American Forum Op-Ed

Pam Solo

AMERICAN FORUM
By Pam Solo and Grant Smith

The reactor disaster in Fukushima is so fresh in our memories that it may seem incomprehensible to think that the history of that tragic (and still unfolding) event in Japan could ever be rewritten and distorted. But history tells us that the nuclear power industry is very adept at revising the facts about every major reactor disaster.

Consider the Three Mile Island (TMI) reactor crisis in the United States. Thanks to years of industry propaganda, many Americans now assume that the panic that followed in the wake of this near-disaster situation derailed the nuclear power industry in the United States, halting its forward momentum in its prime. (Just watch: If the industry falters after Fukushima, it will once again pin the blame on “unreasoning panic” by the public.)

Panic was not the issue after the Three Mile Island. In reality, the U.S. nuclear power industry was already dead in the water by the time of the TMI accident. The culprit was not unreasoning panic on the part of the public. What killed nuclear power more than a quarter of a century ago was cold, hard economics: Nuclear power was just too expensive to build.

Remember the promises made about nuclear power?

First it was “atoms for peace.” But we now know that our nuclear arsenal was the priority. Then it was “too cheap to meter.” But the truth is that nuclear power has been a financial fiasco, declared by Forbes in 1980 as the worst financial disaster in business history.

Little has changed since then, including the nuclear power industry’s enormous lobbying influence and public relations clout. While Wall Street continues to take a pass on financing risky reactors, President Obama and bipartisan Congressional supporters continue to cheerlead the so-called “nuclear renaissance” even as the worst industrial disaster in history continues to play out in Japan. The possibility of an accident, we were told, was next to impossible. But we’ve had three major incidents in 30 years and numerous near misses.

Now “clean” is the mantra in support of nuclear power for politicians and environmentalists alike who think only of reducing CO2. Is nuclear power a clean energy source? Not so much. The evidence paints quite a different story: routine, low-level, radioactive emissions, tritium leaks into water supplies, thousands of tons of fish each year annihilated at water intakes, thermal pollution of lakes and streams, tens of thousands of tons of extremely toxic high-level nuclear waste generated with thousands more to come.

The industry began trumpeting the “nuclear renaissance” in 2003. Yet, not one nuclear unit has been built in the United States. The average price for one reactor increased from an estimated $3 billion in 2002 to $10 billion in 2010 – not including the inevitable cost overruns that have plagued nuclear power construction since the beginning.

In 2009 Citigroup Global Markets wrote: “Three of the risks faced by (nuclear plant) developers – construction, power price and operational – are so large and variable that individually they could bring even the largest utility to its knees.” This analysis is playing itself out now.

In Florida, Progress Energy announced in 2006 that a reactor would cost $6 billion in 2006. By 2010 it was estimated to be over $22 billion.

The price of the French nuclear power plant project in Olkiluoto, Finland has doubled and faces a costly four-year delay. Duke Energy has petitioned the North Carolina public utility commission for rate recovery of over $400 million just to design two nuclear plants. Duke, in North Carolina, and AEP, in Indiana, are pushing legislation to further shift design, construction and operational costs of nuclear plants to ratepayers.

In the meantime, the chronic and seemingly intractable problems for nuclear power continue. In December of 2009, Mark Cooper, a nuclear expert, said that 90 percent of the plants applied for at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had been cancelled or faced delays.

We’ve been down this road before … and it is truly the road to financial ruin. Ratepayers were saddled with an estimated $200 to $300 billion in cost overruns from completed nuclear plants from the 1960s through the 1980s; nearly $50 billion for abandoned plants. Due to industry whining during the deregulation craze in the 1990s, claiming that nuclear power couldn’t compete in deregulated markets because of the high cost of nuclear power, ratepayers once again bailed out the nuclear industry to the tune of $40 billion.

So, how does nuclear power essentially defy the financial law of gravity and continue to be touted by indefatigable boosters?

According to the Institute for Southern Studies the industry has spent an estimated $640 million on lobbying. The goal has been and continues to be not to reduce financial risk but to shift it to taxpayers and ratepayers.

What have we learned after 60 years with nuclear power? The bottom line comes down to this: Nuclear power is an extraordinarily expensive and dangerous way to boil water. Don’t take our word for it, just ask the people in Fukushima.
------------------------------
Pam Solo is the president and founder of the nonprofit and nonpartisan Civil Society Institute and facilitator of the Citizens Lead for Energy Action Now. Grant Smith is a senior energy policy analyst to the Civil Society Institute and former executive director of the Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana, where he worked for 29 years.
--------------------------------
© American Forum 8/11

AMERICAN FORUM

By Rick Weidman

When I served as an Army medic in Vietnam, I often saw a 19-year-old solider whose job was to spray an herbicide called Agent Orange on anything green inside my base. The same was true around the perimeter, to deny cover to any enemy intruders and to ensure a clear line of fire in case of enemy attack.

As I visited numerous American military bases in Vietnam during the war, they all looked like moonscapes. They were stripped of grass and foliage by the same chemical for the same reasons.

Now, more than 40 years after the war, we know that Agent Orange contained dioxin, which is among the world’s most lethal toxins. American veterans of Vietnam fought a long, hard postwar struggle to get our Veterans Administration to compensate troops for a dozen diseases associated with Agent Orange/dioxin. But what about the Vietnamese who were also exposed? And what about the leftover “hot spots” of dioxin that still exist there and continue to harm people to this very day?

The U.S. military shipped, stored, and sprayed millions of gallons of Agent Orange/dioxin over a quarter of the former South Vietnam, both for crop destruction and to deny cover to the enemy. In this country we know from our own experiences with dioxin at Love Canal and Times Beach that these toxic hot spots can cause death and disease to those who come in contact with the chemical. The diseases range from spina bifida to Parkinson’s and certain forms of cancer.

However, the political battle still rages in Washington. VA Secretary Shinseki has classified three additional diseases as associated with Agent Orange/dioxin, thereby making veterans with those conditions eligible for compensation. In addition, women who served in Vietnam can receive compensation if their children are disabled with any of 14 birth anomalies. That’s because Agent Orange/dioxin can cause DNA damage for generations.

The struggle is far from over. We have reason to believe that many additional adverse medical conditions in Vietnam veterans of both sexes also are caused by these exposures, including possible genetic problems in grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Meanwhile, in Vietnam, Agent Orange/dioxin damage also lingers. While we have made some progress for Americans harmed by these exposures, our friends in Vietnam have a long way to go to match our modest gains. The Vietnamese Red Cross estimates that 3 million people, including more than 150,000 of today’s children, are disabled because of the chemical. Former airbases like Da Nang contain dangerous toxic hot spots where Agent Orange was stored and handled and spilled into the ground. Dioxin is hard to break up in the soil and it lasts in human body tissue for years.

Unlike the United States government, the Vietnamese recognized that Agent Orange/dioxin might cause chromosomal damage in the second and third generations of original victims. My own experience is that families of American veterans also suffer. But the VA recognizes no health consequences from Agent Orange/dioxin in disabled daughters and sons of male veterans who served in Vietnam.

It’s time to put this legacy of the war in Vietnam to rest once and for all. A blue-ribbon commission of prominent Americans and Vietnamese has called for a 10-year, $300 million cleanup of Agent Orange/dioxin in Vietnam. The resources would eliminate the hot spots, restore damaged ecosystems and provide humanitarian assistance to the Vietnamese disabled population, including those second- and third-generation children affected by the chemical.

It seems to me that $30 million a year for 10 years, from government, foundation and private sources, is a small price to pay to help remedy the damage caused.

This is a humanitarian concern we can do something about. Recent progress in methods of treating contaminated soils and helping Vietnam’s disabled population shows that America is at its best when it steps up to heal past wounds.

