Senate budget revives 'nuclear pork'

[bananas]

Source: Washington Times

Nuclear energy advocates quietly slipped an extra $50 billion for an Energy Department program into the Senate's budget blueprint last week, giving new life to a provision that had been rejected as "nuclear pork" in February's economic stimulus bill.

Without debate, explanation or a recorded vote, senators accepted an amendment by Sen. Michael D. Crapo, Idaho Republican, to boost the department's "low-carbon" energy loan construction guarantee program by $50 billion over five years. The program would make it easier for the nuclear power industry to secure financing for plants, including the more than two dozen that are now pending.

The amendment is another challenge by the Democrat-led Senate to President Obama, whose energy policies have been antagonistic toward nuclear power. Part of a cluster of 15 changes proposed Thursday night at the tail end of the budget debate, the provision was offered on the Senate floor by Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, North Dakota Democrat.

The same proposal was stripped from the stimulus bill after a leading environmental group, Friends of the Earth, called it a bailout for the nuclear power industry. At the time, the group ran ads attacking the sponsorship by Sen. Robert F. Bennett, Utah Republican, and called on Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel K. Inouye, Hawaii Democrat, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, to spurn the provision.

<snip>

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/apr/08/senate-budget-revives-39nuclear-pork39/?x

[corruptmewithpower]

1. Pork? NOT!!!!!

While Obama has said little about nuclear power since becoming president, his energy secretary has been unequivocal.

"The nuclear industry has to be part of our energy mix," physicist Steven Chu said during his confirmation hearings. "It's 20 percent of our electricity production today, but it's 70 percent of the carbon-free electricity we produce."

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/03/29/the_coming_nuclear_renaissance

[bananas]

2. Pork. nt

[w4rma]

3. definitely pork. (nt)

[Frank Booth]

4. I don't get it either. It's an advanced, proven energy source that's carbon free.

Wind and solar are great, but nuclear has a lot more potential at this point.

[mbperrin]

7. They're not dumping the waste from them in your back yard, are they?

They are in mine, right on top of the water table.

Wind power? Absolutely great - they're finishing a farm in our county right now that could provide electricity for all 44,000 homes in this city, but do you know where's it actually going - to power about 1/3 of the WalMarts in Texas.

Nope. Until the waste can actually be made benign, no nukes.

[bananas]

9. No, efficiency, wind and solar have a lot more potential.

But that isn't even relevant to this issue.
There's been a lot of justified skepticism over new reactor costs.
Investment firms were so skeptical, they were unwilling to risk their money without 100% federal loan guarantees.
So Bush and Cheney and the Republican Congress gave them that in EPACT 2005,
they shouldn't need any more.

The plan was to build only about a half-dozen reactors,
that would accomplish several things:
1) Get a good idea how much they actually cost to build
2) Work out first-of-a-kind engineering problems

Let them finish those before they get any more loans.
We still don't know how much they will cost,
cost estimates keep skyrocketing.

[jpak]

16. The US produces 2 million pounds of uranium yellowcake each year - US reactors use 62 million pounds

not much potential in that...

[bananas]

19. Here's a good description, from an engineer who will be working on the loan program

PE: Tell us about the work you do for your clients’ DOE loan guarantee applications.

Harmon: When the DOE created the loan guarantee program, all of a sudden they started looking like a lender, a financial institution. They went out to the industry and said, ‘What does a lender do?’ and they developed the requirements for a loan guarantee program. One of the requirements is that there will be an independent engineer who will review the project. The DOE requires the sponsor—and it’s not just for nuclear, it’s all of the loan guarantee processes—to submit an independent engineer and independent market assessment of their project. The role we’re playing is independent engineer, which is the role we’ve played for many years for many other projects.

<snip>

As I understand it, the loan guarantee program was set up to demonstrate that we could actually build one on time and on budget. If we tried to build seven at a time right out of the starting gate, because of all the things we’ve talked about, it’s going to be tough. Building one or two or whatever the case may be, I would hazard to guess that everybody else will sit back and let those go, let them develop the staff, build whatever procurement needs we need, see how it goes, see if they can get them done on time and on schedule, then in the next wave we may see five or six at a time. So if they don’t get a loan guarantee, it’s a pretty simple decision for them.

http://pepei.pennnet.com/Articles/Article_Display.cfm?Section=ARTCL&PUBLICATION_ID=6&ARTICLE_ID=355042&C=nucl&dcmp=rss

Adding $50B in loan guarantees will just create a mess.
They already have $18.5B in loan guarantees available since 2005.

