Action Alert: $50 Billion of our Money Targeted for Nuclear Power in Senate Stimulus Bill

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.

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.