nuclear-news

USA’s Environment Protection Agency helping nuclear industry out of its financial crisis

Nuclear Power: Dead in the Water it Poisoned, CounterPunch,  by JOHN LAFORGE    NOVEMBER 5, 2015  “……..As the nuclear industry struggles against financial collapse, government regulators seem to have capitulated to political pressure to weaken radiation exposure standards after accidents and thereby save the industry hundreds of billions of dollars.

On April 15, the EPA issued new Protective Action Guides (PAGs) for dealing with large-scale radiation releases — like Fukushima. The proposed PAGs represent a preemptive government bailout, because they would save reactor owners the nine-figure costs of currently required decontamination following large radiation releases. Eerily, the new PAGs seem to presume the premeditated inevitability of catastrophic releases that the industry can’t afford to withstand. The likelihood of such events was cold-bloodedly conceded by NRC Commissioner James Asselstine who testified to Congress in 1986: “[W]e can expect to see a core meltdown accident within the next 20 years, and it … could result in off-site releases of radiation … as large as or larger than the releases … at Chernobyl.”[48]

Now that Fukushima has tripled down on Commissioner Asselstine’s radiation roulette wager, real players in big electricity are running for the exits. Unlike Congressional hogs feeding at utility lobbying buffets, or commercial television executives who devour utility advertising checks, Wall Street isn’t buying bank-busting liabilities like Fukushima which will cost Japan a minimum of $350 billion and which is relentlessly salting the entire Pacific Ocean with long-lived radioactive materials.

Big investors must smirk at sloganeering about “safe reactor designs” spouted in documentary hoaxes like “Pandora’s Promise.” They read headlines from Japan and recall the stinging deception purveyed by Lewis Straus of the Atomic Energy Commission who said electricity from reactors would be “too cheap to meter.” And they can’t forgetForbes’ 1985 denunciation of nuclear power as industry’s “largest managerial disaster.”

Only add to Forbes’ prescient epitaph that nuclear is also history’s broadest and most and persistent health and environmental catastrophe.

Notes……. http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/05/nuclear-power-dead-in-the-water-it-poisoned/

November 6, 2015 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA