In what may be the worst piece of legislation the Senate has
passed in decades (and they’ve had some whoppers), the Senate voted
last week for a huge corporate boondoggle that will not only help bankrupt
our country but will guarantee long-term environmental damage, a rise in
cancer rates, and thousands of years of monitoring of toxic and radioactive
waste. They did this without a single public hearing, without a debate, and
without much of a conscience.
The energy bill is a major attack on our country and the world’s future.
First, it authorizes the spending of taxpayer dollars to help build six or more
new nuclear reactors — reactors that the utilities couldn’t afford to build on their
own. The utilities and proponents of nuclear power would have us believe that,
per megawatt, nuclear power is the cheapest and the cleanest form of energy available.
In fact, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the last
five commercial reactors cost 11 times as much to build per kilowatt as
natural-gas plants. Furthermore, they aren’t at
all responsible for the cost of long-term storage of the nuclear waste they create
— waste that will have to be stored, monitored, and maintained for the
next 100,000 years.
Mind-boggling, considering that all of recorded human history is only a
fraction of that time. Imagine your reaction if your annual tax bill carried a
surcharge to maintain toxic waste left behind by Ptolemy II and Nebuchadnezzar.
Worse, the bill indefinitely extends the Price-Anderson Act, passing on
the liability for accidents at nuclear plants to the very people who will suffer the
consequences — you and me. George Woodwell, one of the preeminent
scientists in America today, recently pointed out that if it weren’t for
Price-Anderson, there wouldn’t be a single
commercial nuclear reactor in the U.S., because
they couldn’t afford the insurance. As it stands, reactor operators are required to
carry $200 million of liability coverage per reactor; damages beyond that amount
are passed on to the taxpayer.
Ironically, in a 1992 study by Sandia National Labs, commissioned in
the wake of the Three Mile Island near-meltdown, the cost of damage from a
single nuclear accident is estimated to range as high as $560 billion. Who pays? We do.
But that’s not all. Behind curtain number three is a pilot pebble
bed nuclear reactor. The utilities call pebble bed reactors “inherently safe,” because
if they loose their coolant, they don’t melt down. In fact, say the utilities, they
are so safe that the engineers don’t believe they need containment structures.
Of course, if the graphite coatings on the “pebbles” are exposed to, say,
oxygen, they’ll catch on fire, which is precisely what caused most of the radiation
exposure from Chernobyl. But don’t worry, say the utilities: It’s “inherently safe.”
If so, why do taxpayers need to substantially bear the burden of liability in
case of accidents?
Let’s not forget that if the 9/11 hijackers had taken a detour and
crashed into the Indian Point reactor cooling pool (they flew right over it), they would
likely have killed 100,000 people instead of 3,000 if the wind was blowing in
the right direction.
Outraged yet? Keep reading. The bill, a godsend to the utilities, authorizes
the pilot construction of a nuclear plant to produce hydrogen for fuel cells.
Forget that we can produce hydrogen with wind power at almost no cost; instead,
the Bush administration has in store a plan to build hundreds of nuclear plants
to produce hydrogen. We’ll have clean power for our cars, at the price of
hundreds of millions of tons of nuclear waste spread all over the country. How
helpful is that? In fact, this plan is simply a backdoor to build more nuclear
plants while they posture at being environmentally friendly.
This isn’t just about us. It’s about our children and their children, going
forward to all future generations. For some perspective, Julius Caesar was
assassinated by disgruntled senators a mere 2,000 years ago. By law, we have to
maintain and protect the waste produced by these plants for 50 times that. The
entire sweep of human history pales in comparison to the time this stuff will
be around, leaking into the environment, causing cancer and birth defects and
possibly extinction. It won’t reach its peak radioactivity for another 100,000 years.
I hope those campaign contributions from the energy companies make
the senators who voted for this bill feel better, because countless future
generations will be cursing them, giving this
Senate its own brand of immortality. It’s not a legacy I’d want to live
with.
Charles Sheehan-Miles is executive director of the Nuclear Policy Research
Institute and the author of Prayer at Rumayla: A Novel of the Gulf
War.