nuclear-news

Why pay for extravagant new nuclear when there’s nowhere to put the wastes?

McCumber: Whistling past the nuclear graveyard CtPost.com, Friday, February 21, 2014 WASHINGTON — One nice thing about announcing an “all-of-the-above” energy policy, as the Obama administration has done, is that it requires all of the careful consideration and discernment that a Labrador retriever shows toward food.

If you never met an energy source you didn’t love, you can make momentous, multibillion-dollar decisions without concern for inconvenient facts. So Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz showed us this week, when he blithely put the federal government on the hook for $6.5 billion in loan guarantees for a project to build the first two new commercial nuclear plant reactors in 30 years.

Underwriting construction of nuclear power plants means assuming a worrisome amount of risk for the taxpayers’ money — more than Wall Street was comfortable with, in this case — but that’s not new. The federal government has historically subsidized and underwritten nuclear projects. ……

Nothing nuclear in the news this week is designed to ease those concerns. The manager of nuclear safety at the troubled, massively contaminated nuclear-waste site at Hanford, Wash., was fired after blowing the whistle on safety problems. A radiation leak has shut the Waste Isolation Pilot Project, a New Mexico storage site for lower-level waste, for the last several days.

And the ongoing, slow-motion horror that is Fukushima produced another ugly headline — the leakage of more than 100 tons of highly contaminated water from one of the site’s more than 1,000 storage tanks.

It’s bad enough that the surge in renewables and the glut of cheap natural gas make nuclear construction look staggeringly expensive, particularly in an environment where several operators have recently opted to take nuke plants offline rather than repair them or even invest more in their continued operation. But the really reprehensible part of the federal loan guarantee is that it comes from the same administration that has halted any progress toward finding a permanent solution for the storage of spent nuclear fuel, for reasons just as cynically political as the approval itself……..

it doesn’t take a scientific review to understand that before we build new nuclear plants, we should have a place to put the waste they produce, which will be dangerous for the next 160,000 years. David McCumber is Hearst Newspapers‘ Washington Bureau Chief.david.mccumber@hearstdc.com.

February 23, 2014 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized