[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The McCain Plan

[Bill Totten]

Homer Simpson without the Donut

by Greg Palast

www.gregpalast.com (August 06 2008)


I'm guessing it was excessive exposure to either radiation or George
Bush, but Senator John McCain's comments from inside a nuclear power
plant in Michigan are so cracked-brained that I fear some loose gamma
rays are doing to McCain's gray matter what they did to Homer Simpson's.

On Tuesday, the presumptive Republican candidate descended into the
colon of a nuke to declare we need to build 45 new nuclear plants - that
this is the way out of our energy crisis. Nuclear power, declared the
senator, is a "safe, efficient [and] inexpensive" alternative to oil.

Really? We can argue all day about whether nuclear plants are safe (they
aren't - period). But there can be no argument whatsoever that these
giant radioactive tea-kettles are breathtakingly expensive.

Nuclear plants are cheap until you actually try to build one. Not one of
the last 49 nuclear plants cost less than $2 billion apiece. I'm looking
down the road at the remainders of the Shoreham nuclear plant which took
nearly twenty years to build at a cost of $8 billion - or close to
$7,000 per customer it was supposed to supply. When I say "supposed to",
it was closed for safety reasons after operating just one single day.

We're told that the new generation of plants will be different. Just
like an alcoholic child-beater, the nuclear plant builders promise us
that, "This time it will be different". Sure. And McCain believes them.

I don't. Maybe that's because I headed the government racketeering
investigation of the Shoreham nuclear plant's builders. Stone & Webster
Engineering and its partner paid hundreds of millions of dollars to
settle the civil racketeering claim over the evidence we found of fraud
and perjury. Now Stone & Webster (a division of Shaw Group Inc) will
cash in big-time under Plan McCain.

The other big builder which will hit the jackpot under the McCain scheme
is KBR, the one-time subsidiary of Halliburton, whose best known project
is the rebuilding of Iraq. (Halliburton dumped KBR last year. Can't
blame them.) KBR has built many nukes - not one within a mile of its
promised cost.

But that doesn't bother McCain. So who is McCain getting his energy
advice from? I'm looking at a photo of the perplexed senator inside the
control room, looking like Homer without a donut, getting a lecture on
the wonders of nuclear energy from a power company CEO, one Tony Early.
Early is the former President of LILCO, the very corporation the Feds
and State of New York charged with civil racketeering. (We did not name
Early as a co-conspirator. When the government got him on the witness
stand, it was clear the guy was too clueless to recognize he was in the
midst of a billion-dollar swindle. McCain's got quite some team.)

Now, you Obamaniacs might not want to read this next paragraph:

While McCain is pushing nuclear power, a Senator from Illinois who shall
remain nameless (skinny, just gave up smokes), was already embracing
radiation as the solution to pollution. This Senator voted for George
Bush's energy bill, a law which contained massive giveaways to nuclear
energy, legislation which diss'es and dismisses conservation. Indeed,
the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate has been derided as
the "Senator from Commonwealth Edison", the Chicago division of Exelon
Corp., the nation's largest operator of nuclear plants - and whose
executives were the money backbone to his early presidential campaign.

So, we've got both candidates hawking the nuclear snake oil. But there
is one difference between them. A big big BIG difference.

McCain's ready to spend a hundred billion dollars on nuclear power, no
questions asked. But Barack Obama puts a crucial condition on his
approval for building new nukes: an affordable method of disposing the
new plants' radioactive waste.

That's not small stuff. While The New York Times reporters following
McCain repeated his line about "inexpensive" nuclear power without
question, a buried wire story on the same day noted that the Energy
Department is putting the unfunded bill for disposing nuclear plant
waste at $96.2 billion - nearly a billion dollars per plant operating
today. And no one even knows exactly how to do it, or where. Obama has
the audacity to ask about the nuclear waste's cost. "Can we deal with
the expense?" he said on Meet the Press.

McCain's plan to spend endless billions on nuclear plants without a
waste disposal system in place is like building a massive hotel without
toilets. D'oh! I suppose you can always tell the guests to poop in
buckets until someone comes up with a plan for plumbing. But the stuff
piles up. And unlike the fecal droppings of tourists, nuclear waste will
stay hot and dangerous for a thousand generations.

So there you have our election in a nutshell. We have two candidates who
rise above their parties - only to agree on a ludicrous pro-nukes energy
plan.

But at least Senator Obama, when confronted with an economic question,
doesn't have to take off his shoes to add up the facts.

_____

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The Best
Democracy Money Can Buy (2002) and Armed Madhouse: Sordid Secrets and
Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild (2006).

http://www.gregpalast.com/the-mccain-plan-homer-simpson-without-the-donut/


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