Years of radioactive waste water spills from Illinois nuclear power plants have fueled suspicions the industry covers up safety problems and sparked debate about the risks from exposure to low-level radiation.

The recent, belated disclosures of leaks of the fission byproduct tritium from Exelon Corp.'s Braidwood, Dresden, and Byron twin-reactor nuclear plants -- one as long ago as 1996 -- triggered worries among neighbors about whether it was safe to drink their water, or even stay.

"How'd you like to live next to that plant and every time you turn on the tap to take a drink you have to think about whether it's safe?" asked Joe Cosgrove, the head of parks in Godley, Illinois, a town adjacent to Braidwood.

"The president's plan is misguided. It presents health risks, creates additional nuclear waste that we have no long-term solution for, creates additional terrorist targets that we do not adequately defend, and costs an enormous amount of money. (Bush's) phrase 'clean, safe nuclear power' is oxymoronic," he said.

The problem isn't nuclear power plans. The problem is nuclear power plants built on 60's technology operating way past their design lifetimes.

Every nuclear power plan currently in operation in the United States should be scrapped and rebuilt using modern technology. They would be safer, more efficient, and produce more output. We don't need to create new plants. We need to update the ones we have.

The old reactor cores can be stored on site. Just incase them in plastic and concrete, or something that should last for a few hundred thousand years. Give it a nice external layer of granite so it looks pretty. Put a statute on top of whoever actually manages to make it happen. Have the statue holding an old school lantern in one hand and a bundle of electrical cable in the other.

All these plants already have waste storage on site. In many cases the waste storage facilities have been the only thing these plants have changed over the years. They have been augmented to store more waste from inefficient plants that have been operating for too long. Plans like Yucca Mountain cannot be counted on. A distributed approach is necessary, and we already have it to a certain degree.

Start with this plant, please.

Reuters | US nuclear plant leaks fuel health concerns