How Not To Solve Our Energy Problems

New York Times:

A one-sentence provision buried in the Senate’s recently passed energy bill, inserted without debate at the urging of the nuclear power industry, could make builders of new nuclear plants eligible for tens of billions of dollars in government loan guarantees.

Lobbyists have told lawmakers and administration officials in recent weeks that the nuclear industry needs as much as $50 billion in loan guarantees over the next two years to finance a major expansion.

The biggest champion of the loan guarantees is Senator Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico, the ranking Republican on the Senate Energy Committee and one of the nuclear industry’s strongest supporters in Congress.

Nuke proponents like to claim it's the answer to global warming. Click the label, below, for more on that. But here's the kicker:

Power companies have tentative plans to put the 28 new reactors at 19 sites around the country. Industry executives insist that banks and Wall Street will not provide the money needed to build new reactors unless the loans are guaranteed in their entirety by the federal government.

If the market can't support the industry, that alone should prove it's a waste.

Trouble In Nuke-ville

Nuclear power shills are trying to use global warming to promote their own dirty, dangerous, and costly technology. Bad news for them.

Reuters:

Nuclear power would only curb climate change by expanding worldwide at the rate it grew from 1981 to 1990, its busiest decade, and keep up that rate for half a century, a report said on Thursday.

Specifically, that would require adding on average 14 plants each year for the next 50 years, all the while building an average of 7.4 plants to replace those that will be retired, the report by environmental leaders, industry executives and academics said....

While the report also supported storing U.S. nuclear waste at power plants until the long-stalled Yucca Mountain repository opens, 10 dumps the size of Yucca Mountain would be needed to store the extra generated waste by the needed nuclear generation boom.

And how expensive is Yucca Mountain?

Guardian:

It will cost $26.9 billion to build and operate the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump through 2023, the Energy Department said Friday in a new cost calculation.

The department did not release a new figure for the total life-cycle cost of the Nevada project, estimated several years ago at $58 billion. The department plans to recalculate that figure in May and it almost certainly will rise, said Edward F. ``Ward'' Sproat, director of the Energy Department's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management.

The $26.9 billion figure, about in line with recent estimates, assumes that the department meets its goal of opening the repository in March 2017, Sproat told reporters on a conference call.

So, the current estimate is that Yucca Mountain will cost a total of $58 billion- and those cost estimates keep rising. We've already wasted more than ten billion taxpayer dollars, and the site won't even open for another ten years. To build enough nukes to dent global warming would mean an additional ten waste storage sites, and even if such could be found, that would mean more than half a trillion dollars more. Just for waste storage. Doesn't sound like the best idea, does it?

Nice

AP:

A nuclear waste dump in the Russian Arctic may be in danger of exploding because of corrosion caused by salt water in enormous storage tanks, a Norwegian environmental group warned Friday.

The three tanks are used to store spent nuclear fuel rods at Andreeva Bay, on the Kola Peninsula of northwestern Russia, just 28 miles from the Norwegian border, the Oslo-based Bellona said in a statement.

"We discover now that we are sitting on a powder keg, with a fuse that is burning, but we don't know how long that fuse is," said Alexander Nikitin, a former Russian navy officer who is now one of Bellona's nuclear experts.

The group cited a report from Rosatom, the Russian nuclear authority, describing the danger. Bellona said the storage tanks were long believed to be dry inside, but that recent studies show corrosive salt water is inside the tanks.