The transportation of the enormous (and we mean HUGE) components required to build nuclear power plants is really a metaphor for the nuclear industry as a whole: huge, lumbering, slow-moving, a logistical nightmare, and causing a massive inconvenience to all concerned.

Take the two steam generators being built in France by Areva for the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in America. Seventy feet long and weighing 510 tons each, the generators will sail across the Atlantic and up the Chesapeake Bay to Port Deposit. The 70-mile journey from Port Deposit to Three Mile Island will take 20 days as the 26-axle self-propelled flatbed trailers have a top speed of just three miles an hour.

‘A small army of 100 workers is expected to accompany the generators in a column about a mile long…[T]he trip will take the generators over 20 bridges that either will have to be braced to carry the 850-ton combined weight of each generator and transporter, or, in three cases, bypassed altogether… Eighteen traffic signals along the proposed travel route will have to be temporarily lowered, along with numerous utility wires, and trees will have to be cut, all to give the generators the vertical clearance they need to pass.’

See? It’s a metaphor. Will the nuclear industry, moving at a snail’s pace like these generators, get there in time? Are you, like the bridges of Lancaster County, braced for what a nuclear ‘renaissance’ will take? The environmental damage, the uncertainty, consultations and concerns bypassed altogether?

Or will the nuclear industry end up like the nuclear turbines that were destined for Canada’s Point Lepreau reactor a few months back? That’s sunk. Here’s hoping.