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President Obama's Nuclear Reversal
President Obama announced Tuesday that the Department of Energy is awarding $8 billion in taxpayer dollars towards loan guarantees to build the United States' first nuclear reactors in nearly thirty years. This move may be politically expedient, but for the public, it's a raw deal.
As a candidate, Obama expressed openness to new reactors, but said, "Before an expansion... is considered, key issues must be addressed including: security of nuclear fuel and waste, waste storage, and proliferation."
President Obama should heed candidate Obama's advice. These issues have not been addressed. If anything, the challenges facing the nuclear industry have grown worse.
With Yucca Mountain a no-go, there is still nowhere to put the radioactive waste piling up across the country. New reactors would only add to the waste problem and could increase pressure to reprocess spent fuel, a dangerous and costly scheme that would increase waste streams.
There's also still no way to ensure reactors' safety. Reports of Homer Simpson-like lapses by staff at reactor sites abound, and the FBI has called nuclear facilities "target rich" environments for terrorists. More reactors also mean more weapons-usable material, increasing the risk of proliferation.
The fiscal implications of President Obama's position are alarming. For decades, the industry has depended on taxpayer support. Investing in emerging technologies that can eventually thrive on their own makes sense, but the nuclear industry doesn't fit the bill. After more than 50 years as one of the biggest recipients of federal subsidies, the industry should sink or swim on its own.
Many on Capitol Hill complain that within the climate debate, the nuclear industry isn't getting its fair share of attention. Some, like Senators Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Jim Webb (D-Va.) propose to remedy this with a new, hundred-billion dollar subsidy plan.
But the premise that the industry has been given short-shrift is false. Nuclear reactors have received more preferential treatment than any other source of electricity. Even today, the industry is slated to receive more federal loan guarantees, a host of tax credits for nuclear power production, and insurance subsidized through the Price Anderson Act, which was renewed for 20 years in 2005.
Investments in nuclear plants are deemed too risky by private industry (even before the financial crisis, Wall Street banks refused to grant loans for reactors, which tells you something), so the nuclear industry relies on loan guarantees from the federal government for new construction. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the risk of default on such loans is "very high -- well above 50 percent." President Obama's new budget dedicates more than $50 billion to nuclear loan guarantees. Taxpayers could be left on the hook for a massive bailout.
The firms angling to profit from new reactors, including Westinghouse, General Electric and Exelon, as well as electric utilities, are some of the wealthiest corporations in the country. Especially now, with deficits running so high, they should not become the beneficiaries of new government largess.
Nuclear industry lobbyists love to point to France to argue that having lots of reactors can work. But France has not solved its waste problem, and it faces a host of challenges from its nuclear facilities, such as a radioactive leak that recently forced the closure of two rivers. In the U.S., three times the legally safe amount of radioactive tritium, a cancer-causing carcinogen, has been detected in the groundwater along the Connecticut River in Vermont, leaking from pipes in the Vermont Yankee reactor. This news comes on the heels of the admission by the owner of the reactor that it willfully deceived lawmakers about its safety. And when it comes to the laudable goal of reducing carbon emissions, there are speedier and more affordable options. Truly clean options, including efficiency and wind and solar power, should be the focus.
In his remarks in Maryland on Tuesday, President Obama appealed to an international "race to... command growing energy industries" and invest in new technologies. But nuclear power is as old as the hula hoop, and is just as technologically advanced. President Obama should ditch this failed industry and take the lead on investing in truly clean, safe, and financially viable solutions to our energy crisis, rejecting the industry's rhetoric and abandoning this false solution.
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22 Comments so far
Show AllArticle: "President Obama should ditch this failed industry and take the lead on investing in truly clean, safe, and financially viable solutions to our energy crisis, rejecting the industry's rhetoric and abandoning this false solution."
It's always about pushing this corportist windbag Nobel Prize-winning war criminal toward progressive and compassionate policy. He's not going anywhere. He is where he's always been - in a fat cat's back pocket.
The man just moved from the field to the big house.
