The Senate's Radioactive Rip-Off

[donsu]

http://counterpunch.com/wasserman08202007.html


Gargantuan loan guarantees for a "new generation" of nuke reactors define the Senate's version of the Energy Bill that Congress will consider right after Labor Day.

Its backers say the $50 billion-plus in radioactive pork will give us "inherently safe" reactors--which is what they said about the last crop, including Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and hundreds of billions in cost overruns and abysmal failure.

-snip-

The first "new generation" nuke is already swamped with cost overruns and absurd miscalculations. Finnish regulators are screaming at Areva, the French-based nuke pushers, about corner-cutting and costly delays.

But these are merely the latest in the endless flow of "nuke nuggets" that have made the world's 430-plus reactors history's most lethal and expensive technological failure:

Faulty plumbing forced one US nuke operator to shut on-site toilet facilities while the cooling system was in use;

At another US reactor, a basketball wrapped in tape was used to stop up a critical reactor tube;

Consecutive global-warmed "hundred-year floods" threatened to swamp the two Prairie Island reactors (south of that collapsed Minnesota bridge) nearly irradiating the entire downstream Mississippi River;

Like coal miners, uranium miners die en masse from lung cancer and tunnel collapses;

-snip-

With a crippled infrastructure and corner-cutting mentality, the corporate operatives building these reactors are no more competent or trustworthy than the ones in charge of coal mines, bridges, levees.

Homer Simpson will run the new nukes, just like the old nukes.

Wall Street knows it. Does Congress? Better tell them.
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reading the snips will curl your hair

NO NEW NUKE PLANTS!

however, business must go on (like shows) there is still space in neo con pockets for more money.

[Skidmore]

1. This whole congress needs to be dismantled. We need to start afresh

with a whole new group of people, preferably who have not played the system.

I've had it. Up to my eyeballs.

[donkeyotay]

2. And they scream about real alternative energy not being competitive

Think of what we could acheive with this kind of money being invested in solar, wind, etc.