By John LaForge

Touted by PR hucksters as a crucial element to fight climate change, today’s lying about “clean nuclear” is easy to debunk if people only hear the facts. Nuclear waste remains toxic for eons and must be containerized at a cost that can’t even be estimated. And the dirty business begins long before reactors operate, with uranium mining, milling, and fuel fabrication all leaving water pollution to poison their surroundings for — here’s that word again — eons. Dirty mechanics and waste products aren’t the nuclear industry’s only nastiness. It turns out the inside players need the dirtiest of politics to keep their reactors both “popular” and running-while-bankrupt.

In Ohio, former executives of FirstEnergy corporation have finally been indicted in the state’s famous $60-million bribery scandal. The giant swindle has already seen former speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives Larry Householder and former state republican party chair Matt Borges sent to prison. The politicians used the bribes to pass reactor bail-out legislation that kept retirement-age reactors operating in Ohio though they couldn’t compete against renewables.

As Taylor Giorno reported for The Hill, FirstEnergy paid a $230 million fine and fired some executives, but this is the first time anyone from FirstEnergy has faced criminal charges in the bribery investigation. Former FirstEnergy CEO Charles Jones and former VP Michael Dowling are accused of joining a “largescale covert scheme to corrupt the chair of the Ohio Public Utilities Commission (PUCO), steal millions of dollars of cash from a large publicly traded electric utility, forge a spurious contract to conceal a cash ‘side deal’ in a PUCO ratemaking case, steal millions of dollars from a non-profit trade group representing large industrial energy users, and tamper with government records involving financial public disclosures and disclosures of the identities of paid lobbyists,” according to the indictment.

Former PUCO chair Sam Randazzo was also indicted by a federal grand jury last year. “This indictment is about more than one piece of legislation. It is about the hostile capture of a significant portion of Ohio’s state government by deception, betrayal, and dishonesty,” said Ohio attorney general Dave Yost.

How much bribery has been involved at other points on the nuclear fuel chain, we can only imagine. When Nukewatch worked with Canadian activists fighting a waste dump next to Lake Ontario, the locals said they lived “in the bribery zone.” Maybe we all do. — The Hill and AP, Feb. 12, 2024