The American Jobs Plan is a historic opportunity to generate millions of head of household jobs, build a clean energy economy, and fight the disastrous effects of climate change.
It should be obvious to all that the climate crisis is real and growing globally, affecting everything from recurring drought, wildfires, floods, ocean warming, rising sea levels, and the extinction of thousands of species. The human species is among those threatened.
The White House, however, has taken a huge and unacceptable step backward in adding a nuclear bailout to this plan. It is proposing to subsidize antiquated, dangerous, and dirty nuclear reactors to the tune of $50 billion to $100 billion of taxpayer money to boost a dying technology. This money would be better spent on the transformation of our energy system.
Every day that these reactors operate, they leave us and our progeny with thousands of tons of high-level radioactive waste with nowhere safe to store it for the hundreds of thousand of years that it remains lethal. The White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council has concluded that nuclear power is not beneficial to environmental justice communities that are on the frontlines of radioactive exposure, contamination, and environmental degradation across the entire nuclear fuel chain and radioactive waste streams.
The American Jobs Plan is a chance for a future of carbon-free, nuclear-free development serving to power this country, but bailing out the nuclear industry instead of holding it responsible would not only be a mistake but a tragedy.
Take action by telling President Biden and our congressional representatives to keep nuclear bailouts out of the American Jobs Plan. Call or email them now.
This article appears in Jul 15-22, 2021.
When government allows the production of a cubic inch of nuclear waste, it loses a cubic inch of *money*.
So, ending support for it, good deal? Not entirely. The money is fossil fuel tax and royalty revenue. Uranium replaces those fuels at pennies on the dollar, so there is no way nuclear power producers can, so to speak, make government whole.
Of course government was never really entitled to that fossil fuel money. No-one is.
But they want it, and they lie for it. Among the lies is stuff like “high-level radioactive waste with nowhere safe to store it for the hundreds of thousand of years that it remains lethal”. In practice it has never been lethal at all, and to the public, including “environmental justice communities”, it has never even caused injury.
In theory it will be 100 times less dangerous, many thousands of years hence, as it is in these present decades, the ones in which it has established a perfect safety record.
The climate has been “warming” for 12,000 years. The seas have risen over 300′ during that period. Every projection of the “climate crisis” has spectacularly failed. Mr. Gore told us that by 2014 the summer polar ice cap would be gone. It’s still there. In 2008 he (and the US Pentagon paper) told us that the Gulf Stream could stop flowing by 2020, destroying Europe’s agriculture and casting millions into starvation…Today the Gulf Stream flows at the same rate as it did in 2008.
Not one of the projections of the “end of times” has come true. That’s because they’re political movements designed to expand the power of government over the society, not “science.” The industrial addition of CO2 probably has an effect, though it appears difficult to measure. Certainly if we stop all CO2 production, world CO2 will continue to increase as the Chinese are still building more coal fired power plants.
I suspect that the world will continue to warm slowly; which is better than the alternative.
The ultimate cost of storing and monitoring ilthe waste from Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant will exceed the value of the energy it produced. We are talking about storage and monitoring for the next 10,000 years at least. Theres no getting around that fact, or that cost. Everyone agrees, its 10,000 years at a minimum
There are plenty of good reasons PG&E wants to walk away from the operation. Who would want that kind of zillion dollar liability on their hands.? And yet, we have people around here or begging to take that on. They havent thought things through.
Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant is old technology. If were going to pin any hopes on nuclear energy in the future, we have to have modern equipment to do it.
You dont bring a 1985 Chevy nova expecting to perform safely or successfully to the Indianapolis racetrack in 2021.
Talk about lying and deplorable misinformation. You can read above someone claiming that the nuclear power industry has a so-called perfect safety record. Yeah, right. Not even close. Google nuclear power safety violations and accidents.