Anti-nuclear renaissance: a powerful but partial and tentative victory over atomic energy
January 5, 2008
As the presidential primary season heats up, an “anti-nuclear renaissance” against loan guarantees for new nuclear power plants will escalate, with the future of American energy policy and global warming hanging in the balance.
In the last days of 2007, grassroots activism ran up a stunning and improbably victory. But the triumph is both partial and tentative, and will be fiercely contested throughout 2008, with the basic direction of US energy policy hanging in the balance.
This latest chapter in the half-century saga of atomic energy began last summer, with an industry attempt to grab a blank taxpayer check for underwriting new reactor construction. The charge was been led by six-term Senator Pete Domenici (D-NM), atomic power's prime Congressional pusher.
Domenici inserted into the Senate version of the national Energy Bill a complex provision meant to allow the Department of Energy to underwrite up to 80% of new reactor construction costs. The nuclear industry envisioned $25 billion in loan guarantees for 2008, $25 billion more in 2009, and what would amount to a blank check into the future. The guarantees would be granted at the DOE's discretion, with no on-going Congressional oversight.
Domenici slipped in the provision without open debate in Congress or the public. It took the form of a single obscure sentence referencing the Energy Bill of 2005. The move only became widely noticed thanks to a front page New York Times article on July 31.
The loan guarantees generated intense grassroots and Washington-based opposition. After the Times article appeared, musicians Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne and Graham Nash established the www.nukefree.org website, and joined with the on-going grassroots movement against a “nuclear renaissance” meant to revive an industry whose last successful reactor order was placed in 1973. Raitt, Browne and Nash were joined by Keb Mo and Ben Harper in a music video that spread through the internet, underscoring the costs and dangers of such construction.
The video played into an on-going No Nukes movement. The industry has gone to great lengths to assert that it has widespread “green” support. But no major national ecological organization has endorsed nuclear power, and the core of the movement---including scores of national, grassroots and Internet-based groups---rallied to fight the subsidies.
On October 23, nine national groups joined with nukefree.org at a Washington press conference to submit 120,000 signatures against the guarantees. Representatives Ed Markey (D-MA), Shelley Berkeley (D-NV) and John Hall (D-NY) spoke along with representatives from the Sierra Club, League of Conservation Voters, Greenpeace USA, Environmental Working Group, Natural Resources Defense Council, Public Citizen, USPIRG/Association of State PIRGs, the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, and Beyond Nuclear. (Speeches from the press conference can be found at www.nukefree.org, and accessed directly at www.nukefree.freevolt.org).
The petitions were also circulated by MoveOn.org, True Majority and other internet groups, and signed by, among others, Robert Redford, Ozamatli, Patti Smith, System of a Down, Sheryl Crowe, Herbie Hancock, Susan Sarandon, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and the council of the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network. The Nuclear Information & Resource Service (NIRS) submitted endorsements from several hundred local and regional grassroots organizations.
The Union of Concerned Scientists circulated a parallel petition opposing the guarantees. Free market advocates joined in from Forbes Magazine and the Cato Institute, which objects to billions in taxpayer funds going to support what Forbes has called “the largest managerial disaster in business history.”
Amidst intense public and private pressure, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pulled the loan guarantees out of the Energy Bill. It was an historic victory for grassroots activism.
In the midst of the campaign, Domenici admitted to suffering from frontotemporal lobar degeneration, a form of dementia. First elected to the Senate in 1972, he announced he would retire at the end of his sixth term, in January, 2008.
Domenici then tried to stick the loan guarantees into the Farm Bill, prompting critics to term them “Domenici's radioactive retirement package.” That move failed.
The nuclear industry then attempted to add to a global warming bill, co-authored by Senators Lieberman (D-CT) and McCain (R-AZ), a laundry list of reactor subsidies and regulatory easements. These were removed by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), chair of the Energy and Public Works Committee.
Domenici then moved to attach the guarantees to the Appropriations Bill used to fund the government's operations. By late December, bickering over this $500 billion bill deteriorated into intense partisan warfare. Domenici's back-door move angered House Appropriations Chair David Obey (D-WI) and the battle intensified, with opposition signatures continuing to pour in.
The Appropriations Bill finally passed both houses of Congress in late December. But the legislative standing and ultimate outcome for the loan guarantees is murky at best, with legal and procedural experts still debating over what exactly has been done.
Ostensibly, the DOE has been authorized to grant $18.5 billion in reactor loan guarantees over the next two years, plus another $2 billion for uranium enrichment. There is also some $10 billion for renewable energy projects (though the definition of exactly what “renewable” means in the eyes of the Bush DOE remains to be seen). And there is apparently money for coal liquification and gasification. The DOE is also required to submit the specific guarantees to Congress for review 45 days before they can be authorized.
But there agreement ends. Based on the 2005 Energy Act, the $18.5 billion can be seen as just a benchmark number, with the DOE technically capable of issuing all the guarantees it wants. Long-standing Congressional procedures may also be used to interpret the submission requirement as merely informational, granting Congress no power to stop the DOE from issuing the guarantees once they're reviewed.
But Robert Alvarez, a former long-time employee of the Energy Department, now Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, says the nature of the provision leaves the legal standing of the guarantees in limbo and could “paralyze (some say strangle) the loan program.”
Among the problems Alvarez cites are unresolved disputes over the previous Energy Policy Act of 2005, “scoring” procedures required by the 1990 Federal Credit Reform Act to determine the true cost of a spending package, the authorization of a two-year guarantee program in a one-year Appropriations Bill, disputes surrounding Congressional approval processes, and more. “Instead of clearing up the growing mess” over the loan guarantees, says Alvarez, this legislation “has magnified the major hurdles.”
Further muddying the waters is the fact that no proposed American reactor project is likely to obtain an actual construction license within at least the next two years. Michael Mariotte of NIRS questions whether loans can “really be obtained for projects with no official approval to proceed.”
Critics also point out that while the industry claims new reactors can be built for $4-5 billion each, independent observers put the likely real costs far higher. A “new generation” reactor in Finland is some $2 billion over budget and two years behind schedule after just two years of construction. The US industry continues to submit a steady stream of significant modifications to its so-call “standard” construction blueprints. Thus what actually constitutes 80% of what it would cost to build a new reactor is very much a moving target.
But nobody doubts that as Congress reconvenes, Pete Domenici will be resuming his efforts to get as much more money as possible for new reactors. His time in office will be limited. And the political, legal, procedural, technical and financial disputes surrounding the actual nature of the guarantee program are certain to stretch through Congress and the courts for years to come.
Meanwhile, Wall Street has made it clear that it will not fund new reactors without these guarantees. This sharp vote of financial no confidence means that fifty years after the 1957 opening of the first commercial reactor at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, atomic energy still cannot pay for itself. Nor can it compete with the booming revolution in renewable technologies.
