Nuclear lobby pushes for “permanent financing platform,” at taxpayer risk and expense

While President Obama and other leading Democrats went “wooing” wavering Senators on both sides of the aisle with more nuclear power incentives for the administration’s Climate and Energy Bill, the Nuclear Energy Institute released its own "Nuclear Policy Incentive" to Capitol Hill. NEI broadly outlined a plan on how to build 45 new reactors in the US by 2030. It aims to support a climate bill that includes a “permanent financing platform” under the Clean Energy Deployment Administration to start with more than an additional $100 billion in direct federal loans, loan guarantees and other credit support for new reactor construction; to provide tax incentives to steeply ramp up large nuclear power component manufacturing and production facilities; to further streamline the federal licensing process and; to provide financial incentives for the development of “voluntary interim storage facilities for used nuclear fuel” (also known as “radioactive waste parking lot dumps”).

Thus, the nuclear industry is essentially looking to hook up an umbilical attachment to the US taxpayer for limitless federal money necessary to build financially risky new reactors. Given the teetering global economy and the colossal cost of new nukes, this would once again tip the playing field and competitive markets against renewable energy and drain the life blood out from the real answers to global climate change. NEI seeks to further strip public interest groups of their due process to challenge new reactor construction on public health and safety and environmental issues and bribe economically hard hit communities to take timelessly toxic nuclear waste.

Contact President Obama, your two U.S. Senators, and your U.S. Representative. Tell them that a permanent infusion of massive amounts of federal taxpayer dollars into dangerous and financially risky nuclear power in the climate bill jeopardizes real solutions to addressing climate change through renewable energy, energy efficiency and conservation.