[jpak]

13. Porkulus for Cheney GOP Cronies - and bad news for taxpayers that have pay for spent fuel disposal

stupid

[Massacure]

5. It's not pork if the government makes money on it.

I couldn't find a mortgage calculator that goes up to 10 billion, but with a 10 million dollar 30 year, 5% interest loan, the government makes $9,325,578. We can just scale it up by 1000x and the government actually walks away with 9 billion dollars over 30 years.

The government comes out even as long as half of the utilities pay back the loan in full.

[bananas]

6. The government won't make money on empty cooling towers.

During the last nuclear build, there was so much mismanagement, the plants turned into money pits, it was cheaper to abandon them than to finish building them. In Seattle, ratepayers are still paying off the WPPSS boondoggle.

[spag68]

10. Nukes

These confused individuals who still support Nukes, should come and live in an area that is still paying for the last boondoggle. Here on Long Island we are still paying off 8.5Billion dollars for Shorham. Just think truckloads of spent nuke fuel rods crossing the country to be dumped where. Talk about giving terrorists aa easy target. This from a retired electrician who has worked on three of these monsters. The truth is that if all the money spent on nukes was taken away, and all the coal subsidies, along with the billions for the oil industry, we could have put solar panels on every roof in the country. Still they maintain the myth that solar power is not competitive. What a joke, why do people, seemingly sensible people, want to support such destructive behavior?

[jpak]

14. The cost of (the now defunct) Yucca Mountain spent fuel repository was $100+ billion

By law - thanks to Ronald Reagan - US taxpayers now *own* commercial spent nuclear fuel and have to pay for its disposal.

Taxpayers will *NOT* profit from these plants when the cost of spent fuel disposal is considered...

and the cost of any potential loan defaults? = billions and billions.

Lots of $$$$ for stupid republican cheney cronies - not such a good deal for taxpayers.

[Massacure]

21. Your figures are wrong.

The $100 billion figure is Yucca's cost spanning 150 years beginning with its first study in 1983. Only $9.5 billion has been spent so far. If you added one cent per kilowatt hour to the cost of nuclear power, it would take less than a year to pay that nine billion dollars.

[corruptmewithpower]

8. I know a lot of you rubes want to go back to an agrarian lifestyle

and live like Amish folks or cave men, or some primitive sort of utopians. But the idea just ain't sustainable lest we cut the human population to a tenth it's present number. We need energy, and a lot of it. get real!

[spag68]

11. you are already corrupted

What do you know about energy, and who are you calling a rube? The next time you feel the urge to call someone a rube, look in the mirror. You have been deceived, or else you are a shill for the thieves that have pushed us toward ecological disaster.

[corruptmewithpower]

17. Go back to your commune and pray to Gaia, hippy!

[jpak]

15. If taxpayers have to pay for these *bad* loans, more of them will have to live like "cavemen"

get real

[corruptmewithpower]

18. We need energy. Your tinker toy windmills and solar arrays

will never produce a tenth of what we need.

[msongs]

12. yay!! Let's put all the plants and nuke waste in IDAHO. hooray nt

[lucretia54]

20. Does the U.S. really benefit?

The largest firm which builds and owns our nuclear plants has a clever little commercial with people dancing, a catchy tune, and says "clean energy" as it shows the company name- Areva.

No mention of the fact that Areva is a French company; in fact 80% owned by the French government. "Areva" and a British firm "Amergen" already own or have bids to buy several of our 104 plants, and are looking to build more plants here in the US.

Our taxpayers (you) pay prohibitive amounts for the loan guarantees, then again billions to the companies to build the plants.

In addition to that, there are huge amounts of dough involved in uranium mining AND enrichment. Then add transportation: uranium in, waste out...including the very dangerous by product- plutonium, which opens us up to a whole new set of costs and problems! We can't just leave it sitting around.....

In all this building and maintenance, large amounts of fossil fuels are being used. There's nothing clean or economical about it!

This is pork all right, and it's not even Americans who are enjoying it.