Areva

All it took was one sentence in President Obama’s State of the Union Address last week, and an oft-maligned energy source was back on the map.

“To create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives,” the president said. “And that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country.”

A few days later, the White House budget was released and called for an increase in government loan guarantees for nuclear reactors from $18.5 billion to $54.5 billion.

Cost and safety are the two big dark clouds that hang over a nuclear revival. Now, news out of Finland concerning construction of the world's first "next-generation" nuclear reactor shows both issues hitting the project with a double whammy: costs are now 50% higher than originally projected because of faulty welds done by unqualified workers, overseen by unqualified supervisors.

We're not talking about a few welds here and there. We're talking about one billion Euros worth of work that needs to be done over. On a nuclear plant.

And we're not talking about internal quality control that efficiently discovered sub-standard construction. The red flag was raised by a Greenpeace report.