UPDATE: New ABC News/Washington Post poll shows Americans oppose new nuclear power plants 64%-33%.
As we used to say in the Marine Corps, there's always that 2 per cent that didn't get the word. In this case it's Wisconsin's pro-nuclear Republicana lawmakers.
The company planning the largest nuclear project in the United States, two giant reactors in South Texas, announced on Tuesday that it was giving up and writing off its investment of $331 million after uncertainties created by the accident in Japan...
The plan was for the South Texas Project 3 and 4 reactors, and was identified more than two years ago by the Energy Department as one of the four candidates for loan guarantees that were authorized by the 2005 Energy Act.
It is the second of the four to die; Calvert Cliffs 3, in Maryland, seems unlikely at this point, because Constellation Energy could not reach financial terms with the Energy Department. The department has granted a conditional loan guarantee to one project in Georgia and may give another to a project in South Carolina.
In a conference call with investment analysts on Tuesday evening, [the company's CEO] said that to proceed with the project, the federal government would probably have to institute a “clean energy standard” that would create quotas for nuclear power, as states have already done for wind and solar. ..
The public’s appetite for nuclear power projects resembles the situation right after the Three Mile Island accident of 1979, said Charles A. Zielinski, a lawyer in Washington who is a former chairman of the New York State Public Service Commission.
Did you get that? Unless the feds adopt a policy requiring some percentage of energy come from nuclear -- and underwrite it, of course, with taxpayer dollars -- those plants won't be built. Nuclear power is too expensive, not to mention too dirty and too dangerous.
Yet Wisconsin Republicans continue to press to repeal the state's sensible safeguards and requirements for building new nuclear reactors. State Rep. Mark Honadel (R-South Milwaukee), the nuclear point man, says there will be a bill this fall to repeal the current law requiring that any new reactors be beneficial to ratepayers, and that there be a federal waste repository in operation to handle the deadly radioactive waste those reactors generate.
It's been pushed back from spring, no doubt because the disaster in Japan has reminded people of the risk involved. Let's keep working to kill the idea once and for all.
Want to get involved? Here's a good place to start.