War is peace
Slavery is freedom
Ignorance is strength
Ohbombma is not on "our team" ...'cuz...(sing along!)...
Problems are profitable.
Solutions that actually work are illegal.
Drugs don't make seeds, herbs do.
Freedom to farm "every herb bearing seed"
is the first test of religious freedom.
Cannabis isn't illegal,
it's essential.
The ONLY common seed with three ESSENTIAL fatty acids,
is also the BEST available source of organic vegetable protein on Earth,
and the ONLY crop that produces a complete food
AND several sustainable biofuels from the SAME HARVEST!
While sequestering carbon, producing atmospheric monoterpenes and oxygen in abundance and
is the most potentially abundant, globally distributed, organic, useful and nutritious agricultural resource on this planet.
(Stop singing!)
"Essential civilian demand" is the most cost and time efficient strategy for reclaiming our right to grow hemp. If "We the People" don't act on this information in a timely way, then we deserve to lose our hard-won civil liberties and achieve extinction.
Wake Up America. Wake Up Common Dreams.
Report on the unique and essential value of Cannabis or just continue to report on what's wrong, without investigating a proven, ancient solution to the equation of survival.
LOL Obama promising billions of dollars to a bunch of development corporations isn't a good deal for the general population? Who would have thought?
Hemp agriculture makes nuclear energy obsolete. Hemp nutrition makes GMO soy obsolete. Hemp industry is bio-therapeutic, actually healing to the planetary systems we depend upon for survival.
If you don't believe this, then you are under-informed about the subject. EDUCATE YOURSELF! for the benefit of everyone.
Google global broiling to understand more about the threats we face from increasing UV-B radiation and how hemp agriculture is a proportionate, available response to climate change.
Got me, Bill. I'd like to hear this one too.
No objections on the solar, though, I take it? (though surely we can be more efficient than throwing them all out in one place)).
100 sq. miles of solar panels (10 miles x 10 miles) in the Utah desert could power the entire country. 20 miles x 20 miles (400 sq. miles) means we could leave all our lights on even more...
As a sop to the nuclear industry, Obama should have invited the players into a government-led consortium with funding to do the primary scientific research on fusion, fast breeder reactors (so-called Generation IV), and waste disposal. Then we just might have been in a position to get some evidence-based indications as to the efficacy of nuclear power, and some basis for policy going forward.
As if forty years of "failure to launch" isn't evidence enough.
Nuclear safety is another issue altogether, as it is purely faith-based. That is to say, the only question worth asking is whether or not we have faith in the reactor operators (be they private corporations or public authorities) to maintain safety standards. Any believers?
Instead, we're wasting precious time and money on another corporate bailout. Our leaders just don't get it: our present cast of corporate energy players have failed to serve the needs of the people of this country and the world at large, and it's time to let them fail so that a sustainable economic model can take hold.
Wish he could put of his deal with the Nuclear Gang until after the next election in 2010. We will have a chance to throw out all incumbents anyways. He still will not get it.
Unfortunately, this is one policy initiative that should breeze through the Senate - just like the recent 68-30 vote requiring Amtrak to allow passengers to stow firearms in their checked luggage or face a cut off of federal funds. Funny how our otherwise moribund Senate can speed into action when it comes to bad ideas.
Yet another lie.
They just keep coming...............
Obama has plenty of political cover having supporters in Congress including supposedly "liberal" Senators, who use the excuse of trying to gain Republican support (oxymoron) for the climate bill.
Since Nuclear Energy has been (and still is) seen (mistakenly) by the public at large as a "two-fer", they shouldn't have any problem getting re-elected (the "only" thing that matters to a politician) based on this stance.
The tragedy is twofold--that this will be yet another "nail-in-the-coffin" of the moribund US "economy" based on unsustainable energy use. The billions that are not consumed during construction of the reactors, buildings, mines, and reprocessing, will be consumed as fancy vacations, yachts, SUVs, private jets, from the profits derived.
The "real" answers to both energy and climate problems will languish for lack of funding.
