Unfortunately, nuclear power isn't a good answer to our need to get loose from our Middle East oil dependency. For all its chrome-plated promise, nuclear power has fallen flat on its face and the worst is yet to come. Nucleafpower plants are now facing a challenge that their designers never anticipated, though they should have-what to do with the power plants after their useful lives are over. Nuclear power plants last 30 years or less. After 30 years, a reactor's pressure vessel becomes brittle and subject to breakage, simply as a result of constant bombardment by nuclear particles. In addition, after 30 years or so, the radioactivity in pipes and valves has accumulated to a point where maintenance workers are receiving unacceptable doses of radioactivity, so more maintenance crews must come in (to reduce the time any one worker spends getting zapped), which makes maintenance expensive. Old nuclear plants cannot simply be abandoned, or demolished with a wrecking ball. They are full of radioactivity, all of which must be kept away from living things. Much of the radioactivity decays away within 50 years, but three million years must pass before a nuclear plant becomes no more radioactive than the original uranium that initially fueled it.
Q: What is the main idea of the passage expressed by the author?