Thus what's at stake could not be more critical. With the guarantees, reactor builders will be insulated from all that, and could simply build as many plants as the Congress is willing to underwrite. That the Congressional Budget Office has predicted a 50% default rate on these proposed loans, may be of no consequence to them. They could simply suck as much available capital into new reactors as the DOE will underwrite.
But without those guarantees, the pro-nuclear renaissance will die in a puff of radioactive hype. As fossil fuels diminish in supply, and are curtailed due to global warming, no new reactors will be built here. All available capital for new energy supply must flow instead to renewables and efficiency.
According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, some $6 billion in new wind farms are currently under construction in this country. Billions more are pouring in solar, bio-fuels, ocean thermal, wave, tidal and other forms of green power.
Indeed, if this tuneful victory over Pete Domenici's single-sentence insertion into the Energy Bill of 2007 holds through the end of 2008, it may someday be remembered as a landmark step toward a green-powered Earth.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Will Congress plunge us (again) into the nuke power abyss?
Will Congress plunge us (again) into the nuke power abyss?
December 14, 2007
Congress stands at the brink of the global-warmed nuclear powered abyss. Again.
In a victory for green power, a massive grassroots/internet campaign forced removal from the national Energy Bill of blank check loan guarantees to build atomic reactors.
But as you read this, House and Senate Democrats and Republicans are negotiating the 2008 Omnibus Appropriations Bill.
Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM) has slipped in $25 billion in taxpayer-guaranteed loans for new nukes. The nuke reactor guarantees are bundled with $10 billion for renewable energy, $10 billion to turn coal into liquid vehicle fuel, $2 billion to turn coal into natural gas and another $2 billion to build a uranium enrichment plant.
Safe energy supporters are demanding (see www.nirs.org) that American taxpayers not be forced to pay for another fifty years of radioactive failure.
At an October press conference (http://nukefree.freevolt.org/), a coalition of virtually all the nation's major environmental organizations, along with musicians Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne and Graham Nash, submitted more than 120,000 signatures to Congress.
Now that effort must be renewed to prevent a replay of radioactive history.
In 1952, President Harry Truman's Blue Ribbon “Paley Commission” Report showed that the future of American energy was with the sun and wind. Predicting 15 million solar-heated American homes by 1975, the administration pointed the way to a green, energy efficient economy. One that would have avoided the current climate crisis, and rendered the nation energy self-sufficient.
But in December, 1953, at the behest of the nuclear weapons industry, President Dwight Eisenhower told the world its energy would come from atomic reactors. The “Peaceful Atom” would provide electricity “too cheap to meter.” When no utilities would invest in it, the Republican administration offered massive subsidies, and federal insurance against liability for accidents and terror attacks. When it became clear the industry had no answer for its radioactive waste problem, the government promised to take care of it. Federal agencies promoted the technology while allegedly regulating it.
In the late 1960s, Dr John Gofman, the Atomic Energy Commission's top medical researcher, showed “normal” emissions from nuclear power plants were killing thousands of Americans yearly. He was fired.
More than a trillion dollars have been poured into a technology that now produces a very expensive 20% of our nation's electricity. No US reactor ordered since 1974 has been completed. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island have underscored the dangers of those that have been built. On September 11, 2001, the first jet that hit the World Trade Center flew directly over the Indian Point reactor complex a minute earlier.
Meanwhile a global renewable energy industry has boomed far past the Peaceful Atom. Major advances in wind, solar, bio-fuels, ocean thermal, wave, tidal and other green technologies have helped create a multi-billion-dollar business already taking off.
But for the Peaceful Atom, all this could have happened fifty years ago.
Now a much-hyped “revival” of this failed reactor technology again stands in the way. Wall Street will not finance it. Free market advocates like the Cato Institute and Forbes Magazine oppose it.
Domenici's loan guarantees would again divert our resources into the nuclear abyss, and again postpone the green-powered revolution that can save our economy and environment.
Bitter criticism is mounting against a divided Democratic Congressional leadership unwilling or unable to stand up to the Republican minority. Only a great green wave of public outcry---and calls to Congress---can now save us, within the next few days, from yet another lethal, expensive, global-warmed bout with atomic failure.
Will you help?
--
December 14, 2007
Congress stands at the brink of the global-warmed nuclear powered abyss. Again.
In a victory for green power, a massive grassroots/internet campaign forced removal from the national Energy Bill of blank check loan guarantees to build atomic reactors.
But as you read this, House and Senate Democrats and Republicans are negotiating the 2008 Omnibus Appropriations Bill.
Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM) has slipped in $25 billion in taxpayer-guaranteed loans for new nukes. The nuke reactor guarantees are bundled with $10 billion for renewable energy, $10 billion to turn coal into liquid vehicle fuel, $2 billion to turn coal into natural gas and another $2 billion to build a uranium enrichment plant.
Safe energy supporters are demanding (see www.nirs.org) that American taxpayers not be forced to pay for another fifty years of radioactive failure.
At an October press conference (http://nukefree.freevolt.org/), a coalition of virtually all the nation's major environmental organizations, along with musicians Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne and Graham Nash, submitted more than 120,000 signatures to Congress.
Now that effort must be renewed to prevent a replay of radioactive history.
In 1952, President Harry Truman's Blue Ribbon “Paley Commission” Report showed that the future of American energy was with the sun and wind. Predicting 15 million solar-heated American homes by 1975, the administration pointed the way to a green, energy efficient economy. One that would have avoided the current climate crisis, and rendered the nation energy self-sufficient.
But in December, 1953, at the behest of the nuclear weapons industry, President Dwight Eisenhower told the world its energy would come from atomic reactors. The “Peaceful Atom” would provide electricity “too cheap to meter.” When no utilities would invest in it, the Republican administration offered massive subsidies, and federal insurance against liability for accidents and terror attacks. When it became clear the industry had no answer for its radioactive waste problem, the government promised to take care of it. Federal agencies promoted the technology while allegedly regulating it.
In the late 1960s, Dr John Gofman, the Atomic Energy Commission's top medical researcher, showed “normal” emissions from nuclear power plants were killing thousands of Americans yearly. He was fired.
More than a trillion dollars have been poured into a technology that now produces a very expensive 20% of our nation's electricity. No US reactor ordered since 1974 has been completed. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island have underscored the dangers of those that have been built. On September 11, 2001, the first jet that hit the World Trade Center flew directly over the Indian Point reactor complex a minute earlier.
Meanwhile a global renewable energy industry has boomed far past the Peaceful Atom. Major advances in wind, solar, bio-fuels, ocean thermal, wave, tidal and other green technologies have helped create a multi-billion-dollar business already taking off.