One final question--as China and India see us pursuing nuclear power as the "essential" solution to the problem, wouldn't they also be in the hunt competing for the limited supply of the world's uranium (reprocessing has been ruled out here)?
Either that, or they will make smarter decisions--either way, the US Economy is "toast".
No Nukes!
Keep it simple. Problem is, the people have forgotten.
Or rather the news media is providing no background on
this story.
Chernobyl?
3 Mile Island?
If the lesson is "design conservatively," the nuclear industry has clearly not learned the lesson.
Current proposals are still light water reactors and so will still rust and leak, just like previous generations of plants. They cost a fortune to build and to run and to shut down, so massive motivation for continued rampant abuse is designed in.
I agree literally that "Undertrained operators is a really bad idea," and in most cases I would not qualify most personnel in the higher echelons as undertrained. However, I must insist on two serious objections
- First, there is a tremendous and apparently quite international chauvinism in the industry, and, as nearly as I can tell, throughout the industry. Of course American power execs insist that Chernobyl "cannot happen here" because of the containment dome and although containment domes break. They also insist that American personnel are better than were personnel in the corrupt Soviet system.
I will assume that no one here believes that this is due to some inherent racial superiority, but to some superiority of the American system. Frankly, I see no reason to believe that. While American engineers tell me that the repressive Soviets cared nothing for their people and that the profit motive somehow keeps them honest, French engineers and physicists claim that their socialized, public system is superior because the plant owners do not have the motives to put the population through huge risks as do the private American owners.
At the Sorbonne, they attribute my objections to my bad experiences with "les cowboys sauvages." Stateside, I have been tainted by my associations with funny people who barely even speak English.
Yet the accidents continue on both sides of the Atlantic. And -- secondly -- using undertrained and undersupported personnel is designed into all light water systems currently in use. None of the repair or cleaning to be done on highly radioactive internals can be done repeatedly by the same personnel.
This work is done by transient labor subcontracted by corporate contractors, both to protect the large power companies from lawsuit and just to find people. Even those who are habitually sober are little trained and little motivated: they cannot keep their jobs anyway because they exceed their lifetime radiation limits in a very short time -- for some jobs, as little as 45 minutes.
I do acknowledge that these are not the people you refer to as "operators" and that the work they do depends less critically on training. But they still operate on and with the highly radioactive internals of the plant. They go where trained personnel know better than to go.
That sticks with me:
They go where trained personnel know better than to go . . . .
They go where trained personnel know better than to go. . . .
They go where trained personnel know better than to go. . . .
Billy, the whole thing is a bad idea.
....what news media?!?!?
Just another way the man Is NUKING FUTS!
"Reversal"? Rubbish! People who make that specious argument were not listening very well during the campaign for Obama repeatedly stated the need to turn to nuclear energy to mitigate our oil dependency. You just tuned out what you did not want to hear. Obama on the issues:
"Nuclear power ok, as one component of energy mix." (Oct 2008)
FactCheck: Reluctant on nuclear power in past; now favors it. (Oct 2008)
GovWatch: Supports nuclear power if it’s clean & safe. (Jun 2008)
GovWatch: Opposes Yucca Mountain for nuclear waste storage. (Jun 2008)
Nuclear power ok if we safeguard against waste & terrorism. (Sep 2007)
Explore nuclear power as part of alternative energy mix. (Jul 2007)
I could go on but you get my point. The complainers never called him out and there. Don't give us this "reversal " stuff.
Prior to the proliferation of nuclear energy, Obama stated this was to be contingent upon appropriate means of clean up/where to safely store waste before going forward.
So your hero is going ahead in proliferating nuclear power with having these issues resolved.
Going forward in a GREEN direction would be something to celebrate and defend--not this. Perhaps if Bush wanted to proliferate nuclear energy/weapons--you'd be happy with that? Yeah, I just bet you would be.
Apologies, apologies..................
Oh Bummer is the former Senator from Excellon Illinois.
The US's premier operator of nuclear generated electricity.
So what's the question?
Insanity
And that's all I have to say about that.