If we make progress on nothing else regarding the ravages of Agent Orange and other toxic substances used in Vietnam, we must properly care for our future generations -- on both sides of the Pacific.

Weidman served as an Army Medic with the AMERICAL Division in I-Corps Vietnam in 1969. He currently serves as Executive Director for Policy & Government Affairs on the national staff of Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA).

Copyright (c) 2011 by the American Forum. 4/11

IOWA FORUM

By Mark Cooper

Why would anyone pay a $150 for something that costs $100? They wouldn’t if they had a choice, and that’s the problem with new nuclear reactors. Wall Street knows that new reactors cost too much and won’t fund them. But MidAmerican wants to build them, so the company is looking to the Iowa ratepayer to play the fool.

MidAmerican’s 636,000 customers in Iowa are captive customers; they can’t shop for the best power deal. Historically, when a utility wants to add new generating capacity it must build the plant and begin producing electricity before seeking to recover the costs from its customers. They can only recover costs that are reasonable and prudent. And the utility’s rate of return on its investment in the new plant should be commensurate with the risk the utility faces in undertaking the project.

MidAmerican, through HSB 124 and SSB 1144, wants to turn the whole process on its head. As a result, all three of these traditional consumer protections would be dramatically weakened.

The cost recovery scheme that MidAmerican is pushing shifts the risks away from its stockholders and onto its ratepayers. Electric bills rise long before a new power plant even produces one kilowatt. Ratepayers are on the hook even if the new plant costs soar, or the project is canceled or abandoned.

Last year, the Iowa legislature considered cost recovery legislation that had a provision empowering the Public Utility Board to require competitive bidding for new electricity resources. Under that approach, only if nuclear is cheaper can the project proceed, but MidAmerican knows nuclear is much more costly than efficiency, natural gas or wind, so this year’s bill drops that language. In other words, keep out competition – and the beneficial effect it has on prices.

And what exactly does MidAmerican want its customers to underwrite?

Earlier this year, MidAmerican President and CEO William Fehrman told the Iowa Senate Commerce Committee that his company is exploring a plan to build small modular reactors as opposed to one large central generating plant like Iowa’s existing Duane Arnold reactor. Small modular reactors are units that produce tens to hundreds of megawatts versus the 1,200 to 1,600 megawatts of new reactor designs.

Small modular reactors have become something of the darling of nuclear power advocates recently, in part because they claim that these small reactors will solve the major cost problems of large nuclear projects.

But smaller reactors don’t necessarily mean that the electricity produced will be cheaper. In fact, estimated costs for these new and untested designs are purely hypothetical, since none have ever been built commercially.

Meanwhile, utilities are abandoning or delaying proposed new large reactor projects throughout the U.S., because estimated costs for these reactors have soared and can’t compete against cheaper alternatives. In Florida, this has resulted in ratepayers paying almost half a billion dollars so far for new large reactors that that won’t be built until after 2020 – if ever.

Giving MidAmerican advanced cost recovery for totally untested designs is the absolute worst thing to do with ratepayer money. Ratepayers are not merely forced to be investment bankers; they are turned into venture capitalists with a high risk of failure and no projected return on their investment.

MidAmerican is selling its plan to the legislature and Iowans as a way to create jobs and deliver new supplies of energy. That’s just not true. Nuclear reactors produce relatively few jobs for the dollars invested. The costly electricity means consumers have less to spend on other goods and services and add to the cost of doing business. And the equipment vendors often are foreign corporations, sucking U.S. dollars overseas. The alternatives available in Iowa will create at least twice as many jobs as nuclear reactors.

