When I'm not busy being an environmental activist and an unrepentant liberal,I actually attempt to have a life, which I must admit is a whole lot easier to do since I retired out here on the central coast. Last weekend I was out at one of my favorite wineries, Sculpterra, listening to music from my friend Steve Key, a local music promoter, performer and songwriter who performed a new song which was so completely perfect for what I wanted to write about that I requested and got his permission to include his lyrics in this post.
The song is called Fukushima USA and you can hear him perform it on his Web site by clicking on this link. In the song Steve is referring to the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California which is located not only right on top of a geological fault line, but just 20 miles from the city of San Luis Obisop, here in the wine country. Here's a bit of the lyrics:
Local wines by the bottle or taste
Pools filled up with nuclear
waste
Nowhere to send it, so it’s here to stay In Fukushima USA
The
sunshine and the skies so clear
How could anything bad happen here?
That’s
what the Japanese used to say Now it’s Fukushima USA
They had reactors
built by GE
All the latest technology
A nineteen foot high
seawall
Wasn’t much protection at all
But don’t think about that
distant land
Things are safer here than in Japan
Relax and sip a little
chardonnay
In Fukushima USA
At a time when the rest of the more or less sane world is running away from nuclear power like it was, well radioactive, the United States appears headed in the opposite direction. Last week the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) voted 4-1 to allow Atlanta-based Southern Company to build two new nuclear power reactors at its existing Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia. This represents the first approval of a new nuclear power plant in the U.S. in over 30 years.
The one silver lining in the vote was that it was the Chairman of the NRC,Gregory Jaczko , who cast the dissenting vote. Jaczko said "I cannot support issuing this license as if Fukushima never happened. I believe it requires some type of binding commitment that the Fukushima enhancements that are currently projected and currently planned to be made would be made before the operation of the facility." Sounds like common sense to me, too bad the rest of the commission didn't show any.
The timing of this announcement also strikes me as completely out of step. The Obama administation has just gone through a year of getting beat up about providing loan guarantees to Solyndra, a solar energy company. And so just when they are being scrutinized about the economics of their energy policy they approve the first nuclear plant in 30 years. Good gracious, nuclear plants are practically the poster children for cost overruns! They are guaranteed to cost the public exorbitant amounts of money even if there isn't a nuclear accident. (And by the way nuclear accidents are not exactly cheap. Experts estimate the Fukushima accident will end up costing Japan over $257 billion dollars!).
If you want to see proof of this you need to look no further than this handy little table provided by the independent Congressional Budget Office (CBO). It shows a chart of the cost overruns at nuclear plants to date. The data is not pretty!
| Year Begun | Number of Plants | Projected Costs(thousands per MW) | Actual Costs (thousands per MW) | Cost Overrun % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1966 to 1967 | 11 | 612 | 1,279 | 109% |
| 1968 to 1969 | 26 | 741 | 2,180 | 194% |
| 1970 to 1971 | 12 | 829 | 2,889 | 248% |
| 1972 to 1973 | 7 | 1,220 | 3,882 | 218% |
| 1974 to 1975 | 14 | 1,263 | 4,817 | 281% |
| 1976 to 1977 | 5 | 1,630 | 4,377 | 169% |
| Overall Average | 13 | 938 | 2,959 | 207% |
There is a reason we stopped building nuclear plants and it wasn't the one most people think. It wasn't 3 Mile Island, or nuclear waste disposal, or nuclear accidents, it was the fact that nuclear energy plants proved to be ridiculously expensive. So here we are in the middle of the worst recession since the great depression, at a time when wind and solar energy have never been cheaper, and our government wants to support the development of more nuclear plants?
We have often been very supportive at EB of the progressive energy policies of the Obama administration, but on this one they just got it wrong, very wrong! Nuclear energy is too expensive and we still have no solution on how to handle nuclear waste! Moreover, there should be a complete moratorium on nuclear plants until we fully understand the implications from Fukushima. Now is not the time to build Fukushima USA!
