Via the "Beyond Nuclear Bulletin" of Feb. 2, 2009:
Background:
Secretively, without debate, hearings, or any public notification, the Senate Appropriations Committee attached a pre-emptive nuclear power industry bailout onto the stimulus bill late at night on January 27. Although the $50 billion in loan guarantees could also be used to support climate-friendly renewables and efficiency projects, Senate backers such as Sen. Robert Bennett (R-UT) and Sen. Thomas Carper (D-DE) have made clear the main beneficiary they envision would be the nuclear power industry. The coal industry would also vie for these loan guarantees. While efficiency and renewables could meet President Obama's call for "shovel ready" stimulus projects that could get well underway or even be up and running in the next two years, new reactors and carbon sequestration projects would take much longer to even break ground. See Friends of the Earth's press release about this atomic money grab here.
The Bush administration and Congress approved $18.5 billion of loan guarantees for new reactors, and an additional $2 billion for new uranium enrichment, in Dec. 2007. Nuclear utilities, however, applied to the U.S. Dept. of Energy for $122 billion worth of loan guarantees for 21 new reactors last September. While that first installment will likely aid three new nuclear plant proposals (a French Areva "Evolutionary Power Reactor" at Calvert Cliffs Maryland, two Toshiba-Westinghouse AP1000s at Summer South Carolina, and two Hitachi-General Electric Advanced "Boiling Water Reactors" at South Texas Project), this latest surprise money grab would help fund several additional new reactors elsewhere across the U.S. With price tags of $6 to $10 billion per reactor, and climbing, this would transfer the financial risks of loan defaults from nuclear utilities and Wall Street investment banks onto U.S. taxpayers. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated over half of new reactor projects will default on their loan repayment, leaving taxpayers holding the bag for tens of billions of dollars.
What You Can Do:
Call your U.S. Senators and U.S. Representative TODAY, to express your outrage and to urge them to block the up to $50 billion of new atomic reactor loan guarantees proposed in the Senate economic stimulus bill. Call them via the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121. Urge your Senators to strip the language from their version of the stimulus bill, to be voted on this week. Urge your Representative to make sure such an outrage is blocked in the stimulus bill's upcoming House-Senate conference committee later this month.
You can also email your Senators via the website of Nuclear Information and Resource Service here.
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