Would Iowans benefit by paying higher electricity rates now for risky reactor projects that may or may not happen a decade or two in the future? The answer is a resounding “no.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Cooper is a senior fellow for economic analysis at the Institute for Energy and the Environment at Vermont Law School.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright (C) 2011 by the Iowa Forum. 3/11

OHIO FORUM

By Pat Marida and Beatrice Brailsford

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is considering giving a $2 billion loan guarantee to United States Enrichment Corporation (USEC) to build a uranium enrichment facility in Ohio. Many in the state are hailing this project for bringing in much-needed jobs, but financially, the project is on shaky ground and is unlikely to bring anything but debt and dashed hopes to Ohio’s residents.

U.S. taxpayers are already on the hook for $2 billion in guarantees that DOE offered to the French government-owned company Areva to build a similar uranium enrichment facility in Idaho. Once that $3.3 billion facility gets a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and begins operating in four years or so, it is supposed to supply fuel to about 50 nuclear reactors, but not exclusively to plants in the U.S.

All this taxpayer money is being waved around in the name of moving the U.S. toward a clean energy policy. But what are American taxpayers being asked to invest in? Let’s take a closer look at the bets Washington is making with our tax dollars.

In Ohio, USEC's effort to build the American Centrifuge Plant has been riddled with ever-escalating costs and delays. The original estimated cost of $1.7 billion has soared to $4.6 billion in three short years. DOE actually rejected USEC’s initial loan guarantee application in July 2009, because of financial and technology problems.

USEC no longer has an estimated completion date, but the timing of the project is critical. Half of USEC’s business goes away in 2013 with the expiration of the U.S.-Russian agreement to use Russian down-blended uranium from dismantled nuclear weapons as fuel in U.S. reactors.

USEC has invested $1.8 billion in the project and obtained commitments of $100 million each from Toshiba and Babcock & Wilcox. These two companies won’t invest unless the $2 billion loan guarantee comes through, and the deal guarantees them huge profits off the top. Still, USEC will have at least a $600 million cost gap plus enormous financing costs.

In Idaho, Areva is planning to build the Eagle Rock Enrichment Facility on the upstream end of the Snake River Aquifer, the sole source of drinking water for about a quarter of the people who live in the state. Decommissioning will cost an additional $3.5 billion, for which Areva has offered something akin to a wink and a promise to pay. The facility will be situated a few miles east of the Idaho National Laboratory, which has left a sad legacy of nuclear waste that has already cost taxpayers billions to clean up.

Enrichment is a messy business, with a long history of contamination. Producing one ton of enriched uranium for use as nuclear fuel creates, on average, seven tons of depleted uranium hexafluoride waste – a highly toxic material that reacts violently with water and corrodes most metals. DOE is currently storing nearly three quarters of a million metric tons of uranium hexafluoride from decades of past enrichment activities.

The hexafluoride has to be removed before the depleted uranium can be disposed. Once it is removed, the remaining depleted uranium becomes increasingly radioactive over the course of a million years. At present, there is simply no place to put the stuff.

The USEC facility will generate another 265,300 metric tons of uranium hexafluoride; the Areva facility 320,000. This waste will be stored on-site until its turn comes for treatment, which will take at least 25 years because of the current backlog.

But is the investment of taxpayer dollars necessary to produce the fuel to keep U.S. reactors humming? Apparently not. On June 2, Urenco, another international company, cut the ribbon on a new uranium enrichment facility in New Mexico. The $2 billion facility will also serve a global market, but was built solely with private funds.

With three new enrichment facilities up and running and the ongoing delays and cancellations of new reactor projects, we will go from having too little reactor fuel to having too much. That means taxpayers will be asked to guarantee billions of dollars in a market that may soon be glutted.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Marida is the nuclear issues chair of the Ohio Sierra Club. Brailsford is the program director of the Snake River Alliance in Idaho.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright (C) 2010 by Ohio Forum. 11/10

AMERICAN FORUM

By Michael Mariotte

American taxpayers bailed out the banks. They bailed out auto manufacturers. But at least they were our banks and automakers. Now, taxpayers are once again being asked to lend a hand. This time it's to subsidize multi-billion-dollar foreign companies with names like Toshiba, Hitachi and Areva. If the going gets rough for them, taxpayers will be forced to dig into their pockets to bail them out, too.

America needs to invest in new forms of energy: to combat climate change and increase security by reducing our dependence on foreign suppliers. But that reality is being used by some on Capitol Hill to justify the expenditure of billions of dollars to construct new nuclear reactors – a high-cost, high-risk gamble.

Various proposals in both the House and Senate call for as much as $54 billion in taxpayer-supplied loan guarantees for new reactors. Another bill would put no ceiling on the amount of guarantees.

In the haste to make the case for these massive public investments there’s one detail that rarely receives much mention: The construction push will largely benefit global companies and overseas workers. They get the profits; U.S. taxpayers assume the risks.

All 18 of the energy companies seeking approval to build new reactors will be relying on foreign manufacturers to fill the bulk of their orders. That means revenue and jobs in Japan and France, not Ohio or North Carolina or any other state.

Foreign involvement in nuclear construction in this country goes even deeper than manufacturing. Two reactor projects at the head of the line for federal loan guarantees have foreign investors. Calvert Cliffs in Maryland is dominated by the French government-owned EDF Group and Areva (Constellation Energy is also a partner) and the South Texas Project is a partnership between NRG Energy of New Jersey, Toshiba and Tokyo Electric Power Company, both of Japan. A third reactor project awaiting approval, Nine Mile Point in New York, also is co-owned by Constellation and EDF.

Earlier this year, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) took issue with the fact that federal stimulus money was being used to purchase foreign-made equipment for solar and wind projects. That money should be spent here, Schumer argued, not abroad. Unfortunately, that same question has not been raised when it comes to insuring billions in nuclear investments.

Each of these new reactors is estimated to cost about $10 billion or more. If the projects fail – and the Congressional Budget Office has put the odds of that happening at 50-50 – U.S. taxpayers will be forced to foot the bill to make good on the debt. In other words, another bailout to benefit Areva or Toshiba or Hitachi.

Why are U.S. taxpayers being asked to stake profitable global companies looking to make money in American markets? Wall Street is gun-shy. Investors there have looked at the risks of nuclear power and said no. So, to get these projects moving, nuclear backers in Washington have volunteered the taxpayers.

Why aren’t U.S. companies vying for these projects?

The U.S. nuclear manufacturing industry is moribund, its production facilities shuttered. No new reactors have been ordered in this country since Palo Verde in 1973.

Once, the number of U.S. suppliers licensed to produce nuclear-grade building components was 400; now it is down to 80. Today, for example, the only companies capable of building giant steel reactor vessels are located in Japan, China and Russia. While some new manufacturing capacity is being developed in the U.S., it will be years, if ever, before it could play a major role in reactor construction. Thus the U.S. is forced to look overseas for the foreseeable future.

We live in a global economy. American consumers are accustomed to seeing foreign-made labels on their clothing, cars and computers. Foreign investment in the U.S. is nothing new, either.

But what sets apart this latest entry into the U.S. market is the fact that when it comes to nuclear expansion, Washington wants taxpayers to take the risk out of making those investments. That wouldn’t make sense even if the nuclear companies’ owners were all living on Main Street. It makes absolutely no sense to expect U.S. taxpayers to bail out foreign companies – or the French government – if things go sour.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mariotte is Executive Director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright (C) 2010 by American Forum. 9/10

AMERICAN FORUM

By Dr. Jeffery Patterson

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Patterson is president of Physicians for Social Responsibility and a professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright (C) 2010 by American Forum. 7/10

GEORGIA FORUM

By Peter A. Bradford

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bradford is a former commissioner of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and former chair of the New York and Maine utility regulatory commissions. He is currently an adjunct professor at the Vermont Law School.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright (C) 2010 by Georgia Forum. 7/10