tagged w/ Loan Guarantees
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"Last week President Obama announced $8.33 billion in loan guarantees for nuclear construction projects in Georgia, after three decades of an ad hoc nuclear moratorium across the country. For all of the coverage last week, the media frenzy missed an important part of the story--the destructive processes at the front end of nuclear power.:
Read more: http://www.ypnation.net/hidden-costs-nuclear-power"Last week President Obama announced $8.33 billion in loan guarantees for nuclear... more
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HELP STOP TRIPLING OF NUCLEAR LOAN GUARANTEE PROGRAM!
WRITE YOUR REPRESENTATIVE TODAY AND JOIN IN ON NATIONAL CALL-CONGRESS DAY WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24! (Changed to Thursday, February 25 to not conflict with Call-In re: Health Care).
February 18, 2010
Dear Friends,
By now you probably know that on Tuesday President Obama personally announced conditional approval of an $8.3 billion loan guarantee for the construction of two new reactors at the Vogtle site in Georgia.
And you also probably know that Obama has proposed tripling the loan guarantee program for new reactors in his FY 2011 budget, to $54 billion.
What you may not know about the Vogtle deal is that we taxpayers are not just providing loan guarantees, we're providing the actual loans, through the Federal Financing Bank. And you also may not know that the Southern Company has not yet accepted the conditions of the loan--and for various reasons, it may not. In other words, it's not a done deal.
And neither is a $54 billion loan guarantee program a done deal. Congress has to approve this proposal. Twice last year, with your help, we beat back efforts to increase the loan guarantee program. We can do it again!
*The first step is to send a letter to your Representative now.
*The second step is to spread the word and encourage as many people as possible to send in letters. We need to speak very LOUDLY on this one!
*The third step is to get ready for National Call-Congress Day on Wednesday, February 24. We've done this before and thousands of you have called. This time it will be even bigger, because this is a coordinated effort with many groups: NIRS, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, Beyond Nuclear, Friends of the Earth, and you!
So prepare yourself (and we'll send some new talking points early next week), activate your e-mail lists and phone trees, tell your friends and family members. Let's keep the phones ringing in both the House and Senate all day long next Wednesday.
Reaction to the Vogtle loan guarantee, and to the proposed tripling of the program, already has been strong. You can see NIRS' press releases, and statements by Ralph Nader, Sierra Club, PSR, etc. on the front page of our website: www.nirs.org.
Here is a link to a story in today's New York Times titled Environmental Advocates Are Cooling on Obama. Here is a link to a story on the Facing South site. And here is a very good piece from Time Magazine. These are typical of the kinds of stories we've been seeing.
Now we need to follow up the strong reaction to Obama's nuclear plans with strong action:
Please write your representatives here.
Plan to be part of National Call-Congress Day Wednesday, February 24.
And if there is anything we can do to help you, let us know.
Thanks for all you do,
Michael Mariotte
Executive Director
Nuclear Information and Resource Service
nirsnet@nirs.org
www.nirs.orgHELP STOP TRIPLING OF NUCLEAR LOAN GUARANTEE PROGRAM!
WRITE YOUR REPRESENTATIVE... more
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http://www.themediaconsortium.org/2010/02/19/weekly-mulch-nuclear-plants-will-go-up-in-georgia/
By Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium Blogger
If you were to look out to the horizon of the clean energy field right now, you would see the hazy outlines of nuclear reactors. President Barack Obama announced this week that two new nuclear plants will go up in Georgia, built on the promise that the federal government will guarantee $8.3 billion in loans—nearly the entire estimated cost of the project.
“It is a slap in the face to environmentalists,” says Matthew Rothschild at The Progressive. “Though these will be the first nuclear reactors constructed in more than three decades, Obama still labeled them, somehow, as part of the “technologies of tomorrow.””
The president’s announcement wasn’t the only environmental downer this week. Expectations for the next international climate negotiations, to be held in Mexico at the end of 2010, are already low, and yesterday Yvo de Boer, the United Nations’ top climate negotiator, said he would step down this summer and join the private sector. To top it all off, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) now faces sixteen lawsuits that would block its ability to decrease carbon emissions, including one backed by Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R).
