Your holiday gift search ends here!

It's the season for giving, and what better gift for your environmentalist friends - or yourself - than a copy of Ed Begley, Jr.'s new book - Ed Begley, Jr.'s Guide to Sustainable Living!

We will send a complimentary copy of Beyond Nuclear Launch Partner Ed Begley Jr.'s new book to the first ten people who make a gift of $100 or more to Beyond Nuclear in December.

Ed's book lays out a detailed road map culled from his 39 years of green living and provides a comprehensive plan, from effective conservation techniques to producing your own energy.

Even if you cannot manage $100, please consider making a year-end and tax-deductible contribution to Beyond Nuclear today.

                                                              Make a secure donation on-line today!

Long-awaited GAO report documents costs of high-level radioactive waste management alternatives

A Government Accountability Office report, "NUCLEAR WASTE MANAGEMENT: Key Attributes, Challenges, and Costs of the Yucca Mountain Repository and Two Potential Alternatives," has just been released. Beyond Nuclear's Paul Gunter and Kevin Kamps served as consultants on the report, which was a year and a half in the making. The report details the monetary costs, and technical challenges, of managing irradiated nuclear fuel for decades and even centuries to come. Requested by Nevada Senators Harry Reid (the Senate Majority Leader and long-time Yucca dump foe) and John Ensign, as well as Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chair Barbarba Boxer of California, this report confirms what radioactive waste watchdogs have long warned -- that the price tag for ratepayers and taxpayers will rise into the tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars over time. The report compares the costs and challenges of radioactive waste disposal at Yucca Mountain, versus long-term on-site storage at nuclear power plants, as well as "centralized interim storage" at two regional sites in the U.S. The report does not compare and contrast the "safety, health, and environmental risks" associated with each of the proposed alternatives, however.

Beyond Nuclear joins coalition letter to Energy Dept. urging no "conditional loan guarantee" for risky French EPRs

Beyond Nuclear, as a member of the Chesapeake Safe Energy Coalition, has joined with groups in multiple states targeted for new Areva "Evolutionary Power Reactors" in a letter urging Energy Department officials to not grant rushed loan guarantees to this financially risky French reactor design with documented safety flaws.

Nuke subsidies: "All risk, no reward, for taxpayers and ratepayers"

A new report, "ALL RISK, NO REWARD, FOR TAXPAYERS AND RATEPAYERS: THE ECONOMICS OF SUBSIDIZING THE 'NUCLEAR RENAISSANCE' WITH LOAN GUARANTEES AND CONSTRUCTION WORK IN PROGRESS," by Mark Cooper, Senior Fellow for Economic Analysis at the Institute for Energy and the Environment of the Vermont Law School, shows that the American public could face trillions of dollars of financial risk and added costs if a new generation of atomic reactors is built in the U.S.

Forbes strikes again!

As described in the current issue of Forbes magazine, federal nuclear loan guarantees would transfer the financial risks of the “nuclear renaissance” onto U.S. taxpayers. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has estimated that “well over half” of nuclear loan guarantees will default, leaving taxpayers to hold the bag for many billions of dollars per failed project. In February 1985, Forbes reported that “[t]he failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale. The utility industry has already invested $125 billion in nuclear power, with an additional $140 billion to come before the decade is out, and only the blind, or the biased, can now think that most of the money has been well spent.” If Energy Secretary Chu rushes nuclear loan guarantees out the door by the end of the year, as he has threatened to do, this ugly history could easily repeat itself. Phone Energy Secretary Steven Chu at (202) 586-6210 (during business hours only), email him at The.Secretary@hq.doe.gov, write him a letter at U.S. Department of Energy/1000 Independence Ave., SW/Washington, DC 20585, or fax him at (202) 586-4403. Urge Secretary Chu to not rush granting $18.5 billion in nuclear loan guarantees to flawed, incomplete, uncertified, unsafe and financially risky new reactor designs.