More from Friends of the Earth (the link at the end is worth watching if you're on broadband):
Under the guise of fighting global warming, the nuclear power industry and its allies in Congress are pushing a plan to construct the first new nuclear power plants in the U.S. in decades, and this plan's lynchpin is to pass federal legislation making taxpayers the unwilling financial underwriters of new plants, through federal loan guarantees.
Did you know that experts estimate that we would need to triple our number of nuclear reactors to make a serious dent in global warming? With just over a hundred reactors currently online in the U.S.A., and at a cost of around $5 billion per reactor, that would require at least $1 trillion (assuming we didn't replace aging plants).
Given that cost, and the fact that it takes up to ten years to build a new plant, it would take decades to start meeting the threats of planetary climate change with nuclear power. And that's not even taking into consideration the risk taken by the public with triple the threat of nuclear disaster.
We can fight these provisions and win. Nuclear power's allies got the loan guarantees into the Senate's version of the energy bill, but activists drove them from the final congressional package. Now, nuclear boosters in Congress are looking to other pieces of legislation in which to insert these nuclear loan guarantees.
We can check those efforts if we don't let up. Send a message to Congress telling your members that taxpayers must not be forced to underwrite this bad idea.
We may feel like we are playing "whack-a-mole" with these loan guarantees in the coming months, as they keep popping up in different pieces of legislation -- but it's worth the effort. Industry experts say that new plants won't get built without the loan guarantees, so the stakes couldn't be higher for all sides.
If you or your friends want to know more about why nuclear power is a bad idea, and why we must fight the loan guarantees, take a tour through our interactive overview of nuclear power's drawbacks below:
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