But for the Peaceful Atom, all this could have happened fifty years ago.
Now a much-hyped “revival” of this failed reactor technology again stands in the way. Wall Street will not finance it. Free market advocates like the Cato Institute and Forbes Magazine oppose it.
Domenici's loan guarantees would again divert our resources into the nuclear abyss, and again postpone the green-powered revolution that can save our economy and environment.
Bitter criticism is mounting against a divided Democratic Congressional leadership unwilling or unable to stand up to the Republican minority. Only a great green wave of public outcry---and calls to Congress---can now save us, within the next few days, from yet another lethal, expensive, global-warmed bout with atomic failure.
Will you help?
--
Two critical (but tentative) green victories hang in the balance
Two critical (but tentative) green victories hang in the balance
December 11, 2007
The eyes of the world are now on the US Senate. Our oil-endangered species anxiously awaits even a tiny American step toward fighting global warming and saving the planetary environment.
But the battered and embattled Energy Bill now being held hostage by the Republican neo-con minority hides two huge victories tentatively won by the No Nukes/safe energy movement. If those victories hold, the odds on human survival could take a quiet but huge leap forward.
The key issues now in the Energy Bill's limelight are big tax break/subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, and a Renewable Electricity Standard that would require a certain percentage of our electric power to come from green sources such as wind, solar, bio-fuels and more.
The centerpiece of the bill has become new standards for motor vehicle fuel efficiency. This could still go down. But the auto industry, and its labor unions, seem to have signaled through Congressman John Dingell (D-MI) that they're willing to accept what's currently in the package, or something similar. (That such standards have already been largely achieved or even exceeded in China, Japan and Europe may have something to do with this accession.)
As for the fossil subsidies, George W. Bush and his minions in the media and Congress are screeching that the grotesque profits being rolled up by their coal, oil and gas cohorts are simply not enough. The only hybrid the neo-cons will now buy is the one mixing that with the notion that truly green power will somehow raise electric rates. Nothing strikes greater terror amongst of the Barons of Old Energy than the vision of an electric grid powered by community-owned wind farms and rooftop solar panels, stretching from sea to shining sea.
But the multi-trillion-dollar transformation from the King CONG madness of Coal, Oil, Nukes and Gas is already underway. The brave renewable world will be powered entirely by natural fuels. Google's deep-pocket leap into that great green sunrise marries the computer revolution that transformed the world of information in the 1990s with the clean power revolution that will remake the energy business of the new millennium.
The entrenched Barons of Oil are a formidable barrier to that transformation. But peak oil has come, peak gas is past, and the ghastly costs of coal are too obvious to ignore. It has become all too clear that very soon we will say goodbye either to fossil fuels or to our ability to live on this planet.
As for nuke power, after 50 years of proven failure, a hugely funded counterattack has been launched to somehow revive this Titanic technology. It's a desperate last gasp for an uncompetitive technology staring at extinction.
In the half-century since the first commercial reactor opened at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, the industry has found no solution for its radioactive waste problem. It can't get liability insurance. It can't protect its reactors from terror attacks, or from errors by its own operators.
Nor can it get its own financing. And here's where the Energy Bill hides our most crucial green victories.
This past summer, US Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM) slipped an obscure sentence into the Senate version. It would allow the Department of Energy to issue unlimited guarantees for building new atomic reactors. By its own admission, the industry wants $25 billion for 2008 and $25 billion for 2009, with untold billions to follow, free of Congressional oversight.
The ploy underscores what's long been known on Wall Street: the Peaceful Atom is the most expensive technological failure in human history. Even under optimal circumstances, no new reactor could come on line in this country in less than ten years. A "new generation" plant under construction in Finland is already two years behind schedule and $2 billion over budget.
The American nuke pushers continually invoke France's 59 reactors, but never mention that they are all owned by a government with a very big export agenda. The French industry is in fact a loss-leader, untroubled by such details as cost, independent regulation, waste disposal or media scrutiny.
The US industry has already punctured its own myth of "efficient standardized designs" by submitting scores of major changes to blueprints it has already run by regulators. Its cost estimates and construction schedules have already been deemed absurdly optimistic by such independent observers as Moody's.
Most importantly, every passing moment renders nuke power significantly less competitive with advancing green technologies that have long since passed it by. In an intense two months, anti-nuke/safe energy forces rallied through the www.nukefree.org web site and a wide range of environmental and internet allies. Mixed in came support from free market groups like the Cato Institute and Forbes Magazine, which dislike a technology that can't compete after five decades on the federal dole.
Spurred on by a music video featuring Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Keb Mo and Ben Harper, more than 120,000 signatures poured in against the nuke loan guarantees. On October 23, the petitions were submitted with Representatives Ed Markey (D-MA), Shelly Berkeley (D-NV) and John Hall (D-NY), and the core of the environmental movement on hand.
Under the leadership of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the subsidies were dropped from the Energy Bill. At the same time, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), as Chair of the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works, deleted a laundry list of nuke handouts from the Global Warming Bill being championed by Senators Joe Lieberman (D-CT) and John Warner (R-VA).
The victories are not etched in stone. Nuke backers could inject the guarantees into the hectic negotiations now roiling the Energy Bill. Those handouts could resurface in the Lieberman-Warner Bill, which will be voted on next year.
Domenici says he'll continue to push for nukes until he retires from the Senate next year. Rumors are now flying that he is already pushing for the guarantees to be included in the upcoming omnibus appropriations bill, where the complexities of the legislative process will make the battle even fiercer and more delicate than in the Energy Bill. Key votes on that could be coming within days. As always, stopping nuke power will require our full and immediate attention.
For the stakes couldn't be higher. New reactors are indeed on order and under construction in Russia, China, India and elsewhere. But except for France, the major economic powers of Europe---most importantly Germany, Spain, Sweden, Denmark and Italy---have turned their collective back on nuke power. The global take-off toward renewable energy would gain serious----perhaps definitive---altitude from an American decision to not build more nukes.
Which is the hidden big picture behind these radioactive loan guarantees. Despite all the "nuclear renaissance" hype, no new reactors will be built in the United States without taxpayers footing the bill, a la France.
If that underwriting is stopped here, the flight toward a green-powered planet might rise to unstoppability. And our species just might find a way to solve the climate crisis and survive on this planet.
December 11, 2007
The eyes of the world are now on the US Senate. Our oil-endangered species anxiously awaits even a tiny American step toward fighting global warming and saving the planetary environment.
But the battered and embattled Energy Bill now being held hostage by the Republican neo-con minority hides two huge victories tentatively won by the No Nukes/safe energy movement. If those victories hold, the odds on human survival could take a quiet but huge leap forward.
The key issues now in the Energy Bill's limelight are big tax break/subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, and a Renewable Electricity Standard that would require a certain percentage of our electric power to come from green sources such as wind, solar, bio-fuels and more.
