While platforms explode and leak thousands of gallons of death into our oceans, and while mines collapse and kill workers – our country now seems to be jumping in the way of a bullet fired generations ago. That bullet is nuclear power. Seemingly ignoring perhaps the best opportunity to make the case for transforming our country’s energy system into actual clean and renewable source dependency, our president is doing the only thing he knows how to do – catering to corporate power. The nuclear industry has been trying to resuscitate its image for decades and have found themselves the perfect cheerleader in our president.
Long beholden to the nuclear industry, Obama learned his standard strategy of fighting publicly for what he privately sabotages by watering down nuclear regulatory legislation in the senate. Indeed the nuclear industry gave Obama nearly a quarter of a million dollars in campaign contributions. Exelon, an energy company that own 19 nuclear reactors, also has ties to Rahm Emmanuel and David Axelrod. Even John Rowe, Exelon’s chairman, has been selected to serve on the Department of Energy’s panel on nuclear waste. Is it any surprise that Obama’s own energy plan includes building multiple new nuclear power plants?
How about exploiting our ability to tap into renewable sources of energy? Why not turn offshore drilling platforms into offshore wind farms? By putting off this inevitable transition and increasing our energy consumption we are only making this transition more painful. By ignoring energy sources that may not be as profitable (How long until a company tries to own the wind; or the light from the sun; or the heat of the earth?) we are creating a situation that will eventually disturb almost every aspect of society. While such a situation may provide the impetus to do away with systems of capital and create actual democracy, the recovery (whatever form it takes) will be longer, more painful, and harder to envision with every year we choose to deny the obvious.
Even the proposed plants themselves are proving difficult to build as prices rise exponentially and private companies are unwilling to finance such projects without government financial backing. Mother Jones has an excellent article on the costs of creating a nuclear renaissance that can be found here. Obama’s interest in empowering corporate interests over implementing actual environmentally safe and renewable energy is best displayed in the article here:
…[T]he Institute for Energy and the Environment at Vermont Law School, found that building and operating 100 new nuclear reactors—as some Republicans have advocated—would cost $1.9 trillion to $4.1 trillion more over the life of the reactors than generating the same amount of electricity from renewable energy and energy efficiency measures. Investing the same amount in renewable energy by 2030 would cut at least twice as much carbon pollution, according to a study by Environment America.
The nuclear ambitions of our president, if even attainable, will produce tons of radioactive waste that will have to be buried or housed for billions of years, and as has been seen in the past is incredibly dangerous. Events like the Three Mile Island incident and Chernobyl should serve as stark reminders that accidents with nuclear plants can be just as terrifying despite being a “cleaner” source of power. Yet it shouldn’t surprise you that even with these grandiose plans of a horizon marked with cooling towers – the issue of where to store this waste is still undecided. After all, that is not where profit comes in so we can leave that issue to the end.
I suppose we could just keep shooting it into Iraqis.
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