[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Worst Giveaway Yet

Thu May 21 02:49:48 MDT 2009

Another $50 Billion for Rust-Bucket Nukes?

by Harvey Wasserman, AlterNet

AlterNet (April 10 2009)

The nuke power industry is back at the public trough for the fourth time
in two years demanding $50 billion in loan guarantees to build new reactors.

Its rust-bucket poster child is now the ancient clunker at Oyster Creek,
whose visible New Jersey rust and advanced radioactive decay are A-OK
with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission ("NRC"), which just gave it a
twenty-year license extension. The industry's savior may be France,
whose taxpayer-funded EdF and Areva Corporations may be poised to build
their own reactors on US soil using French and American taxpayer money.

And President Obama's first big test on nuke power may be how he fills a
vacancy - and the chair - at the NRC.

The latest demand for a $50 billion taxpayer handout has been sleazed
into the Senate budget bill. It has already been kicked out of the
Stimulus Package, and George W Bush's Energy Bills of 2007 and 2008.
Bush did get $18.5 billion in guarantees into his 2005 Energy Bill, but
that is being being challenged.

This latest bailout incarnation has been widely tagged "nuclear pork"
even in the right-wing Washington Times, which says the Senate accepted
it "without debate, explanation or a recorded vote". The amendment came
from Senator Michael Crapo (Republican, Indiana) with support from
Budget Committee Chair Kent Conrad (Democrat, North Dakota).

Crapo says the guarantees are part of a program created in the 2005 Bush
Energy Bill is aimed at "clean energy" programs, not just "advanced"
nuclear power. But no Congressional experts take that disclaimer
seriously. No independent financiers will take an un-subsidized flier on
new reactors. Nuke operators can't get private insurance on a major
melt-down. With the proposed Yucca Mountain dump all but dead, the
industry - after fifty years - has no certified place to take its
high-level radioactive waste. Guarantees are also part of a bill
supported by Senator George Voinovich (Republican, Ohio) and Senator
Byron Dorgan (Democrat, North Dakota) who chairs the appropriations
subcommittee that oversees energy spending, and has been working with
Securing America's Future Energy (SAFE), a pro-nuke cabal of business
and retired military leaders.

Green energy groups such as Friends of the Earth, Nuclear Information &
Resource Service ("NIRS"), Beyond Nuclear, NukeFree.org, Greenpeace,
Physicians for Social Responsibility and others are gearing up for yet
another Congressional fight. If they win this time, they'll have to
fight it out again and yet again as the industry gloms onto new bills on
a "clean energy bank", global warming, reprocessing and more.

"The $50 billion in nuke loan guarantees proposed in February's economic
stimulus bill were taken out in House-Senate conference following a
national outpouring of opposition", says Michael Mariotte of NIRS. "With
a similar outpouring, we can defeat these again in the conference
committee that will meet after the Easter recess".

Mariotte says green energy groups are organizing a national write-in
campaign to begin next week, and a call-in effort for April 27, the day
after the anniversary of the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe. No one doubts
the industry will pour on one legislative scam after another in its
desperate attempt to get taxpayer money as it is being priced into
oblivion by rapid advances in renewables and efficiency.

Reports are also circulating that France's heavily subsidized reactor
pushers, EdF and Areva, may use newly purchased stakes in Constellation
and other US utilities to strongarm their way into the American
electricity market. Among other things they may use French taxpayer
money to build reactors on American soil. Their foreign ownership status
may insulate them from even the infamously lax NRC regulation.

The Atomic Energy Act prohibits "foreign ownership, control or
domination" of a US reactor project, but the industry will try to work
around that. As the over-priced, inefficient French fleet wobbles at
home without meaningful regulation, and with no solution to its waste
problems, the EdF/Areva reactor pushers apparently view the US as virgin
territory.

Indeed, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has just granted a
twenty-year license extension to America's oldest reactor. The Oyster
Creek plant opened in December 1969 with an expected design life of
forty years. It now has visible rust around its core and has been
constantly plagued by errant releases of hot water and lethal radiation.

Perched fifty miles east of Philadelphia and 75 miles south of New York
City, Oyster Creek could not be licensed at all by today's standards.
Its reactor containment was never required to withstand a jet crash and
is far flimsier than the lid that blew off Chernobyl Unit Four in the
Ukraine in 1986, releasing massive quantities of radiation into the
surrounding countryside. Because Oyster Creek's old core is laden with
far more residual radiation, a breach could blanket the densely
populated American northeast with an apocalyptic cloud of death and
destruction.

Owned by the Chicago-based Exelon Corporation, Oyster Creek has been
bitterly opposed by area residents and nuclear experts who fear its
vital internals are crumbling. The re-licensing process did not require
a test of metals in the core, which can become dangerously embrittled
after decades of exposure to super-hot water and intense radiation.

In 1991, Massachusetts' elderly Yankee Rowe was shut by lightening.
Congressional pressure then demanded an embrittlement inspection that
the reactor's owners would not do.

Parallel issues have been contested in bitter relicensing fights at
Minnesota's Monticello, Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island Unit One,
Vermont Yankee and Indian Point, 45 miles north of New York City. The
first terror jet to hit the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001 flew
directly over Indian Point, whose elderly containments could not
withstand an airplane's impact.

But the NRC's willingness to re-license the rickety, trouble-plagued
Oyster Creek signals a willingness to ignore a wide range of serious
health, safety and environmental concerns.

Thus pushers of the "Peaceful Atom" are pumping hard for taxpayer
handouts and against meaningful regulation, even for the oldest and most
decrepit reactors still pumping radiation into the American landscape.

Fittingly, there is now a vacancy on the five-member NRC that President
Obama could fill. He could also appoint a new chair. The number of
Commissioners over the past three decades who have been at all
responsive to legitimate safety and health concerns has been miniscule.
An independent-minded appointee would signal that the administration is
serious about the health, safety and environmental issues that cut to
the core of the "Peaceful Atom".

But whomever Obama appoints, it's painfully clear that the world's most
expensive failed technology is not going away without a long, hard fight.

http://www.alternet.org/story/136156/

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