Is the "Nuclear Renaissance" Dead Yet?
by Harvey Wasserman
Wasserman is senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service.
September 13, 2010
America's much hyped "reactor renaissance" is facing a quadruple bypass. In actual new construction, proposed projects and overseas sales, soaring costs are killing new nukes. And the old ones are leaking like Dark Age relics teetering on the brink of disaster.
As renewables plummet in cost, and private financing stays nil, the nuclear industry is desperate to gouge billions from Congress for loan guarantees to build new reactors. Thus far, citizen activism has stopped them. But the industry is pouring all it has into this fall's short session, yet again demanding massive new subsides to stay on life support.
American reactor component makers are angry with India for passing a new law requiring the industry to assume substantial liability for a catastrophe they might cause. The horrifying aftermath of Bhopal, where Union Carbide killed thousands of local citizens with a lethal gas emission for which they have not been held fully accountable, still weighs heavily in India. But the atomic industry will not tread where it's held liable for the true costs of its potential disasters. In the US, liability is capped at around $11 billion, even though the financial damage from a full-scale catastrophe could easily soar into the trillions. Minimum estimates from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, which occurred in a remote, impoverished area, have exceeded $500 billion. By recent estimates the death toll is 985,000 and still counting. On behalf of US corporations, the Obama Administration is demanding the Indian liability requirements be lifted. Especially in the wake of BP's Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, it is a stunning admission that even after 50 years, reactor technology cannot be held accountable for its technical vulnerabilities, here or abroad.
America's aging fleet of first generation reactors is leaking profusely. Indian Point, north of Manhattan, has suffered seven unplanned shut-downs in two years. In recent months serious emissions of tritium and other radioactive substances into the air and water have been found at Vermont Yankee, Indian Point, New Jersey's Oyster Creek and many more. Ohio's infamous Davis-Besse, where boric acid ate virtually all the way through a reactor pressure vessel, has sprung some two dozen leaks which cannot be explained by its owner, First Energy. In Vermont, leaks from pipes the operators said did not exist have seeped contaminated water into the Connecticut River. As reactor owners petition to extend operating licenses for decades to come, the rickety, embrittled old plants become increasingly dangerous.
Read the full article at:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/09/13-2
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