A nuclear error
Although the Georgia reactors would be the first new nuclear construction in the country in decades, they mark the beginning of what the Obama administration hopes will be a shift towards nuclear energy. In the 2011 budget, President Obama proposed an expansion of the loan guarantee program that funds projects like these from $18.5 billion to $54.5 billion.
These nuclear projects deserve close scrutiny. At AlterNet, Harvey Wasserman details the problems with the Georgia reactors. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) already rejected the initial designs for the plant. That means the estimated cost could well exceed the projected $8.5 billion, which Wasserman says, was low at the start.
“Over the past several years the estimated price tag for proposed new reactors has jumped from $2-3 billion each, in some cases to more than $12 billion today,” he explains.
Risky business
In the past, energy firms like The Southern Company, the Atlanta-based group that is building the plants, could only imagine securing funding for new nuclear projects. These projects have a high risk of failure, and private investors do not dream of touching them.
Inter Press Service’s Julio Godoy reviewed several European studies on the feasibility of financing nuclear plants. One study from Citibank concluded that “the risks faced by developers … are so large and variable that individually they could each bring even the largest utility company to its knees financially,” Godoy reports. These risks include uncontrollable construction costs, long delays, and the possibility of low power prices that would not support that plants’ operation.
That’s one reason that green advocates disapprove of nuclear energy: The money could be better spent elsewhere. “People tend to think that environmentalists have some sort of allergic reaction to nuclear because they’re scared of radioactive waste and unsecured nuclear materials,” writes Aaron Wiener at The Washington Independent. “But when it comes down to it…It’s simply a bad investment to pour billions of taxpayer dollars into a nuclear sinkhole when proven technologies such as wind and solar would provide guaranteed benefits.”
Wind to fly on
While the administration lavishes attention on nuclear, other clean energy industries are trying to move forward. In Wisconsin, a Spanish company is opening up a plant to build wind turbine components, which will bring much-needed jobs to the Milwaukee area, as Kari Lydersen reports for Working In These Times.
There’s always the threat, however, that gains like this will be rolled back by competition from China. Clean energy jobs can still be sent overseas, Lydersen points out. She argues that the United State could be providing a boost to the solar and wind industry in order to keep jobs here.
“Manufacturing in the United States could be driven both with incentives to the actual producers – like the tax break to Ingeteam [the Spanish company building the Wisconsin plant] and support for renewable energy through renewable energy portfolio (RPS) standards and other incentives,” she writes.
China as competition
From a purely environmental perspective, China’s headway into green technology is not a problem. Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum reminds us that the whole world can benefit from advances in clean energy, wherever they happen. Climate change is, after all, a global crisis. But Drum concedes that fear of Chinese competition does serve some purpose:
“I’ve lately become more receptive to the idea that, for better or worse, the only way to get Americans to take this stuff seriously is to kick it old school and start hauling out that old time Cold War evangelism,” he says. “Frame green tech as a matter of vital economic and national security superiority over the Reds and quit worrying overmuch about whether that’s really technically accurate. Just figure that it’s close enough, it’s language everyone understands, and it’ll do a better job of motivating development than a couple hundred more PowerPoints about receding glaciers.”
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.http://www.themediaconsortium.org/2010/02/19/weekly-mulch-nuclear-plants-will-go-up-in-... more
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After reading this simple explanation, America needs to outlaw, derivatives, futures, swaps, options and anything else that remotely resembles them.After reading this simple explanation, America needs to outlaw, derivatives, futures,... more
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From the first Presidential debate:
McCain: "And Senator Obama says he's for nuclear, but he's against reprocessing and he's against storing."
Obama: "I -- I just have to correct the record here. I have never said that I object to nuclear waste. What I've said is that we have to store it safely."
From article:
"Separated plutonium, being only weakly radioactive, is easily carried off—whereas the plutonium in spent fuel is mixed with fission products that emit lethal gamma rays. Because of its great radioactivity, spent fuel can be transported only inside casks weighing tens of tons, and its plutonium can only be recovered with great difficulty, typically behind thick shielding using sophisticated, remotely operated equipment. So unseparated plutonium in spent fuel poses a far smaller risk of ending up in the wrong hands."From the first Presidential debate:
McCain: "And Senator Obama says he's... more
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