Yet another $50 billion for rust-bucket nukes?

[ensho]

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_4586.shtml


The nuke power industry is back at the public trough for the fourth time in two years demanding $50 billion in loan guarantees to build new reactors.

Its rust-bucket poster child is now the ancient clunker at Oyster Creek, whose visible New Jersey rust and advanced radioactive decay are A-OK with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which just gave it a 20-year license extension.

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No independent financiers will take an unsubsidized flier on new reactors. Nuke operators can’t get private insurance on a major meltdown. With the proposed Yucca Mountain dump all but dead, the industry -- after 50 years -- has no certified place to take its high-level radioactive waste.

-snip-

Reports are also circulating that France’s heavily subsidized reactor pushers, EdF and Areva, may use newly purchased stakes in Constellation and other US utilities to strong-arm their way into the American electricity market. Among other things they may use French taxpayer money to build reactors on American soil. Their foreign ownership status may insulate them from even the infamously lax NRC regulation. The Atomic Energy Act prohibits “foreign ownership, control or domination” of a US reactor project, but the industry will try to work around that. As the overpriced, inefficient French fleet wobbles at home without meaningful regulation, and with no solution to its waste problems, the EdF/Areva reactor pushers apparently view the US as virgin territory.

Indeed, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has just granted a 20-year license extension to America’s oldest reactor. The Oyster Creek plant opened in December 1969 with an expected design life of 40 years. It now has visible rust around its core and has been constantly plagued by errant releases of hot water and lethal radiation.

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But whomever Obama appoints, it’s painfully clear that the world’s most expensive failed technology is not going away without a long, hard fight.
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no more nuke plants

[Occam Bandage]

1. So we shouldn't build new nuke plants because old nuke plants are old.

That is intelligent!