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Yet another $50 billion for rust-bucket nukes?

Yet another $50 billion for rust-bucket nukes? Scoop by Harvey Wasserman 13 April 09 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, 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………………………….This latest bailout incarnation has been widely tagged “nuclear pork” even in the right-wing Washington Times,………

………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……………

……… 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……………

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

Scoop: Yet another $50 billion for rust-bucket nukes?

April 13, 2009 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, USA | antinuclear, nuclear, nuclear costs, radioactive, uranium