Trump's DOE seeks to further heavily subsidize new and old atomic reactors, which would put renewables at a massive competitive disadvantage! On the very same day that Energy Secretary Rick Perry offered Southern Co. et al. additional billions of dollars worth of taxpayer-backed nuclear loan guarantees, to prop up two very troubled new reactors under construction at Vogtle, GA (see related entry, above), he also wrote the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), urging "compensation" to dirty, dangerous, and expensive coal burners and atomic reactors. His supposed rationale? To "compensate" these already long-massively subsidized industries, for their supposed electrical grid "reliability and resilience" benefits. As Dave Kraft of Nuclear Energy Info. Service in Chicago has pushed back, what about the nuclear weapons non-proliferation advantages of renewables, or the fact that they don't generate forever deadly radioactive wastes?! Perry's moves were loudly cheered by nuclear and coal industry lobbyists. But they were widely protested by renewable energy and other competitors, ratepayer, taxpayer, and free market advocates, as well as environmentalists. This latest proposed round of massive subsidies, if enacted, could end the competitive marketplace for electricity in the U.S., and would help prop up such dangerously age-degraded atomic reactors as Palisades in Michigan, Davis-Besse in Ohio (each of which put the drinking water supply for tens of millions of people, the Great Lakes, at risk), and dozens of others. Perry's polluting-industry-friendly moves come at the very same time that the Trump administration seeks to repeal the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan* (which sought to reduce global warming emissions, while doing few to no favors for the nuclear industry). Please contact your U.S. Rep., and both your U.S. Senators -- as via the Capitol Switchboard, 202-224-3121 -- and urge they do all they can to block these latest attempts to massively subsidize the nuclear (and coal) industry at public (taxpayer, and ratepayer) expense! More
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