Nuke Industry Is on the Verge of Getting $25 Billion Handout

The House is set to vote on Tuesday on the $500 billion 2008 Omnibus Appropriations Bill. Unveiled on Sunday, the measure covers budgets for all cabinet departments except the Pentagon. It's expected to pass both houses of Congress this week.

Hidden in the bill is a major energy package that would boost government financing for the nuclear industry. It would provide loan guarantees of up to $25 billion for new nuclear reactors. A massive grassroots campaign forced these taxpayer-financed loans out of the national energy bill earlier this month, but last week Republican Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico slipped them back into the budget vote.

Harvey Wasserman has been at the forefront of raising awareness about the dangers of nuclear power. He helped found the grassroots anti-nuke movement in the early 1970s, advises the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. He's senior editor of the Ohio-based freepress.org and editor of nukefree.org. Harvey Wasserman has also co-authored two books on the 2004 election. They are How the GOP Stole America's 2004 Election and Is Rigging 2008 and What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election.

Amy Goodman: Welcome to Democracy Now! ... Talk about this energy bill.

Harvey Wasserman: Well, we beat Pete Domenici. With Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Keb' Mo', Ben Harper, we put out a music video on nukefree.org. We raised 120,000 signatures and presented them to Congress in October. And Domenici was forced to pull these nuke loan guarantees out of the energy bill, but then slipped them back into the appropriations bill.

And the nuclear power industry is a fifty-year proven failure, and they can't get independent financing to build their own new reactors, which they want to do now. And so, they've gone to the government. This is one issue where we're in agreement with Forbes magazine and the Cato Institute, which is backing the opposition to these loan guarantees, because if nuclear power, after fifty years of huge government subsidies, can't make it in the marketplace, why should the taxpayers fund another $25 billion worth of reactor construction?

We're on the brink of a tremendous energy revolution in solar, wind, tidal, geothermal. You know, we're looking almost at a solartopia of a renewable-based economy, which will be much more controllable at the grassroots, much more democratically oriented. And that's why the nuclear power industry is desperately holding on here.

Goodman:So who are its backers, aside from Pete Domenici?

Wasserman: Well, we have Westinghouse, General Electric -- the usual suspects -- Ariva, a large French company, all wanting to go into the -- to revive the so-called nuclear renaissance. You know, we've been trying for fifty years to drive the stake through the heart of an industry that doesn't seem to have one.

And there's absolutely no demand for new nuclear plants. There's no reason to build them. They don't work. Even with optimum conditions of licensing and so on, they couldn't get a reactor online for another ten years. They've been saying the nuclear power plants are a solution to the global warming problem; we know they make global warming worse. You know, it's a total scam. And they are continuing to take of taxpayer money, public money, to build reactors where we don't need that kind of financing for wind, for solar, for tidal, geothermal, the other forms of green energy, which can be community-controlled.

And so, these subsidies, these loan guarantees in the appropriations bill, we are asking people, through the nukefree.org website, to call Congress, call the congressional leadership, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi -- David Obey is very key as the congressional chair of the House Appropriations Committee, Mitch McConnell on the Republican side -- and tell them: get these loan guarantees out of the appropriations bill.