The recent court-ordered release of documents from the Vice President’s Energy Task Force confirmed what the public already knew: that the Bush Administration had only industry interests in mind when it devised its energy plan. This is clearly the case for not only oil, but nuclear energy as well.

The Senate Energy bill (S 517), which passed in late April, is evidence of this because it adopts into law a nuclear industry-drafted plan for expanding nuclear power in the United States. The list of authors for “A Roadmap to Deploy New Nuclear Power Plants in the United States by 2010” reads like a who’s who of the nuclear power industry. In fact, it is a report issued by the United States Department of Energy, an agency who is charged with promoting nuclear power and is too closely linked to the nuclear industry to concern itself with the public’s best interest.

The private nuclear industry would use taxpayer money to build new nuclear power reactors on federal land, effectively nationalizing nuclear power without a public referendum. This bill would construct commercial atomic reactors at DOE nuclear bomb-building sites, thus erasing any doubt about the connection between atomic power and atomic weapons. The nuclear industry was born and thrived in times of crises (WWII and the Cold War) when the public was willing to overlook shortcomings and bad decisions. Under these conditions nuclear power operated without full public approval. In this time of crisis, nuclear reactors pose too great a security threat to thrive under cover of darkness and tacit approval. We must actively resist nuclear power proliferation. Building more atomic reactors is building more officially recognized terrorist targets- period.

To add insult to injury, the Senate Energy bill would extend insurance subsidies and caps on catastrophic accident liability to a new generation of nuclear reactors. The Price-Anderson Act gives current nuclear reactors an insurance subsidy of 3.4 billion per year. This market subsidy would increase as new reactors are built. Additionally, a 9 billion dollar cap on accident liability provided by Price Anderson falls well short of the catastrophic accident costs predicted by the federal government.

S 517 still has to be melded with the energy bill which passed the House (HR 4). If the resulting Frankenstein’s monster passes, it will make the United States more vulnerable to terrorist attacks on a new generation of nuclear reactors which have less protection against attack than the current generation of unsafe nuclear reactors. It will send our energy policy back to the 1950’s. Maybe the public would benefit from nationalization of some entities—nuclear power, a publicly unpopular, radically expensive technology, is not one of them.
Nationalizing Nuclear Power is a bad idea