The centerpiece of the bill has become new standards for motor vehicle fuel efficiency. This could still go down. But the auto industry, and its labor unions, seem to have signaled through Congressman John Dingell (D-MI) that they're willing to accept what's currently in the package, or something similar. (That such standards have already been largely achieved or even exceeded in China, Japan and Europe may have something to do with this accession.)
As for the fossil subsidies, George W. Bush and his minions in the media and Congress are screeching that the grotesque profits being rolled up by their coal, oil and gas cohorts are simply not enough. The only hybrid the neo-cons will now buy is the one mixing that with the notion that truly green power will somehow raise electric rates. Nothing strikes greater terror amongst of the Barons of Old Energy than the vision of an electric grid powered by community-owned wind farms and rooftop solar panels, stretching from sea to shining sea.
But the multi-trillion-dollar transformation from the King CONG madness of Coal, Oil, Nukes and Gas is already underway. The brave renewable world will be powered entirely by natural fuels. Google's deep-pocket leap into that great green sunrise marries the computer revolution that transformed the world of information in the 1990s with the clean power revolution that will remake the energy business of the new millennium.
The entrenched Barons of Oil are a formidable barrier to that transformation. But peak oil has come, peak gas is past, and the ghastly costs of coal are too obvious to ignore. It has become all too clear that very soon we will say goodbye either to fossil fuels or to our ability to live on this planet.
As for nuke power, after 50 years of proven failure, a hugely funded counterattack has been launched to somehow revive this Titanic technology. It's a desperate last gasp for an uncompetitive technology staring at extinction.
In the half-century since the first commercial reactor opened at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, the industry has found no solution for its radioactive waste problem. It can't get liability insurance. It can't protect its reactors from terror attacks, or from errors by its own operators.
Nor can it get its own financing. And here's where the Energy Bill hides our most crucial green victories.
This past summer, US Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM) slipped an obscure sentence into the Senate version. It would allow the Department of Energy to issue unlimited guarantees for building new atomic reactors. By its own admission, the industry wants $25 billion for 2008 and $25 billion for 2009, with untold billions to follow, free of Congressional oversight.
The ploy underscores what's long been known on Wall Street: the Peaceful Atom is the most expensive technological failure in human history. Even under optimal circumstances, no new reactor could come on line in this country in less than ten years. A "new generation" plant under construction in Finland is already two years behind schedule and $2 billion over budget.
The American nuke pushers continually invoke France's 59 reactors, but never mention that they are all owned by a government with a very big export agenda. The French industry is in fact a loss-leader, untroubled by such details as cost, independent regulation, waste disposal or media scrutiny.
The US industry has already punctured its own myth of "efficient standardized designs" by submitting scores of major changes to blueprints it has already run by regulators. Its cost estimates and construction schedules have already been deemed absurdly optimistic by such independent observers as Moody's.
Most importantly, every passing moment renders nuke power significantly less competitive with advancing green technologies that have long since passed it by. In an intense two months, anti-nuke/safe energy forces rallied through the www.nukefree.org web site and a wide range of environmental and internet allies. Mixed in came support from free market groups like the Cato Institute and Forbes Magazine, which dislike a technology that can't compete after five decades on the federal dole.
Spurred on by a music video featuring Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Keb Mo and Ben Harper, more than 120,000 signatures poured in against the nuke loan guarantees. On October 23, the petitions were submitted with Representatives Ed Markey (D-MA), Shelly Berkeley (D-NV) and John Hall (D-NY), and the core of the environmental movement on hand.
Under the leadership of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the subsidies were dropped from the Energy Bill. At the same time, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), as Chair of the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works, deleted a laundry list of nuke handouts from the Global Warming Bill being championed by Senators Joe Lieberman (D-CT) and John Warner (R-VA).
The victories are not etched in stone. Nuke backers could inject the guarantees into the hectic negotiations now roiling the Energy Bill. Those handouts could resurface in the Lieberman-Warner Bill, which will be voted on next year.
Domenici says he'll continue to push for nukes until he retires from the Senate next year. Rumors are now flying that he is already pushing for the guarantees to be included in the upcoming omnibus appropriations bill, where the complexities of the legislative process will make the battle even fiercer and more delicate than in the Energy Bill. Key votes on that could be coming within days. As always, stopping nuke power will require our full and immediate attention.
For the stakes couldn't be higher. New reactors are indeed on order and under construction in Russia, China, India and elsewhere. But except for France, the major economic powers of Europe---most importantly Germany, Spain, Sweden, Denmark and Italy---have turned their collective back on nuke power. The global take-off toward renewable energy would gain serious----perhaps definitive---altitude from an American decision to not build more nukes.
Which is the hidden big picture behind these radioactive loan guarantees. Despite all the "nuclear renaissance" hype, no new reactors will be built in the United States without taxpayers footing the bill, a la France.
If that underwriting is stopped here, the flight toward a green-powered planet might rise to unstoppability. And our species just might find a way to solve the climate crisis and survive on this planet.
Will Congress make taxpayers fund terror-target nuke reactors?
Will Congress make taxpayers fund terror-target nuke reactors?
November 29, 2007
Within a matter of days Congressional back-room deals may rubber stamp huge taxpayer loan guarantees to build dozens of what amount to pre-deployed "dirty bombs" for terrorists.
The terror attacks of September 11, 2001, showed that atomic power plants are supremely vulnerable. The first jet that hit the World Trade Center flew directly over Indian Point, whose two active reactors---plus one more that's retired---sit next to some very fragile high-level waste storage pools.
Had that first jet hit Indian Point, 35 miles north of Manhattan, with tens of millions of Americans closely downwind, the devastation would have been unimaginable. In fact, the 9/11 Commission found that Al Quaeda at one point considered crashing two planes into two nuclear facilities as part of its original plan.
Yet Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM) is trying desperately to force taxpayers to underwrite $50 billion and more in loans to build still more of these radioactive bulls-eyes. A decision to include these provisions in the Energy Bill may be made as you read this, which is why safe energy advocates are asking citizens to flood Congress with calls, demanding the provisions be removed.
There is effectively nothing that can protect an atomic power plant from a terror attack. After 9/11, a global internet debate erupted over whether a jet could penetrate a reactor containment dome. Fortunately, there is no experimental data…yet.
But at very least more than two dozen early reactor domes, including Indian Point's, were never required to withstand a jet crash. They were designed in the 1960s with no anticipation of the much bigger planes now filling our skies. There is nothing to indicate they could withstand the kind of impact or fire that hit the WTC towers.
It would not be necessary for terrorists to hijack another jet, since Osama bin Laden among others has more than enough money to buy his own.
