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Nukes are Back and So are We
by Harvey Wasserman
 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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