U.S. Climate Bill could be stuffed up with pro-nuclear measures

Along the way, the industry has hired a bevvy of flacks with marginal green credentials.

Will Progressives Swallow a Pro-Nuclear Power Energy Bill Stuffed with Nuke Plant Subsidies?, HARVEY WASSERMAN, BUZZFLASH, 20 April 2010, The Climate Bill is due on Earth Day.By all accounts it will be a nuclear bomb. It will be the ultimate challenge of the global grassroots green movement to transform it into something that can actually save the planet. For the atomic power industry, the bill will cap a decade-long $640-million-plus virtual cleansing of its radioactive image.

It will have the Obama Administration and Senators John Kerry (D-MA), Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Lindsay Graham (R-SC) embracing very substantial taxpayer subsidies for building new nuclear plants………
From “An Inconvenient Truth” to Obama’s impending Earth Day address, the official emphasis is on each of us, as individuals. To be sure, we ALL must consume smarter, use less and recycle more. Since the first Earth Day, all these great green ideas have had an undeniable impact. ..
But some technologies and fuel sources have proved simply unworkable on a survivable planet. Topping the list is atomic power.

Once sold as “too cheap to meter,” atomic reactors are too expensive to matter—except for massive taxpayer subsidies.
……….Selling the falsehoods that atomic energy is “carbon free,” successful in France and can “fight climate change” has been dirty and expensive.

Along the way, the industry has hired a bevvy of flacks with marginal green credentials.

But on Earth Day we’ll see its crowning achievement.

Already the Administration has pledged $8.33 billion in loan guarantees to fund a double-reactor project in Georgia. The designs have not yet been certified, the price tag is soaring, there’s bitter debate over where the cash will come from and what fees should be attached, and the state’s ratepayers are on the hook even if the plant never generates electricity.

But the Administration wants more than $50 billion in loan guarantees to repeat the process elsewhere. Kerry-Lieberman-Graham have toyed with even bigger subsidies, in various forms, ranging to $100 billion and more. (www.nirs.org)
…………The Administration, the Congress and the country will have to decide: will we continue to subsidize failed atomic technologies and catastrophic fossil mining and drilling whose corporate backers have apparently unlimited funds for lobbying and PR?

Or do we finally turn to the truly green technologies and ways of living that can save both our planet and our economy?

The final battle starts Thursday. The outcome is up to us.