Nor would they need to penetrate a containment. The impact and fire alone on or near a reactor could devastate pipes, pumps, cooling systems, electronic controls, human operators, off-site power and communications, and any number of additional vital pressure points capable of causing a melt-down.
Chernobyl did explode in 1986, and Michigan's Fermi I fast breeder almost did so in 1966. In 1979, Three Mile Island faced the possibility of a hydrogen explosion. But its lethal radiation, which killed people and animals nearby, vented through stacks that remained intact throughout the disaster.
Arizona's entire three-reactor Palo Verde complex was recently shut because a single worker had what may have been a pipe bomb in his car.
All these events highlight the vulnerability of any society dependent on nuke power for its energy. A recent earthquake in Japan forced shut seven reactors in a single moment. The US now has 104 such plants generating some 20% of our electricity. Many are also near earthquake faults. All are vulnerable individually and as a fleet to a terror shut-down without a moment's notice.
Domenici's loan plan has been denounced by nearly every major environmental group in the United States, along with taxpayer groups and free marketeers such as the Cato Institute and Forbes Magazine, plus Congressional conservatives concerned about the budget process.
Domenici and his neo-con cohorts have been clear in their willingness to shred the Constitution in the name of national security.
But they would simultaneously force us to underwrite easily ignitable engines of radioactive mass destruction pre-deployed on our own soil.
The decision on whether these radioactive loan guarantees will be in the Energy Bill is being made as you read this. Call the Congressional leadership, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and tell them these bailouts for terror-target nukes must be stopped. NOW!!
November 29, 2007
Within a matter of days Congressional back-room deals may rubber stamp huge taxpayer loan guarantees to build dozens of what amount to pre-deployed "dirty bombs" for terrorists.
The terror attacks of September 11, 2001, showed that atomic power plants are supremely vulnerable. The first jet that hit the World Trade Center flew directly over Indian Point, whose two active reactors---plus one more that's retired---sit next to some very fragile high-level waste storage pools.
Had that first jet hit Indian Point, 35 miles north of Manhattan, with tens of millions of Americans closely downwind, the devastation would have been unimaginable. In fact, the 9/11 Commission found that Al Quaeda at one point considered crashing two planes into two nuclear facilities as part of its original plan.
Yet Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM) is trying desperately to force taxpayers to underwrite $50 billion and more in loans to build still more of these radioactive bulls-eyes. A decision to include these provisions in the Energy Bill may be made as you read this, which is why safe energy advocates are asking citizens to flood Congress with calls, demanding the provisions be removed.
There is effectively nothing that can protect an atomic power plant from a terror attack. After 9/11, a global internet debate erupted over whether a jet could penetrate a reactor containment dome. Fortunately, there is no experimental data…yet.
But at very least more than two dozen early reactor domes, including Indian Point's, were never required to withstand a jet crash. They were designed in the 1960s with no anticipation of the much bigger planes now filling our skies. There is nothing to indicate they could withstand the kind of impact or fire that hit the WTC towers.
It would not be necessary for terrorists to hijack another jet, since Osama bin Laden among others has more than enough money to buy his own.
Nor would they need to penetrate a containment. The impact and fire alone on or near a reactor could devastate pipes, pumps, cooling systems, electronic controls, human operators, off-site power and communications, and any number of additional vital pressure points capable of causing a melt-down.
Chernobyl did explode in 1986, and Michigan's Fermi I fast breeder almost did so in 1966. In 1979, Three Mile Island faced the possibility of a hydrogen explosion. But its lethal radiation, which killed people and animals nearby, vented through stacks that remained intact throughout the disaster.
Arizona's entire three-reactor Palo Verde complex was recently shut because a single worker had what may have been a pipe bomb in his car.
All these events highlight the vulnerability of any society dependent on nuke power for its energy. A recent earthquake in Japan forced shut seven reactors in a single moment. The US now has 104 such plants generating some 20% of our electricity. Many are also near earthquake faults. All are vulnerable individually and as a fleet to a terror shut-down without a moment's notice.
Domenici's loan plan has been denounced by nearly every major environmental group in the United States, along with taxpayer groups and free marketeers such as the Cato Institute and Forbes Magazine, plus Congressional conservatives concerned about the budget process.
Domenici and his neo-con cohorts have been clear in their willingness to shred the Constitution in the name of national security.
But they would simultaneously force us to underwrite easily ignitable engines of radioactive mass destruction pre-deployed on our own soil.
The decision on whether these radioactive loan guarantees will be in the Energy Bill is being made as you read this. Call the Congressional leadership, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and tell them these bailouts for terror-target nukes must be stopped. NOW!!
People were killed by Three Mile Island & other nuclear disasters
Harvey Wasserman
People were killed by Three Mile Island & other nuclear disasters
November 18, 2007
One of the biggest lies ever told in American industrial history is that “no one died at Three Mile Island.”
In the frenzy to get public funding for still more nuclear reactors, some industry backers now say no one has ever been killed by the nuclear industry AT ALL.
These absurd statements reflect atomic energy's desperate need for federal loan guarantees, which have been slipped into the Energy Bill now before Congress. After fifty years of proven failure, no private sources will invest in this lethal, expensive technology.
Meanwhile billions are pouring into the booming business of green power, including wind, solar power and increased efficiency. These technologies are not only profitable and clean, they don't kill people.
And the reality is that people have, in fact, been killed by the fallout from atomic power, and not just at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
At the very birth of fission technology, Lewis Slotin, a top researcher on the Manhattan Project, was fatally irradiated in an early experiment. Patriotic workers were exposed to high radiation doses while building the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In the 1950s, a critical accident struck a reactor at Chalk River, Canada. Scores of American “jumpers” were run into the plant to do clean-up work and then run out. One was the future president Jimmy Carter, who joked about the incident in his autobiography “Why Not the Best.”
In 1961, three workers were killed at the SL-1 plant in Idaho. One was pinned to the ceiling of the containment dome by a fuel rod that shot out of the reactor core. The men's bodies were classified as high level radioactive waste, and were buried in lead casks.
On October 5, 1966, a critical blockage brought Michigan's Fermi I fast breeder reactor to the brink of disaster. Fermi's owners said the $100 million accident released no radiation. But for a month state authorities prepared to evacuate Detroit.
The entire history of atomic energy is defined by radiation releases that the industry has covered up. Today, nothing reactor owners say can be believed. At both Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, elaborate official studies done before the accidents “proved” that it was “impossible” for what then did happen to occur. The term "inherently safe" had been applied to reactors that proved very much otherwise. Today that same term is being used to describe the "new generation" of plants to be underwitten by these proposed guarantees.
In the late 1960s, Dr. John Gofman was asked to evaluate the killing power of so-called "normal" releases from America's fleet of atomic reactors.
Gofman was a towering figure. He was instrumental in developing the atomic bomb. As a medical doctor, his breakthrough discoveries in heart disease and LDL cholesterol are still in use.
Dr. Gofman was chief of health research at the Atomic Energy Commission. But he discovered that regular radiation emissions from America's nukes would kill 32,000 citizens per year, even without an accident or terror attack.
The industry demanded Gofman change his findings. When he refused, he was fired. He spent the rest of his life warning that Americans were being killed every day by the ever-growing fleet of US reactors.
In 1979, human error caused the melt-down at Three Mile Island Unit Two. The reactor's owners immediately denied there was any melting of fuel. This was a lie. Robotic cameras later showed that at least a third of the fuel had melted.
The owners said there was never a danger of a major catastrophe. That was a lie. The plant was very much at the brink of an apocalyptic radiation release.
The owners ridiculed those---among them Pennsylvania's Secretary of Health---who desperately warned that local citizens should be evacuated, especially to protect pregnant women and small children. The governor finally ordered just such an evacuation, but later fired his long-time friend at the Department of Health, who had advocated the evacuation, and who warned of damage from TMI's stealth radioactive fallout.
TMI's owners denied that its releases harmed anyone. But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has admitted to Congress that nobody knows how much radiation escaped or where it went.
Official statistics showed a huge jump in infant death rates in Harrisburg in the three months after the accident compared to the numbers for the previous two years. State statistics showing heightened cancer rates were quickly altered. The state's tumor registry was abolished. Evidence showing downwind health effects was suppressed.
But an investigative team from the Baltimore News-Herald uncovered a massive epidemic of death and disease among the area's farm and wild animals.
In early 1980, I reported from ground zero on a ghastly epidemic of human death and disease. Based on a horrifying series of house-to-house interviews, I found cancer, heart attacks, respiratory problems, skin lesions, cataracts, a metallic taste in the mouth, hair loss, birth defects and everything else you'd expect from a major radiation release was everywhere to be found.
With three other researchers, I spent two years investigating these and other parallel epidemics at nuclear facilities throughout the United States. Our findings were published in 1982 by Dell/Delta in a book called KILLING OUR OWN (www.ratical.org/radiation/KillingOurOwn/KOO.pdf) that showed a similar death toll throughout the nuclear fuel cycle---especially at uranium mines, mills and enrichment facilities---and at weapons production plants, waste storage pools and much more.
At TMI, 2400 central Pennsylvania families filed a class action lawsuit seeking justice. But the federal courts have never allowed their case to be heard.
Studies by Steven Wing of the University of North Carolina have confirmed the TMI death toll. Researcher Joe Mangano and others have used the government's own statistics to show a heightened cancer rate in the region. Parallel studies have correlated radioactive emissions with infant death rates, cancer rates and other health epidemics around other operating reactors.
But the industry's response is always the same. Anyone who shows that reactors kill people is automatically "discredited," even if their credentials, like those of Dr. Gofman, dwarf those of their attackers.
Even at an obvious catastrophe like Chernobyl, the deniers are out in force. The radiation releases at this unprecedented explosion far exceeded what was released at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
By all accounts, the plague that darkened central Pennsylvania after TMI was exponentially exceeded for thousands of downwind square miles in the Ukraine and other nearby nations of the former Soviet Union. The cancers, birth defects and other radioactive plagues have duplicated on a far larger scale what had already happened in the US in 1979.
Today, with billions in bailout dollars on the line, there is big money to be made in saying that atomic reactors have harmed no one.
But the truth is less convenient. Nuclear power kills people. From the Manhattan Project to TMI, from Chalk River to Chernobyl, even "normal" operations can be lethal.
Solar power, wind energy, bio-fuels, increased conservation---these sources are safe and clean. They don't create radioactive emissions or wastes, and will not be potential terror targets.
Nor do they need federal loan guarantees. Unlike atomic energy, green power is profitable for the entire community.
And unlike Three Mile Island, we will never have to evacuate wind farms or solar panels while their owners lie about what's really going down.
People were killed by Three Mile Island & other nuclear disasters
November 18, 2007
One of the biggest lies ever told in American industrial history is that “no one died at Three Mile Island.”
In the frenzy to get public funding for still more nuclear reactors, some industry backers now say no one has ever been killed by the nuclear industry AT ALL.
These absurd statements reflect atomic energy's desperate need for federal loan guarantees, which have been slipped into the Energy Bill now before Congress. After fifty years of proven failure, no private sources will invest in this lethal, expensive technology.
Meanwhile billions are pouring into the booming business of green power, including wind, solar power and increased efficiency. These technologies are not only profitable and clean, they don't kill people.
And the reality is that people have, in fact, been killed by the fallout from atomic power, and not just at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
At the very birth of fission technology, Lewis Slotin, a top researcher on the Manhattan Project, was fatally irradiated in an early experiment. Patriotic workers were exposed to high radiation doses while building the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In the 1950s, a critical accident struck a reactor at Chalk River, Canada. Scores of American “jumpers” were run into the plant to do clean-up work and then run out. One was the future president Jimmy Carter, who joked about the incident in his autobiography “Why Not the Best.”
In 1961, three workers were killed at the SL-1 plant in Idaho. One was pinned to the ceiling of the containment dome by a fuel rod that shot out of the reactor core. The men's bodies were classified as high level radioactive waste, and were buried in lead casks.
On October 5, 1966, a critical blockage brought Michigan's Fermi I fast breeder reactor to the brink of disaster. Fermi's owners said the $100 million accident released no radiation. But for a month state authorities prepared to evacuate Detroit.
The entire history of atomic energy is defined by radiation releases that the industry has covered up. Today, nothing reactor owners say can be believed. At both Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, elaborate official studies done before the accidents “proved” that it was “impossible” for what then did happen to occur. The term "inherently safe" had been applied to reactors that proved very much otherwise. Today that same term is being used to describe the "new generation" of plants to be underwitten by these proposed guarantees.
In the late 1960s, Dr. John Gofman was asked to evaluate the killing power of so-called "normal" releases from America's fleet of atomic reactors.
Gofman was a towering figure. He was instrumental in developing the atomic bomb. As a medical doctor, his breakthrough discoveries in heart disease and LDL cholesterol are still in use.
Dr. Gofman was chief of health research at the Atomic Energy Commission. But he discovered that regular radiation emissions from America's nukes would kill 32,000 citizens per year, even without an accident or terror attack.
The industry demanded Gofman change his findings. When he refused, he was fired. He spent the rest of his life warning that Americans were being killed every day by the ever-growing fleet of US reactors.
In 1979, human error caused the melt-down at Three Mile Island Unit Two. The reactor's owners immediately denied there was any melting of fuel. This was a lie. Robotic cameras later showed that at least a third of the fuel had melted.
