nuclear-news

USA’s nuclear loan guarantees – like blood transfusions for a dying patient

Undeterred by Fukushima, Nuclear Lobby Pushes Ahead with New Reactors, Spiegel Online, 13 March 12, …..The US Department of Energy has $18.5 billion in federal guarantees available for building new nuclear power plants. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, the co-winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics, praises the expansion project in Georgia as pioneering. “The Vogtle project will help America to recapture the lead in nuclear technology,” he says.

Approval could also soon be in the works for two reactor blocks in South Carolina. Indeed, energy suppliers are putting added pressure on the NRC, which has already received applications for some 30 additional reactor blocks.

Still, critics doubt that all of the planned facilities will actually be built. Even under the best of
conditions, a single nuclear power plant costs, per megawatt of capacity, almost twice as much as a coal-fired power plant and almost four times as much as a gas-fired one.

For this reason, Amory Lovins, an energy expert at the Colorado-based Rocky Mountain Institute, thinks that the supposed renaissance of atomic energy is nothing more than a nuclear-industry fabrication. Indeed, since a significant portion of the financing for nuclear
facilities comes from federal subsidies and private investors are hardly ever involved, Lovins compares the situation to a form of “nuclear socialism.”

“The nuclear industry is in a desperate effort to demonstrate that it is healthy,” he says. “Loan guarantees are not a sign of economic health,” he adds, in the same way that “blood transfusions are not a sign of medical health.”….. http://www.spiegel.de international/world/0,1518,819452-2,00.html

March 14, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | general