News & Articles

Why do Congressional representatives, TV pundits, FOX and even CNN promote nuclear power? As American University researcher Judy Pasternak and her students have documented, the nuclear industry spent $645 million over 10 years lobbying Capitol Hill, and another $63 million in campaign contributions. Between 1999 and 2008, over $64 went to successfully manufacture the “fact” that nuclear power is “carbon free” and can help fend off climate chaos.
 
Independent scientists and researchers like Arjun Makhijani, President of Institute for Environmental and Energy Research, Amory Lovins, President of Rocky Mountain Institute, and economists like Jeremy Rifkin disagree. Being free of corporate handcuffs and the imperative of short term profit making, they have all demonstrated how a nuclear “renaissance” — to replace the 440 old units now rattling apart worldwide, and get to the total of 1,600 needed for a minimum impact on climate change — would require that we build three new reactors every 30 days for 40 years.
 
The impossibility of such a reactor-building blitz is evident all around us. Vermont Yankee, Kewaunee in Wisc., and San Onofre in Calif. are all down to decommissioning before their licenses expired.
 
The owners of the Comanche Peak station 40 miles southwest of Fort Worth just announced the cancellation of their long-awaited expansion. TXU, Inc. intended to double its poison footprint and had asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license to double the number of reactors there from two to four. But as Univ. of Texas engineering professor Ross Baldick told The Dallas Morning News, “Currently, it’s just not competitive with gas. Nuclear’s capital costs are so high you can’t win on it.”
Switzerland will phase out all five of its reactors by 2034 and Germany will mothball its 17 by 2025. Italy has renewed its pre-Fukushima promise to go nuclear-free, and Taiwan is on the verge of a phase-out announcement. Venezuela and Israel, both of which had nuclear power plans, have decided against. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told CNN in 2011, “I think we’ll skip the nuclear.”
 
Utilities & Corporate
Giants Abandoning Nukes
 
Scientific American reported last year that Bill Johnson, CEO of Progress Energy, one of the nuclear utilities filing for a construction license but with no plans to actually build a reactor in the near future, said in 2012, “Nuclear can’t compete today.”

Forbes reported in 2012 that John Rowe, the recently retired CEO of Exelon Corporation — which owns more reactors than any other utility in the US, 22 — had said, “… let me also state unequivocally that new ones [reactors] don’t make any sense right now…. It just isn’t economic, and it’s not economic within a foreseeable time frame.”
 
Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of the most powerful reactor builder and advocate in the country — General Electric — said four years before Fukushima, “If you were a utility CEO and looked at your world today, you would just do gas and wind. ... You would never do nuclear. The economics are overwhelming.”
 
Siemens corporation, Europe’s largest engineering conglomerate, announced in 2011 that it would stop building power reactors anywhere in the world. The firm built all 17 of Germany’s reactors and was the first giant company to announce such departure.
 
Then in June 2012, Germany’s gas and electricity behemoth RWE announced that it too was quitting the reactor biz altogether — and instead investing in solar power. The largest utility in Germany, RWE, with 72,000 employees and 17 million customers, had until then been one of the most vehement defenders of nuclear power.

Now that Fukushima is costing its owners and the state of Japan a minimum of $150 billion, and tainting the whole of the Pacific Ocean, real players in big electricity sound anti-nuclear.
 
Unlike Congressional hogs feeding at the utility lobbying trough, or commercial television executives who feed off utility advertising checks, Wall Street is not going to buy into today’s the radiation gushers. Twenty-three reactors in the U.S. are identical to the three melted, spewing General Electric Mark-1 wrecks at Fukushima.
 
No, big investors must smirk at the snake oil sloganeering spouted in documentary hoaxes like “Pandora’s Promise” about “safe new reactor designs.” They recall the stinging deception of electricity from reactors “too cheap to meter.” And they can’t forget the cover of Forbes magazine in 1985 thundering: “The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale.…”
 
Only add to Forbes’ condemnation — and to nuclear power’s epitaph — that it’s also history’s largest and most monumental environmental disaster.
 
— John LaForge is a co-director of
Nukewatch and edits its quarterly
newsletter.