The owners said there was never a danger of a major catastrophe. That was a lie. The plant was very much at the brink of an apocalyptic radiation release.
The owners ridiculed those---among them Pennsylvania's Secretary of Health---who desperately warned that local citizens should be evacuated, especially to protect pregnant women and small children. The governor finally ordered just such an evacuation, but later fired his long-time friend at the Department of Health, who had advocated the evacuation, and who warned of damage from TMI's stealth radioactive fallout.
TMI's owners denied that its releases harmed anyone. But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has admitted to Congress that nobody knows how much radiation escaped or where it went.
Official statistics showed a huge jump in infant death rates in Harrisburg in the three months after the accident compared to the numbers for the previous two years. State statistics showing heightened cancer rates were quickly altered. The state's tumor registry was abolished. Evidence showing downwind health effects was suppressed.
But an investigative team from the Baltimore News-Herald uncovered a massive epidemic of death and disease among the area's farm and wild animals.
In early 1980, I reported from ground zero on a ghastly epidemic of human death and disease. Based on a horrifying series of house-to-house interviews, I found cancer, heart attacks, respiratory problems, skin lesions, cataracts, a metallic taste in the mouth, hair loss, birth defects and everything else you'd expect from a major radiation release was everywhere to be found.
With three other researchers, I spent two years investigating these and other parallel epidemics at nuclear facilities throughout the United States. Our findings were published in 1982 by Dell/Delta in a book called KILLING OUR OWN (www.ratical.org/radiation/KillingOurOwn/KOO.pdf) that showed a similar death toll throughout the nuclear fuel cycle---especially at uranium mines, mills and enrichment facilities---and at weapons production plants, waste storage pools and much more.
At TMI, 2400 central Pennsylvania families filed a class action lawsuit seeking justice. But the federal courts have never allowed their case to be heard.
Studies by Steven Wing of the University of North Carolina have confirmed the TMI death toll. Researcher Joe Mangano and others have used the government's own statistics to show a heightened cancer rate in the region. Parallel studies have correlated radioactive emissions with infant death rates, cancer rates and other health epidemics around other operating reactors.
But the industry's response is always the same. Anyone who shows that reactors kill people is automatically "discredited," even if their credentials, like those of Dr. Gofman, dwarf those of their attackers.
Even at an obvious catastrophe like Chernobyl, the deniers are out in force. The radiation releases at this unprecedented explosion far exceeded what was released at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
By all accounts, the plague that darkened central Pennsylvania after TMI was exponentially exceeded for thousands of downwind square miles in the Ukraine and other nearby nations of the former Soviet Union. The cancers, birth defects and other radioactive plagues have duplicated on a far larger scale what had already happened in the US in 1979.
Today, with billions in bailout dollars on the line, there is big money to be made in saying that atomic reactors have harmed no one.
But the truth is less convenient. Nuclear power kills people. From the Manhattan Project to TMI, from Chalk River to Chernobyl, even "normal" operations can be lethal.
Solar power, wind energy, bio-fuels, increased conservation---these sources are safe and clean. They don't create radioactive emissions or wastes, and will not be potential terror targets.
Nor do they need federal loan guarantees. Unlike atomic energy, green power is profitable for the entire community.
And unlike Three Mile Island, we will never have to evacuate wind farms or solar panels while their owners lie about what's really going down.
Nukes are back & so are e
Harvey Wasserman
Nukes are back and so are we
October 18, 2007
The nuclear power industry is back to where it always goes when it wants to build new reactors---the taxpayer trough.
And those of us who've been fighting them for decades are doing it again, now with help from the musicians' community, and a petition drive (at nukefree.org) aimed at stripping the radioactive subsidies from the national Energy Bill now before Congress.
Time after time over the past half-century, the atomic energy industry has gone to the government to demand massive amounts of money. The most recent public gouging came during the Great Deregulation Scam of 1999-2001. As Enron and its cronies contrived phony energy shortages and nearly bankrupted California, the atomic pushers went before America's state legislatures and asked for a massive bailout. They complained that with the coming age of deregulation (about two dozen states deregulated their electricity businesses) nuclear power plants were too expensive, inefficient and obsolete to compete in the coming green age.
So they demanded---and got---more than $100 billion in “stranded cost” payouts. These were the ultimate admission that atomic power simply could not make it in the marketplace. As deregulation failed throughout the US, what Forbes Magazine labeled “the largest managerial disaster in business history” stayed alive as America's ultimate welfare cheat.
Now the industry is back for more. After complaining about its old reactors' lousy economic performance, it now argues that the new ones will be magically transformed, and that billions more should be spent building them.
The first of those is already under construction in Finland. Ground was broken just two years ago, but the project is already two years behind schedule and $2 billion over budget.
So a whole new cover story has been invented: nuke power will “solve global warming.”
The assertion is absurd. All reactors emit radioactive carbon, along with numerous other “hot” isotopes. Massive quantities of greenhouse gasses are spewed into the atmosphere during the mining, milling and enrichment of uranium fuel. The reactors themselves emit huge plumes of heat directly into the air and water.
Nukes perform poorly in hot weather, which is precisely when they're supposed to help with global warming. Reactors in both France and the US have been forced to shut because the rivers into which they dump their waste heat have exceeded 90 degrees Farenheit.
Still more greenhouse gasses have been created with the partial construction of the proposed Yucca Mountain waste dump in Nevada, which has already cost the public $11 billion. If it ever opens---it's not yet licensed, and many say it will never be---Yucca could cost $60 to $100 billion. Even then it couldn't handle the waste from the new reactors the industry wants to build---or even all the spent fuel from the old ones now in existence.
Yet the industry wants Congress to give the industry essentially a blank check for loan guarantees to the tune of $25 billion in 2008 and $25 billion more in 2009, with countless billions more still to come down the road.
Why? Because Wall Street just isn't buying. After fifty years, nuke power is the most expensive technological failure in US history. It can't get investors, liability insurance or a solution to its waste problem. It can't compete with new conservation, efficiency or renewables like wind power.
Since 9/11/2001, it's also become obvious that atomic reactors cannot be defended from terror attack. They are pre-deployed weapons of radioactive mass destruction.
It's thus no accident that the push for new nukes with federal loan guarantees also comes with a demand for extended federal liability insurance. Who would invest in a reactor that might irradiate thousands of square miles and kill hundreds of thousands of human beings? The answer is simple: after fifty years, without federal guarantees---nobody!
Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were tragic warnings, as was the fact that the first jet to hit the World Trade Center flew directily over the Indian Point reactor complex, 45 miles north. Had those reactors been hit, the death toll could have been in the tens of thousands by now. The property damage from irradiating southern New York, Long Island, and all of downwind New Jersey and New England would be beyond calculation.
