This really makes me sick. Bankrupting America and likely turning us into Japan one day.We elect asses.
Obama's Nuclear Giveaway
Buried in the budget is a plan to underwrite the nuclear industry’s revival.
By Kate Sheppard
Whole story
http://motherjones.com/environment/2010/02/obamas-nuclear-giveaway
In September 2007, the city of San Antonio and NRG Energy announced a partnership to build two new nuclear reactors—the first new nuclear project to be initiated in the United States in decades. The project represented, one of the partners promised, "a milestone for our long-term energy future."
The project, initially estimated to cost $5.8 billion, quickly became a leading candidate for a Department of Energy (DOE) program in which the government would guarantee loans to finance new nuclear plants. In less than a year, however, the plant's projected cost had more than doubled to $13 billion. By April 2009, an independent report had calculated that the real cost of the plant could be as high as $22 billion. In December, San Antonio's municipal utility, CPS, announced it was bailing out of the venture entirely and suing NRG, arguing that NRG and Toshiba—which was contracted to construct the reactors—had lied about the price tag of the venture.
After this debacle, one would think the government would be wary about underwriting projects with such dicey finances. Yet the Obama administration's 2011 budget proposes tripling the loan guarantee program—from the $18.5 billion that Congress has already approved to $54.5 billion. The program's expansion is just one of several signs that the Obama administration is throwing its muscle behind the nuclear industry's push for a massive expansion.
"We are aggressively pursuing nuclear energy," said Energy Secretary Steven Chu on Monday when he rolled out the department's budget proposal. Several days earlier, Chu had unveiled a blue-ribbon panel to assess nuclear waste disposal, seen as one of the most significant barriers to a nuclear revival. And in his State of the Union address Obama argued that creating new clean energy jobs "means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country."
Whole magilla
http://motherjones.com/environment/2010/02/obamas-nuclear-giveaway
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