Reply #47: more

[buddhamama]

this is press release so i'm posting it in its entirety

For Immediate Release

May 1, 2003 202-328-0002


BUSH-CHENEY-DOMENICI ENERGY BILL WOULD GIVE BILLIONS IN TAXPAYER MONEY TO BUILD DANGEROUS, UNNECCESSARY NEW ATOMIC POWER REACTORS


BILL APPROVED BY SENATE ENERGY COMMITTEE WOULD SET NATION ON WRONG ENERGY COURSE FOR DECADES


The Senate Energy Committee today approved a comprehensive energy bill that would provide huge new taxpayer subsidies to the nuclear power industry, including direct taxpayer funding of new commercial nuclear reactors—a path that wasn’t chosen even during the gung-ho days of nuclear development in the 1970s.

“The Senate Energy Committee is facing backwards,” said Michael Mariotte, executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS). “They are getting ready to throw the public’s hard-earned cash at the most dangerous and most obsolete technology of the 20th century. Instead of attempting to secure a future that will meet our needs for both energy and a clean environment, committee chairman Pete Domenici (R-NM) has fashioned a bill that would do little but enrich a few nuclear utilities and reactor manufacturers with the public’s money.

“The Senate Energy Committee would have us believe that spending tens of billions of dollars to help utilities build 6-10 new reactors would be in any way meaningful for our nation’s energy future. Spending that kind of money might be useful—if it were for wind power and other renewable technologies that can provide electricity without producing lethal radioactive waste, threatening communities with atomic meltdown and providing tempting targets for terrorists, as the FBI warned about just yesterday,” Mariotte said.

NIRS noted that while three nuclear utilities are in the process of applying for “early site permits” to build new reactors, that program is being paid for by taxpayer money too. “The utilities aren’t willing to put up their own money to build new reactors,” pointed out Cindy Folkers of NIRS’ Energy Future Project. “It’s only when taxpayer funds are provided that the utilities show interest in new reactors.”


Among other provisions, the energy bill would:

Give billions to cover 50% of the cost of up to 8,400 Megawatts, or 6-10 new reactors, of new nuclear power plants. Since 1947, government subsidies to nuclear reactors have reached $145 billion while wind and solar have received about $5 billion.

Would renew the Price-Anderson Act indefinitely. This law caps industry liability at about $9 billion when estimates of the actual cost of a catastrophic accident reach as high as $600 billion. The difference would likely be covered by taxpayer money.

Bush’s Nuclear Hydrogen Initiative would receive $1 billion to research hydrogen fuel production from nuclear reactors, which could include construction of a new reactor in Idaho. This ignores the fact that hydrogen fuel for cars can be generated much faster, cheaper and more cleanly by using other methods, including sustainable energy.

Approximately $610 million would fund the Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative which would allow reprocessing research and could fund the Mixed Oxide fuel program (MOX). Reprocessing was banned by the Carter Administration because of health and environmental concerns. The dangerous MOX Program would use plutonium from nuclear weapons as fuel for commercial reactors that were not designed for it.


“It is clear from past precedent that nuclear power cannot survive in a free market. At a time when our country must have true energy independence, the Senate has decided to give yet more taxpayer money to nuclear power reactors, an expensive, dangerous source of energy and a terrorist target.” said Folkers.



“The once touted ‘too cheap to meter’ nuclear industry now boasts itself invulnerable to terrorism,” said Paul Gunter, Director of the NIRS Reactor Watchdog Project. “But building more nuclear power plants actually would mean more pre-deployed terrorist targets in an increasingly insecure world,” he concluded.



“We hope that the American people will learn what this energy bill really is about,” said Mariotte. “And it’s not about energy. It’s about ensuring that our nation’s energy resources stay in the hands of the few—especially the centralized nuclear power utilities and manufacturers--instead of being distributed where they would do the most good: among the renewable energy and energy efficiency communities. In the long run, the people who wrote and support this energy bill will make the executives of Enron look like paragons of social responsibility.”

http://www.nirs.org/energybillpressrlease5103.htm