By Arnie Alpert, for the Clamshell Alliance
Paul Gunter, a co-director of Beyond Nuclear, says, “Nukes are just too expensive, take too long to build, and feature too many pathways to catastrophic accidents.” Their continued use — along with building costly new reactors — make climate change worse and the world less safe. In a statement on our new website, we assert: “A tsunami of nuclear power propaganda is sweeping the globe.” This propaganda is backed by a multi-billion-dollar nuclear promotion campaign funded by taxpayers via the Biden administration’s Department of Energy, and the UN International Atomic Energy Commission. Billions of dollars in nuclear subsidies were loaded into Biden’s infrastructure bill, with billions more in the Inflation Reduction Act. Meanwhile, the Atomic Energy Advancement Act — which passed in the House in March 2024 and the Senate in June — further subsidizes the nuclear industry by extending the $16.6 billion cap on liability from reactor accidents for the next 40 years.
The $300-billion Fukushima reactor disaster response proves this to be comically inadequate. “Nukes just cannot compete with zero fuel cost solar and wind, and that means the era of base load plants running on fossil and nuclear fuel is ending,” said Roy Morrison, a former Clamshell staff member who has worked as a commercial solar energy developer. “Solar arrays combined with energy storage from home rooftops already are acting as virtual power plants to meet utility demands for peak power.” Masayoshi Iyoda wrote for Al Jazeera on April 3, 2024: “The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report pointed out that nuclear energy’s potential and cost-effectiveness of emission reduction by 2030 was much smaller than that of solar and wind energy.”
— Excerpted from article previously published by ScheerPost. The Clamshell Alliance is an anti-nuclear organization founded in 1976.
Leave a Reply