There’s some lovely nuclear propaganda in the Washington Times this week written by Stuart Butler, vice president for domestic-policy issues for the Heritage Foundation. It certainly makes nuclear power sound like the solution to all our energy problems with no nasty side effects. Just take Butler’s views on nuclear waste:

With modern techniques, spent nuclear fuel is safely removed and reprocessed to yield new reactor fuel, drastically reducing the amount of waste needing disposal. In fact, if you used nuclear power for your entire lifetime needs, the resulting waste would only be enough fill a Coke can. And this can be safely deposited in deep repositories. Compare that with the tons of plastic, batteries, tires and motor oil we’ll throw out to be buried in landfills.

Current reprocessing techniques take spent reactor fuel and from it extract 95 per cent uranium, one per cent plutonium, and three per cent highly radioactive waste. ‘Only one per cent plutonium and three per cent highly radioactive waste left over?’, you’re probably saying to yourself. ‘That’s fantastic!’

No. It’s really not.

Take for example, the UK’s 60,000 tonnes of high-level nuclear waste. Reprocessing that would still leave 1,800 tonnes of highly radioactive waste. That’s a lot of Coke cans – more than 4 million. Where shall we put them?

Where are the ‘deep repositories’ Butler talks about? The US’s Yucca Mountain project in Nevada is billions of dollars over budget, decades behind schedule, and technically full before it has even opened. President Obama is against the project. In Germany, 130,000 barrels of radioactive waste are currently leaking after being placed in a converted salt mine in Lower Saxony. (And that's only low and intermediate level waste that has been stored for a few decades – try to imagine what happens to highly radioactive waste that has to be stored for thousands and thousands of years…)

Other countries’ plans for geological storage of their nuclear waste – Finland, Sweden, Canada, Japan, UK - are all still at the planning stage. The technology is unproven. The human race has yet to build a structure able to last even a few thousand years let alone a few million. Meanwhile the global stockpile of high-level nuclear waste is growing by 12,000 tonnes a year.

But it’s nasty wind turbines and ugly solar panels that are ruining nuclear energy’s potential, according to Butler, not its own many problems and dangers. ‘Washington should create a level playing field for energy ideas,’ says Butler. ‘It's time to say no to lobbyist-driven subsidies and phase out existing ones.’

He should pray that never happens – an end to lobbyist-driven subsidies and a phase out of existing ones would mean the death of his beloved nuclear industry. The day it has to stand on its own two feet will be the day it falls over.