Greenpeace

As Vermont seethes with radioactive contamination and the Democratic Party crumbles, Barack Obama has plunged into the atomic abyss. 

In the face of fierce green opposition and withering scorn from both liberal and conservative budget hawks, Obama has done what George W. Bush could not: pledge billions of taxpayer dollars for a relapse of the 20th Century’s most expensive technological failure. 

Obama has announced some $8.3 billion in loan guarantees for two new reactors planned for Georgia. Their Westinghouse AP-1000 designs have been rejected by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as being unable to withstand natural cataclysms like hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes. 

The Vogtle site was to originally host four reactors at a total cost of $600 million; it wound up with two at $9 billion. 

The Southern Company, which wants to build these two new reactors, has cut at least one deal with Japanese financiers set to cash in on American taxpayer largess. The interest rate on the federal guarantees remains bitterly contested. The funding is being debated between at least five government agencies, and may well be tested in the courts. It's not clear whether union labor will be required and what impact that might have on construction costs. 

The Congressional Budget Office and other analysts warn the likely failure rate for government-back reactor construction loans could be in excess of 50%. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu has admitted he was unaware of the CBO’s report when he signed on to the Georgia guarantees. 

Over the past several years the estimated price tag for proposed new reactors has jumped from $2-3 billion each in some cases to more than $12 billion today. The Chair of the NRC currently estimates it at $10 billion, well before a single construction license has been issued, which will take at least a year. 

Energy experts at the Rocky Mountain Institute and elsewhere estimate that a dollar invested in increased efficiency could save as much as seven times as much energy than one invested in nuclear plants can produce, while producing ten times as many permanent jobs. 

Georgia has been targeted largely because its regulators have demanded ratepayers put up the cash for the reactors as they're being built. Florida and Georgia are among a small handful of states taxing electric consumers for projects that cannot come on line for many years, and that may never deliver a single electron of electricity. 

Two Florida Public Service Commissioners, recently appointed by Republican Governor Charlie Crist (now a candidate for the US Senate), helped reject over a billion dollars in rate hikes demanded by Florida Power & Light and Progress Energy, both of which want to build double-reactors at ratepayer expense. The utilities now say they'll postpone the projects proposed for Turkey Point and Levy County. 

In 2005 the Bush Administration set aside some $18.5 billion for reactor loan guarantees, but the Department of Energy has been unable to administer them. Obama wants an additional $36 billion to bring the fund up to $54.5 billion. Proposed projects in South Carolina, Maryland and Texas appear to be next in line. 

But the NRC has raised serious questions about Toshiba-owned Westinghouse’s AP-1000 slated for Georgia’s Vogtle site, as well as for South Carolina and Turkey Point. The French-made EPR design proposed for Maryland has been challenged by regulators in Finland, France and Great Britain. In Texas, a $4 billion price jump has sparked a political upheaval in San Antonio and elsewhere, throwing the future of that project in doubt. 

Taxpayers are also on the hook for potential future accidents from these new reactors. In 1957, the industry promised Congress and the country that nuclear technology would quickly advance to the point that private insurers would take on the liability for any future disaster, which could by all serious estimates run into the hundreds of billions of dollars. Only $11 billion has been set aside to cover the cost of such a catastrophe. But now the industry says it will not build even this next generation of plants without taxpayers underwriting liability for future accidents. Thus the “temporary” program could ultimately stretch out to a full century or more. 

In the interim, Obama has all but killed Nevada’s proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump. He has appointed a commission of nuclear advocates to “investigate” the future of high-level reactor waste. But after 53 years, the industry is further from a solution than ever. 

Meanwhile, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has reported that at least 27 of America’s 104 licensed reactors are now leaking radioactive tritium. The worst case may be Entergy’s Vermont Yankee, near the state’s southeastern border with New Hampshire and Massachusetts. High levels of contamination have been found in test wells around the reactor, and experts believe the Connecticut River is at serious risk. 

