Antinuclear

US taxpayers up for $trillion costs of nuclear wastes

Interestingly, by U.S. law, once nuclear waste is removed from the property of the utilities, it then becomes the problem of the federal government and tax payers, and no longer a liability for utilities and corporate shareholders………Somewhere between two to four trillion in U.S. tax dollars has gone to the nuclear experiment, in all its forms over the decades, but now we face very real fiscal constraints…

A blue-ribbon, “nuclear” bus ride  Mountain Xpress,Ned Ryan Doyle, 21 Jan 201“……….It’s no secret that temporary storage facilities for high level nuclear waste at our nation’s nuclear plants are at, or beyond, design capacity.

The proposal to reprocess 67,000 metric tons at the “SRS Energy Park” would mean transporting all those nuclear materials to them to extract about 1-2% in the form of plutonium for bomb material or more proposed power production.

It would then be a matter of re-transporting the waste -from the waste- created from the reprocessing, (which would be increased in volume by an estimated one hundred times), to an as yet to be determined location, or locations, for final storage………..
President Carter’s Executive Order banned nuclear fuel reprocessing in the 1970’s. Congress recently – and quietly – passed legislation at the behest of the nuclear industry and utilities that appears to circumvent that decision.

President Carter’s pre-White House experience included naval nuclear engineering, and he issued a prudent ban based on science and facts, not politics. The problems created then in New York state still remain today at West Valley, the nation’s first site of attempted reprocessing.

Globally, reprocessing in other nations, including the socialist energy system in France, has withered, facing the same difficulties with containment, storage, transportation and funding.

Interestingly, by U.S. law, once nuclear waste is removed from the property of the utilities, it then becomes the problem of the federal government and tax payers, and no longer a liability for utilities and corporate shareholders. So, there was a lot of talk of moving nuclear waste to SRS for a new attempt at reprocessing, suggestions that appeared to resonate in the sympathetic ear of at least one BRC Commissioner, John Rowe, chair of the largest nuclear power utility, Exelon…………

Will tax payers choose the fiscal black hole of nuclear power – the most expensive & dangerous method in history to merely boil water – simply to generate electricity? Will we decide to create a few nuclear related jobs that cost, per dollars invested, in the range of five to ten million dollars per job?…….

In the seven decades since the Nuclear Age began, no one has been able to solve the waste storage problem, it only gets worse with radioactive debris piling up across the globe and in our oceans. Not counting Hiroshima and Nagasaki, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions by some estimates, have been killed or sickened by radiation released, accidently or routinely. Somewhere between two to four trillion in U.S. tax dollars has gone to the nuclear experiment, in all its forms over the decades, but now we face very real fiscal constraints…….. A blue-ribbon, “nuclear” bus ride | Blogwire | Mountain Xpress

January 21, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized