Group items tagged

"The hypocrisy is astonishing! Some in Congress used fiscal responsibility as an excuse to oppose health care reform, yet they support an outrageous attempted money grab in risky taxpayer loans (tens of billions to a trillion) to the wealthy nuclear industry, when the Congressional Budget Office estimates more than 50 percent risk of default. Taxpayers should be outraged. The nuclear industry has already externalized most of its costs, risks, and liabilities onto taxpayers, ratepayers, and future generations, both financially and radiologically. Nuclear power is a dangerous distraction from real solutions to climate change and our energy needs, yet the nuclear industry, that already got the lion's share of energy subsidies for the past 50 years, is shamelessly attempting to rob the clean energy fund from the Climate Bill and Energy Bill. In reality, new nuclear plants are not the answer to global warming or the energy crisis."

"The government Friday introduced the contentious civil nuclear liability bill in parliament, prompting the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to dismiss it as "unconstitutional" and walk out of the Lok Sabha amid vigorous protests from opposition benches. "It's contrary to articles of the constitution. It's illegal and unconstitutional," BJP leader Yashwant Sinha told the house. Sinha also accused the government of acting under US pressure. The government had deferred the tabling of the bill in the first half of the budget session in March in the face of a hostile opposition. The passing of the legislation is one of the last remaining steps required to operationalise the 2008 India-US 123 civil nuclear cooperation agreement. "

"In a surprise development, the government has decided to refer the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Bill to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science and Technology, Environment and Forests instead of the one on Energy as was widely expected. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Energy is headed by SP leader Mulayam Singh Yadav while the one on Science and Technology, Environment and Forests is chaired by Congress member in Rajya Sabha T Subbarami Reddy. Yadav was a vocal critic of the Bill till some time back though he was apparently won over by the government at the time of the Bill's introduction in Lok Sabha on the last day of the Budget session. "

"Few people see nuclear power as a cheap option. The capital cost is high, and the ultimate cost, if something goes seriously wrong, could be very large. The UK's nuclear liability law is based on the Paris and Brussels Convention on Nuclear Third Party Liability, which has been in operation since the 1960s. The operator is required to take out the necessary financial security to cover its liabilities and in the UK this is currently set at £140m. Recent amendments, which are not yet in force, are aimed at ensuring that greater compensation is available to a larger number of victims in respect of a broader range of nuclear damage. In particular, it will be possible to claim compensation for certain kinds of loss other than personal injury and property damage, including loss relating to impairment of the environment. The period of operators' liability for personal injury has been increased from 10 to 30 years and, more generally, the limit on operators' liability has been increased to €700 m. That's the situation as summarised recently by Lord Hunt, then energy Minister. However if the worst comes, then even €700m is unlikely to be enough. The cost of just upgrading the emergency containment shelter at Chernobyl in 1997 was $758 m. Quite apart from the loss of life, with estimates of early deaths ranging up to several thousand and beyond, and also lifelong illnesses (e.g. related to immune system damage) for some of those exposed, the total economic costs of the Chernobyl disaster were much larger: e.g. Belarus has estimated its losses over 30 years at US $235 bn, with government spending on Chernobyl amounting to 22.3% of the national budget in 1991, declining gradually to 6.1% in 2002. And 5-7% of government spending in the Ukraine still goes to Chernobyl-related benefits and programmes. www.greenfacts.org/en/chernobyl"

"The government plans to establish a 100 billion yen fund to keep track of the health of all residents of Fukushima Prefecture for 30 years following radiation leaks at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, government sources said Thursday. The government plans to allocate 78 billion yen in a second supplementary budget for the current fiscal year and plans to ask the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., to contribute 25 billion yen to the fund."

A US House of Representatives appropriations subcommittee unanimously approved a Department of Energy funding bill Tuesday that would fully fund a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, while eliminating funding for the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, the international spent fuel reprocessing program.

The Senate Defense Authorization Bill that was passed out of the Senate Armed Services Committee had better news than expected for the Savannah River Site. The portion of SRS funded through that part of the federal government was pegged to get an allocation next year of $1.28 billion which is $74 million more than was in President Bush's request for the Site.

I have previously discussed the non-job-creating $50 billion in nuclear loan guarantees the Senate put into the stimulus (see "Can Obama stop the nuclear bomb in the Senate stimulus plan?" For the record it was Sen. Robert Bennett (R-UT), which I point out merely because R-UT perfectly describes thinking behind this farce. Not only won't these loans generate any jobs in Obama's first term, but as Peter Bradford, former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, explained to me, it could actually kill jobs. How?

A bipartisan group of Senators led by Kay Bailey Hutchison has signed a letter to Senators Dorgan and Bennett, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, urging them to increase funding for a 2005 program that would provide loan guarantees for companies seeking to build nuclear power plants. According to the letter, there are currently 26 applications pending for new reactors in 15 states. But the current energy bill has allocated $18.5 billion for loan guarantees, enough for only three reactors according to signatories Hutchison, Burr, Landrieu, Lugar, Bill Nelson, Graham, Cornyn, Martinez, Sessions, Wicker, Risch, and Vitter. But it's not all bad news. Even though Obama campaign against the use of Yucca mountain as the nation's nuclear waste repository, and even though his secretary of energy says that Yucca mountain is no longer an option, the Obama administration still proposed $200 million for Yucca in FY2010. Even the projects Obama kills still get funding, so maybe Congress will be convinced to throw a few billion more toward the only non-carbon emitting power source that actually works. The full letter after the jump...

Funding for the next year of nuclear clean-up in the UK has been outlined in the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority's business plan. Over the next financial year, the NDA has forecast a spend of £2880 million ($4237 million) on dismantling legacy nuclear facilities from the UK's national program to develop nuclear power. The funding for this comes from government, but with a large portion repaid to government from the commercial income from some of NDA's estate. In FY2009, commercial operation is expected to be £1343 million ($1976 million), leaving government funding at £1537 million ($2261 million).

"The government has discovered thousands of cases of workers at nuclear power plants outside Fukushima Prefecture suffering from internal exposure to radiation after they visited the prefecture, the head of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said. Most of the workers who had internal exposure to radiation visited Fukushima after the nuclear crisis broke out following the March 11 quake and tsunami, and apparently inhaled radioactive substances scattered by hydrogen explosions at the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant. The revelation has prompted local municipalities in Fukushima to consider checking residents' internal exposure to radiation."

"In relation to the nuclear crisis, the government counted ¥275.4 billion in provisional costs, including ¥120 billion for the government's part of compensation for the problems at Fukushima No. 1, whose operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., will have to shoulder a bigger part of overall damage. Second extra budget's key outlays Kyodo * ¥800 billion in reserve for future emergency spending. * ¥545.5 billion in grants to local governments affected by the disaster. * ¥300 billion in additional spending on financial support to those who had their homes badly damaged or destroyed. * ¥120 billion for the government's part of compensation over the crisis at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant. * ¥78.2 billion to finance health checks over the next 30 years on people in Fukushima Prefecture in the wake of the nuclear crisis. The government plans to create a ¥96.2 billion fund to cover expenditures on health issues concerning people in Fukushima Prefecture. Of that amount, ¥78.2 billion would finance health checks over the next 30 years for people in the prefecture, the ministry said. The government would also enhance the monitoring of radiation levels throughout the country, spending ¥23.5 billion."