After Gutenberg

jcwinnie

Speaking of the Empire’s policy of global devastation, Harvey Wasserman tells us about new taxpayer-funded loan guarantees of $7 billion for new reactors.

The guarantees have been stuck into the Continuing Resolution just passed by the House to fund the government. It now goes to the Senate, where calls should be directed to delete this budget-busting radioactive boondoggle.

Nuke lobbyists have spent more than $640 million in the past decade to fund a “nuclear renaissance” from the federal trough. Earlier this year the Obama administration and the industry’s congressional minions were set to add as much as $36 billion to a Department of Energy loan guarantee program to build new reactors. Citizen opposition has been instrumental in slashing that number.

Because they are uneconomical and cannot compete with natural gas and renewables, private funding for new reactor projects has been virtually non-existent. The General Accounting Office and Congressional Budget Office have predicted at least a 50% financial failure rate for such loans.

Some $18.5 billion in funds for reactor construction loan guarantees were set aside by the Bush administration. Obama gave out $8.33 billion of it earlier this year to the Southern Company’s two-reactor project at Vogtle, Georgia, where ratepayers are being forced to fund the plant as it’s being built. More than $10 billion of the original federal money remains undistributed.

At an industry summit in Washington December 7-8, Energy Secretary Stephen Chu anointed atomic energy as a “clean” energy source that could be included in future official mandates and guidelines for energy production.

When running for president, Obama courted green activists by warning that “before an expansion of nuclear power is considered, key issues must be addressed including: security of nuclear fuel and waste, waste storage and proliferation.”

Radioactive leaks and shaky operations endemic to the 104 licensed US reactors have deepened grassroots opposition to new ones. Financial commentaries in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere have made it clear that the proposed new projects can’t compete with gas and renewables. Massive delays and cost overruns at reactor projects in Finland and France have helped kill private sector interest in the technology as a whole.

But Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) is calling for 100 new reactors, requiring a capital liability of a trillion dollars or more, which he wants the taxpayer to guarantee. Other industry representatives in Congress and the Administration have supported similar plans.

All this comes despite the industry’s inability to attract comprehensive private investment capital, or to provide umbrella liability insurance for major disaster by terror and error that could ultimately cost thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.

The industry still has no answer for its waste problem. It has yet to finalize a standard design acceptable to regulators. In terms of job creation in the energy sector, reactor investments are among the very worst.

Thus this new nuclear push is vehemently opposed by the core of the environmental movement, and by budget hawks angry about supremely risky new liabilities being piled on to a gargantuan national debt.

Amidst a national furor over leaks and taxes, the battle over these loan guarantees may ultimately have the most lasting impact. Thus immediate calls to the Senate may have a huge long-term impact on the fate of the Earth.

jcwinnie

CP commentator Toby: “People cannot have missed the fact that the GOP rode into a Congressional majority on the back of the deficit, and then agreed to increase the deficit in order that the rich continue to pay lower taxes. Or am I missing something?”

jcwinnie

To the Editor:

Re: “E.P.A. Delays Tougher Rules on Emissions” (front page, Dec. 10):

It’s not surprising that the coal and oil industries are seeking to block clean air progress, but that is no excuse for the Obama administration’s delay of new lifesaving smog standards.

By the Environmental Protection Agency’s own estimate, putting off this decision for another half year means that between 2,000 and 6,000 Americans will die because of air pollution. Further, even the most stringent ozone standard that the E.P.A. is considering would still have a net economic benefit of billions of dollars, as the savings in health care costs would outweigh the costs of pollution controls.

It’s past time for the E.P.A. and the Obama administration to do the job that the Clean Air Act demands.

This is a critical juncture for the Obama administration to decide whether to betray the promise the president was elected on and reach what amounts to a fatal compromise for thousands of Americans — or to move forward as promised with the much-needed standards that will both save lives and move us toward clean energy prosperity.

Michael Brune
Executive Director
Sierra Club

San Francisco, Dec. 10, 2010

jcwinnie

OTOH (On The Other Hand) via EENews Net we read:

Over the course of this year, more U.S. coal-fired power plants were tapped for retirement and more proposed plants were canceled than in 2009, according to an end-of-year report by the Sierra Club, which is fighting the continued use of coal.

Data collected by the advocacy group show that 38 coal plant projects were dropped or delayed in 2010, up from 26 the year before and 27 in 2008.

Meanwhile, power producers announced plans to retire 48 existing plants this year, four times as many as in 2009 and 12 times as many as in the year before that.

The retirements announced this year would take 12,000 megawatts of coal-fired power off the grid — roughly 4 percent of the nation’s total coal-fired capacity and enough electricity to power about 6 million American homes.

Construction was not started on any new coal plants this year, as was the case last year, and the same situation is expected for 2011, the Sierra Club said. Environmentalists, who have sought to slow the construction of coal plants by challenging their permits and supporting strict new rules on the production and use of coal, see the numbers as a victory.

“Coal is a fuel of the past. What we’re seeing now is the beginning of growing trend to leave it there,” said Mary Anne Hitt, the director of the advocacy group’s “Beyond Coal” campaign, in a statement today.