Nuclear Power and the Economic Stimulus

Kent Garber reported on January 7th that Keen for a Revival, the Nuclear Industry Eyes the Stimulus Package:

With President-elect Barack Obama signaling that energy issues should be at the core of any economic stimulus package, the resurgent U.S. nuclear industry—like so many others—is pushing to make sure it's well represented.

Industry representatives and lobbyists are asking lawmakers to use the economic stimulus package, estimated to be in the range of $700 billion to $800 billion, to help revive the country's long-dormant nuclear manufacturing sector, as well as to train workers for jobs within the industry, which is now precariously poised for an expansion. In recent years, more than two dozen applications for new reactors have been filed with federal regulators, after a 30-year drought in which no nuclear reactors were approved.

Meanwhile the Sustainable Energy Network, based here in Takoma Park, submitted a letter on January 7th to House and Senate leaders on this very topic.

Signed by a number of organizations based here in Takoma Park including Beyond Nuclear, the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, and the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, the letter reads in part:

We, the undersigned 159 sustainable energy and environmental organizations, and businesses (and 61 individual advocates), are writing to urge that you support provisions in the proposed stimulus bill that will promote sustainable energy technologies and create "green jobs."

More specifically, funding should be targeted at those energy efficiency and renewable energy projects that can be brought on line quickly, will maximize job creation, will curb greenhouse gases and energy imports, and have the least adverse social and environmental impacts.

Nuclear power and fossil fuel technologies should not be included among those supported by the stimulus bill. These technologies cannot be brought on line quickly, entail unacceptable environmental and public health hazards, and
produce far fewer jobs per dollar invested.

For the full text of the letter, click here (pdf).

Harvey Wasserman of NukeFree.org outlines many, many reasons why Obama's Stimulus Money Must Not Be Wasted on Nuke Reactors. Here are just a choice few:

No reactors put into construction in the next few years could produce usable power for at least a decade, probably more;

By contrast, large wind farms can be installed in less than a year, as can many other renewable and efficiency installations;

Every dollar spent on efficiency can save seven times the energy one spent on an atomic reactor can produce;

The numbers of jobs new reactor construction might create is a bare fraction of the number that could come with comparable Solartopian investments in renewables, efficiency and restored mass transit;

Atomic energy is now fifty-two years of proven economic failure. From the 1957 opening of the first commercial reactor at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, to the hugely over-budget fiasco of a French reactor now being built in Finland, the "Peaceful Atom" has never turned the corner to true social profitability;

The true cost of nuke-generated electricity is obscured by massive "stranded cost" write-offs provided at tax-payer and rate-payer expense during the de-regulation fiasco of the turn of the century that allowed utilities to scam away up to a $100 billion in hidden construction costs.

Armed with these talking points, please contact Representative Chris Van Hollen, Senators Barbara Mikulski and Ben Cardin, and the President-Elect Barack Obama Transition Team Office.

Because, in the words of Wasserman,

This massive new investment about to be made in the future of our economy must not be corrupted to bail out the very worst of the 20th Century's failed technologies.