A furious statewide grassroots campaign aims to shut the plant, whose license expires in 2012. A binding agreement between Entergy and the state gives the legislature the power to deny an extension. US Senator Bernie Saunders (D-VY) has demanded the plant close. The legislature may vote on it in a matter of days. 

Obama has now driven a deep wedge between himself and the core of the environmental movement, which remains fiercely anti-nuclear. While reactor advocates paint the technology green, the opposition has been joined by fiscal conservatives like the National Taxpayer Institute, the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. 

Reactor backers hailing a “renaissance” in atomic energy studiously ignore France’s catastrophic Olkiluoto project, now $3 billion over budget and 3 years behind schedule. Parallel problems have crippled another project at Flamanville, France, and are virtually certain to surface in the US. 

The reactor industry has spent untold millions lobbying for this first round of loan guarantees. There's no doubt it will seek far more in the coming months. Having failed to secure private American financing, the question will be: In a tight economy, how much public money will Congress throw at this obsolete technology?

The potential flow of taxpayer guarantees to Georgia means nuclear opponents now have a tangible target. Also guaranteed is ferocious grassroots opposition to financing, licensing and construction of this and all other new reactor proposals, as well as to continued operation of leaky rustbucket reactors like Vermont Yankee. 

The “atomic renaissance” is still a very long way from going tangibly critical. 

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Harvey Wasserman is Senior Advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service. His SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH is at www.solartopia.org.

Is the Climate Bill morphing into an excuse to promote fossil fuels and new nuclear power plants? 

Sen. John Kerry's (D-MA) recent promotion of a pro-nuke/pro-drilling/pro-coal agenda in the name of Climate Protection has been highlighted in a New York Times op-ed co-authored with Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC). The piece brands nuke power "our single largest contributor of emissions-free power." It advocates abolishing "cumbersome regulations" so utilities can "secure financing for more plants." And it wants "serious investment" to "find solutions to our nuclear waste problem." 

The Senate Bill as now drafted also includes a "Clean Energy Development Administration" that could deliver virtually unlimited federal cash to build new reactors and fund other mega-polluters. 

Also on the table are vastly expanded permits for off-shore drilling. And Kerry/Graham have talked of making the US "the Saudi Arabia of clean coal" while bringing "new financial incentives for companies that develop carbon capture and sequestration technology." 

If you think pushing nukes, oil wells and coal mines to "prevent global warming" is counter-intuitive, you ain't seen nothin' yet. 

The give-aways are allegedly meant to attract GOP votes. The joint Kerry/Graham op-ed is being billed as a "game changer." 

But even with provisions pushing a hundred new reactors in the US alone, some GOP stalwarts hint they would NEVER vote for a bill that includes cap-and-trade clauses. So is the GOP set to play the same game with Climate legislation as it has with health care: prolong negotiations, gut the substance of reform, demand---and GET---untold corporate give-aways, and then oppose the bill anyway? 

What thin green substance survives could be limited to a few showpiece handouts for renewables and efficiency, with cap-and-trade as the centerpiece. But many environmentalists argue that cap-and-trade could create yet another costly bureaucracy with little real impact on the climate crisis. 

To get real about solving this crisis, Congress should demand---and fund---a definitive national transition to energy efficiency and modernized mass transit. We still waste half the energy we consume. There's no source of usable juice cheaper and quicker to install than increased efficiency. 

Taxes on carbon and other forms of "ancillary" pollution would help if they assess radioactive emissions (from coal as well as nukes), destruction of our oceans, lakes and rivers, removal of mountain tops, creation of nuclear waste, and so on. Merely axing the subsidies to King CONG (Coal, Oil, Nukes & Gas) and rendering a level playing field for true green energy sources to fairly compete with the old fossil/nukes would take us a long way up the road to Solartopia. A feed-in tariff that rewards renewables for the pollution they avoid would also help. 

Without all that, the Climate Bill's outright negatives could be huge. Atomic reactors can do little or nothing to bring down carbon emissions. Projected construction costs for new nukes have jumped from $2 billion to $13 billion and counting. Body-blows to the all-but-dead Yucca Mountain nuke waste dump have left the industry, after 50 years, with nothing tangible to do with some 50,000 tons of spent lethal radioactive fuel rods. And after a half-century, the industry cannot command private construction financing or private liability insurance to cover a catastrophic melt-down or terror attack. Even if reactors could help with greenhouse gas emissions, it would take a trillion dollars or more to make a noticeable dent, and a decade or more for such reactors to begin to come on line. 

But the reactor lifeline does not flow through licensing or waste. Because it has failed as a commercial technology, the industry must have massive infusions of cash and loan guarantees. The Climate Bill's real damage will be measured by the size and scope of reactor subsidies, if any. 

Kerry's willingness to entertain "clean coal" and new offshore oil drilling as "solutions" for climate chaos staggers the imagination. It seems to signal that King CONG still owns Washington, and that any meaningful Congressional push for green power will demand serious re-direction from the grassroots. 

DC insiders generally doubt that any Climate Bill can pass this year. Afghanistan and health care still dominate the national agenda. 

But Democrats are desperate for SOMETHING to show at December's Copenhagen Climate Conference. The question is: how much will they give fossil/nuke Republicans to get a bill---ANY bill---with the world "Climate" attached? 

The anti-nuclear movement has three times defeated proposed $50 billion loan guarantees for new nuclear plants. The environmental community still understands that solving the climate crisis requires the ultimate phase-out of fossil fuels. “A carbon-free, nuclear-free energy future is within the Senate’s reach," says Michael Mariotte of the Nuclear Information & Resource Service. "The approach laid out by Kerry and Graham would lead to a climate bill in name only." NIRS is organizing a national call-in this week. A nationwide series of demonstrations for the environment will take place October 24. 

Preserving our ability to survive on this planet demands we phase out fossil fuels and nuclear power, and win a green-powered Earth based solely on renewables and efficiency. Ultimately, we cannot live with less.

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Harvey Wasserman's SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH is at www.solartopia.org. He is senior advisor to the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, and senior editor of www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared.

The accolades are still pouring in for departed anchorman Walter Cronkite. Few mention his critical "that's the way it is" reporting on the atomic melt-down at Three Mile Island. Yet Cronkite and TMI are at the core of today's de facto moratorium on new reactor construction — which the industry's new champion, Senator Lamar Alexander, now wants to reverse through the proposed federal Climate Bill.

Technicians who knew what was happening shook with terror as Cronkite opened his March 28, 1979, newscast with "the world has never known a day quite like today. It faced the considerable uncertainties and dangers of the worst nuclear power plant accident of the Atomic Age. And the horror tonight is that it could get much worse." (Read more about Cronkite's reporting here.)

Cronkite went on to say that "experts" had [wrongly] ruled out the possibility of an explosion. In the ensuing weeks and years, he did not report what remains one of the most heavily censored secrets of the nuclear age — that significant radioactive fallout did escape from TMI, that it scattered randomly throughout the region, that it landed heavily on certain parts of the downwind population, and that human beings (as well as wild and farm animals) were killed and maimed in great numbers.

Cronkite was also not quite accurate in characterizing the TMI melt-down as potentially the worst reactor disaster in US history. On October 5, 1966, human error led to a coolant stoppage at the Fermi Fast Breeder Reactor in Monroe, Michigan, 45 miles south of Detroit. Highly volatile liquid sodium could have exploded, releasing apocalyptic quantities of radiation that would have quickly killed thousands of people and permanently poisoned most or all of the Great Lakes, the world's largest bodies of fresh water. For a full month area law enforcement weighed the possibility of evacuating Detroit.

Like TMI, it's not definitively known how much radiation was released at Fermi, where it went, or who was harmed. Experts still debate why these two accidents weren't even worse, and how the nation barely avoided these radioactive mega-bullets.

