Nuclear power is a dirty, expensive, unsafe power source that costs U.S. taxpayers millions of dollars each year. Advocating a new generation of nuclear power plants as a long-term energy solution leads our country in the wrong direction.

Since taking office, Vice President Dick Cheney has touted the industry's mantra regarding the "clean" advantages of nuclear power over fossil fuels, hoping to use the energy policy as a catalyst for nuclear renaissance. Contrary to claims by Cheney and the industry, however, nuclear power cannot be accurately characterized as clean or green.

Both the Better Business Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission have agreed that such claims are unsubstantiated. Nuclear reactors do not emit the traditional air pollutants produced by fossil-fuel powered electricity plants, but they do carry the potential for significant public health risks when it comes to addressing the storage of radioactive waste.

Nuclear reactors generate long-lived, highly radioactive wastes that need to be carefully isolated and stored. Some scientists conclude that it is virtually impossible to assure that fission-reactor wastes would not pose unacceptable risks to current and future generations.

Utilities have not found one single safe site for storage, or a secure method to transport radioactive waste. In the U.S., public acceptability considerations led Congress to choose the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada, although it wasn't the optimal technical solution.

Despite initial claims of "too cheap to meter," nuclear power in the United States has become too expensive to afford. The nuclear industry has received over the years, 60 percent of all federal energy research and development dollars. Yet customers of nuclear utilities still pay far higher prices than their conventionally supplied counterparts.

A 1993 Energy Information Agency study found the average bill from a nuclear utility was more than two dollars per kilowatt hour higher and nearly $17 per month than from a conventional utility.

Why the disparity despite the huge government handout? Because utilities have been unable to control the costs of constructions, retrofits, repairs, and maintenance, while storing waste pushed costs even higher.

One of the primary problems with nuclear power is its inability to perform without substantial federal and state subsidies. According to the Congressional Research Service, the nuclear industry has received more than $66 billion in taxpayer research and development subsidies since its inception.

Additional supports are granted in the form of a taxpayer-financed insurance policy known as the Price Anderson Act. At the state level, nuclear power plant operators have cost consumers higher-than-average electricity rates and have reaped billions of dollars in so-called "stranded costs" in states that have undergone deregulation of their electricity markets. Nuclear power has remained an energy option over the past decades largely due to these huge taxpayer subsidies.

In France, the nation that made the biggest investment in nuclear energy, the national utility, Electricite de France, is carrying a $30 billion debt, mostly because of its nuclear investments.

And while French nuclear advocates like to praise the nation's cheap domestic power prices, in reality, when compared to 10 other European Union nations, France ranks fifth in domestic power prices. In fact, since 1985, France's electricity prices have seen the smallest decrease in the EU. And while four new reactors are under construction there, none have been initiated since 1996.

Most other major industrialized nations have stopped construction of nuclear power plants altogether, and many are planning to shut down plants that are still working.

The U.S. nuclear industry shows signs of decline all around: Reactors are closing nationwide, and nuclear power plants are projected to lose market share of electricity gener- ation.

Worldwide, the U.S. Department of Energy projects that in the next 20 years global nuclear capacity will fall by half, and the Worldwatch Institute projects a sustained decline by 2002 at the latest.

The Bush-Cheney nuclear power strategy is headed in the wrong direction. Instead, the federal government should focus more on energy efficiency research and the development of clean, safe, renewable sources like wind, solar, biomass or geothermal.

According to a 1990 study by the Rocky Mountain Institute, every U.S. dollar invested in energy efficiency displaces seven times more global warming pollution than a dollar invested in nuclear power. Now that's a long-term energy policy!

Susan Sargent (email: ssargent@gwi.net) lives in Chelsea, Maine and is the Maine representative for the National Environmental Trust, a national non-profit, non-partisan advocacy group.

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