmental lobby's rage at the Fukushima disaster is misplaced. They should be blaming TEPCO in particular, and not nuclear power in general. Especially stupid in Germany which pretty much never has natural disasters, and for whom nuclear (supplemented by North Sea shore wind) is probably the best option given their level of development

of course, and i have no intention to imply that your plant is dangerous.

i believe though, what fukushima has shown, is that you can't just "power down" a nuclear power plant. some of the reactors haven't even been in use and still  the used rods pose a great danger, and i bleive that is something that scared people a lot.