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An important new article from Rocky Mountain Institute: The Nuclear Illusion by Amory Lovins and Imran Sheikh. “Nuclear power is continuing its decades-long collapse in the global marketplace because it’s grossly uncompetitive, unneeded, and obsolete—so hopelessly uneconomic that one needn’t debate whether it’s clean and safe; it weakens electric reliability and national security; and it worsens climate change compared with devoting the same money and time to more effective options.” Read this to understand the reality of energy in the 21st century, and make sure your elected representatives at every level of government read it too.
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Should the U.S. be a dump for foreign nuclear waste? Factsheet from HEAL Utah on EnergySolutions’ proposed import of 20,000 tons of radioactive waste from Italy.
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A major new report on the French reprocessing program from the International Panel on Fissile Materials finds that it does not reduce volume of radioactive waste and would have to be half its current cost to be economically competitive with storage of the waste, thus undercutting the Bush administration’s major arguments for reprocessing.
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Activists in Utah held a rally at a local Italian restaurant to bring attention to EnergySolutions’ application to import 20,000 tons of radioactive waste from Italy to the U.S, which appears to be most of Italy’s “low” and intermediate level radioactive waste. The waste would come in through the ports of Charleston, SC and New Orleans, LA, be shipped to Tennessee for incineration, other "processing" and “recycling.” Some would be dumped in regular trash in Tennessee and some sent to Utah to be buried.
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Reprocessing: Dangerous, Dirty and Expensive; Why Extracting Plutonium from Nuclear Reactor Spent Fuel is a Bad Idea. Fact sheet from Union of Concerned Scientists.
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Nuclear Power Plant Electricity: A Simple Costing Manual. This is a basic primer from energy consultant Philip D. Lusk that shows how to calculate the kilowatt/hour cost of electricity from a new nuclear reactor. Under the model’s fairly universal assumptions, the cost of electricity from a standard new reactor will be about 19.75 cents per kw/h. Most renewable and efficiency projects would be well below this number, and on an economic basis alone should be implemented first.
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