Despite all that, Pete Domenici, the Senator from Nuke Power, slipped these loan guarantees into the 2007 Energy Bill that could become one of the most expensive and lethal rip-offs in US history.
Meanwhile, the renewable energy industry is soaring to new heights of power and profitability. Wind farming has boomed to a $10-15 billion per year industry, with worldwide growth rates surpassing 25%. Breakthroughs in silicon solar cells are taking rooftop photovoltaics (PV) to vastly increased levels of efficiency and profitability. Bio-fuels, tidal, geo- and ocean thermal, wave energy and many more rapidly developing forms of green power are also booming ahead.
In 1979, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne and Graham Nash, through Musicians United for Safe Energy, helped organize five nights of No Nukes concerts at Madison Square Garden. The accompanying rally at Battery Park City drew 200,000 people.
All of it was part of a successful grassroots campaign to stop the nuke industry. In 1974 Richard Nixon predicted there would be 1000 reactors in the US by the year 2000. But in the year 2000, there were just 103.
That's still 103 too many. Browne, Nash and Raitt are now working to help stop this latest bailout. In singing Stephen Stills's classic “For What It's Worth,” they joined Ben Harper and Keb Mo for a video that's linked through the www.nukefree.org web site, where a petition is being circulated and signed.
On October 23 they'll present the first round of petitions to Congress. In demanding the nuke subsidies be removed from an Energy Bill that contains many positive green features, they'll be joined by their fellow musician John Hall (D-NY), now a US Representative committed to shutting Indian Point.
They'll also be working with one of the most successful non-violent grassroots campaigns in US history. Should they stop this latest atomic assault on the public treasury, the door could finally open for a truly green-powered future.
Nukes are back and so are we
October 18, 2007
The nuclear power industry is back to where it always goes when it wants to build new reactors---the taxpayer trough.
And those of us who've been fighting them for decades are doing it again, now with help from the musicians' community, and a petition drive (at nukefree.org) aimed at stripping the radioactive subsidies from the national Energy Bill now before Congress.
Time after time over the past half-century, the atomic energy industry has gone to the government to demand massive amounts of money. The most recent public gouging came during the Great Deregulation Scam of 1999-2001. As Enron and its cronies contrived phony energy shortages and nearly bankrupted California, the atomic pushers went before America's state legislatures and asked for a massive bailout. They complained that with the coming age of deregulation (about two dozen states deregulated their electricity businesses) nuclear power plants were too expensive, inefficient and obsolete to compete in the coming green age.
So they demanded---and got---more than $100 billion in “stranded cost” payouts. These were the ultimate admission that atomic power simply could not make it in the marketplace. As deregulation failed throughout the US, what Forbes Magazine labeled “the largest managerial disaster in business history” stayed alive as America's ultimate welfare cheat.
Now the industry is back for more. After complaining about its old reactors' lousy economic performance, it now argues that the new ones will be magically transformed, and that billions more should be spent building them.
The first of those is already under construction in Finland. Ground was broken just two years ago, but the project is already two years behind schedule and $2 billion over budget.
So a whole new cover story has been invented: nuke power will “solve global warming.”
The assertion is absurd. All reactors emit radioactive carbon, along with numerous other “hot” isotopes. Massive quantities of greenhouse gasses are spewed into the atmosphere during the mining, milling and enrichment of uranium fuel. The reactors themselves emit huge plumes of heat directly into the air and water.
Nukes perform poorly in hot weather, which is precisely when they're supposed to help with global warming. Reactors in both France and the US have been forced to shut because the rivers into which they dump their waste heat have exceeded 90 degrees Farenheit.
Still more greenhouse gasses have been created with the partial construction of the proposed Yucca Mountain waste dump in Nevada, which has already cost the public $11 billion. If it ever opens---it's not yet licensed, and many say it will never be---Yucca could cost $60 to $100 billion. Even then it couldn't handle the waste from the new reactors the industry wants to build---or even all the spent fuel from the old ones now in existence.
Yet the industry wants Congress to give the industry essentially a blank check for loan guarantees to the tune of $25 billion in 2008 and $25 billion more in 2009, with countless billions more still to come down the road.
Why? Because Wall Street just isn't buying. After fifty years, nuke power is the most expensive technological failure in US history. It can't get investors, liability insurance or a solution to its waste problem. It can't compete with new conservation, efficiency or renewables like wind power.
Since 9/11/2001, it's also become obvious that atomic reactors cannot be defended from terror attack. They are pre-deployed weapons of radioactive mass destruction.
It's thus no accident that the push for new nukes with federal loan guarantees also comes with a demand for extended federal liability insurance. Who would invest in a reactor that might irradiate thousands of square miles and kill hundreds of thousands of human beings? The answer is simple: after fifty years, without federal guarantees---nobody!
Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were tragic warnings, as was the fact that the first jet to hit the World Trade Center flew directily over the Indian Point reactor complex, 45 miles north. Had those reactors been hit, the death toll could have been in the tens of thousands by now. The property damage from irradiating southern New York, Long Island, and all of downwind New Jersey and New England would be beyond calculation.
Despite all that, Pete Domenici, the Senator from Nuke Power, slipped these loan guarantees into the 2007 Energy Bill that could become one of the most expensive and lethal rip-offs in US history.
Meanwhile, the renewable energy industry is soaring to new heights of power and profitability. Wind farming has boomed to a $10-15 billion per year industry, with worldwide growth rates surpassing 25%. Breakthroughs in silicon solar cells are taking rooftop photovoltaics (PV) to vastly increased levels of efficiency and profitability. Bio-fuels, tidal, geo- and ocean thermal, wave energy and many more rapidly developing forms of green power are also booming ahead.
In 1979, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne and Graham Nash, through Musicians United for Safe Energy, helped organize five nights of No Nukes concerts at Madison Square Garden. The accompanying rally at Battery Park City drew 200,000 people.
All of it was part of a successful grassroots campaign to stop the nuke industry. In 1974 Richard Nixon predicted there would be 1000 reactors in the US by the year 2000. But in the year 2000, there were just 103.
That's still 103 too many. Browne, Nash and Raitt are now working to help stop this latest bailout. In singing Stephen Stills's classic “For What It's Worth,” they joined Ben Harper and Keb Mo for a video that's linked through the www.nukefree.org web site, where a petition is being circulated and signed.
On October 23 they'll present the first round of petitions to Congress. In demanding the nuke subsidies be removed from an Energy Bill that contains many positive green features, they'll be joined by their fellow musician John Hall (D-NY), now a US Representative committed to shutting Indian Point.
They'll also be working with one of the most successful non-violent grassroots campaigns in US history. Should they stop this latest atomic assault on the public treasury, the door could finally open for a truly green-powered future.
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