There were innumerable technical differences between the two disasters. One was cost: Fermi became a $100 million pile of radioactive rubble, whereas TMI, thirteen years later, was priced at $900 million to build, and about $2 billion as a liability.

But thanks in part to Cronkite, there was also a gigantic gap in news coverage. Fermi got virtually none. I was Editorial Director of the University of Michigan Daily at the time, and Ann Arbor correspondent for Time magazine and the United Press International. But neither I nor any of my fellow journalists — including at least one other wire service reporter — heard a peep about this accident, which stretched through the entire month of our senior year just 40 miles away, and could have killed us all.

I finally did learn about the Fermi catastrophe in 1974 — eight years later — while reading John G. Fuller's We Almost Lost Detroit, published by the Reader's Digest Press. In hair-raising detail, Fuller reported on the horrifying story of an entire industry's incompetence, dishonor, fallout and cover-up.

In the ensuing five years, thousands of grassroots citizens marched on proposed reactor sites from Seabrook, New Hampshire to Diablo Canyon, California — as well as Middletown, Pennsylvania. The mass demonstrations and arrests spawned global news coverage that moved debate over atomic energy into the mainstream. It also prompted the Jane Fonda/Michael Douglas/Jack Lemon Hollywood thriller, The China Syndrome. With eerie accuracy, the movie predicted many technical aspects of what actually happened at TMI — most of which had been deemed "impossible" by the industry's expensive "experts" and apologists. When it was released within hours of the actual accident, it helped blast coverage all the way to the lead of Cronkite's CBS Evening News.

By 1979 the nuclear industry was — like today &mdsah; on the financial ropes. Despite decades of expensive "too cheap to meter" media hype, the "Peaceful Atom" was absurdly expensive and technologically untenable. All orders placed prior to TMI would ultimately be cancelled for a combination of economic, technical and political reasons. It is no exaggeration to say the No Nukes movement helped cancel scores of reactors.

But the essential unworkability of atomic power is what prompted the citizen's movement to stop it. Today's industry has surmounted virtually none of its core challenges, starting with its complete 50-year failure to solve its radioactive waste problem, and carrying through its inability to secure private financing or liability insurance for new construction. Today's "renaissance" is built on the hope of huge government subsidies, collective public amnesia, and three decades of the Big Lie that "no one was harmed" by the massive, unmonitored radiation releases at TMI. To this day there has been no public hearing to compensate some 2400 central Pennsylvania families who by the early 1980s claimed bodily harm and death from the plant's fallout.

None of that made it to Cronkite's Evening News. Though he became an ardent proponent of nuclear disarmament, the true story of what happened to TMI's downwinders has never cracked the corporate media.

Nor is it certain that the story of another melt-down today would be fully told. Before the mass No Nukes demonstrations and TMI, the networks might have claimed innocent ignorance. Cronkite had the integrity and clout to break through to the American heartland on that all-important first night.

Today's nuke-powered Big Lie machine has never been more powerful. Though a few cable reporters might cover the story, only the internet could be counted to carry the load, with high-paid deniers swarming over every independent blog. A TMI-scale melt-down would instantly evoke a horde of media locusts intent on devouring all coverage and dismissing all health and safety concerns. Their ultimate goal: to protect the massive economic investments in a technology that has long-since become human history's most expensive technological failure.

How effective they might be remains to hopefully never be seen.

But as you read this, the industry has again poured into Congress, this time targeting the Climate Bill. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) has called for a "Sense of Congress" resolution to be attached to it that would endorse a doubling of the US reactor fleet — with 100 new plants — along with at least $50 billion in loan guarantees to make it happen. My next report will cover these efforts in greater detail.

But as the backroom horse-trading escalates, it is critical that calls start pouring into Congress. The nation — the world — cannot afford more Three Mile Islands, especially now that Walter Cronkite is no longer around to report on them.

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Harvey Wasserman's SOLARTOPIA is at www.solartopia.org. He is Senior Editor of www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared.