nuclear-news

Can Obama stop the bomb in the senate stimulus plan?

The Huffington Post 3 feb 09 by Joseph Romm

A radioactive dirty bomb has been dropped on the Senate stimulus package.

On Wednesday, the Senate Appropriations Committee voted to add $50 billion in nuclear loan guarantees to the economic recovery package (S. 336). This “would more than double the current loan guarantee cap of $38 billion” for “clean energy” technology.Yet this provision would not create a single job for many, many years, but would saddle the public with tens of millions of dollars more in toxic loans. As I noted in my 2008 report, “The Self-Limiting Future of Nuclear Power“:

In August 2007, Tulsa World reported that American Electric Power Co. CEO Michael Morris was not planning to build any new nuclear power plants. He was quoted as saying, “I’m not convinced we’ll see a new nuclear station before probably the 2020 timeline,”…………………

Why are we still propping up an industry that can’t survive without the taxpayer swallowing both the economic risk of an actual meltdown and the risk of the new nukes melting down financially — all for a mature technology that has already received more than $100 billion in direct and indirect subsidies (see “Nuclear Pork — Enough is Enough“)?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-romm/can-obama-stop-the-nuclea_b_163110.html

February 2, 2009 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war