2,500 feet of a potential highway route.
Under the DOE base case scenario (88 percent
rail, 12 percent truck), 50 to 260 accidents
would be expected based on normal rail and
truck accident rates. An attack on a GA- 4
truck cask using a state-of-the-art anti-tank
weapon could cause some 18,000 latent cancer fatalities. Cleanup and recovery costs
would exceed $17 billion.
By the time Yucca Mountain is filled
(77,000 tons), reactors now operating will
have produced another 37,000 tons of spent
fuel, which, with nowhere to go, will sit in
cooling ponds at sites across America. This
does not include waste produced by any of
Sen. McCain’s proposed 100 new reactors.
The only preemptive policies the United
States desperately needs right now would
aggressively focus regulations, incentives and
research on safe, secure, clean, affordable
and globally competitive energy systems —
that are uninteresting targets for bombs. Efficiency and renewable energy systems —
widely distributed and largely noncombustible — fill the bill.
As The Economist magazine repeatedly
emphasizes, and Amory Lovins and his RMI
colleagues recently detailed in “Forget
Nuclear,” nuclear power still makes no sense
financially. Even disregarding the safety, security and subsidy issues, it will cost at least 12
cents per kilowatt-hour to build and run a
new nuclear plant. It will cost even more at the
nuclear industry’s flagship Finnish project,
Sen. McCain voted
repeatedly against
renewable electricity
production tax credits.
Olkiluoto 3, which is now several years behind
schedule and $2.5 billion over budget. Efficiency services, in sharp contrast, where
allowed by state public utility commissions to
compete with supply options, deliver four to
over 12 times the services for the same cost per
kilowatt-hour. Wind farms and cogeneration
plants can now generate power at half the
cost of nuclear, and, as the RMI report shows,
they can replace the output of nuclear plants
14 times over. Renewables can also displace
coal-plant carbon emissions more rapidly, per
dollar of investment: Whereas nuclear will
displace 8 kilograms of CO2 per 2007 dollar
invested, these other options can achieve from
12 kg CO2 (for wind) to 93 kg CO2 (for 1 cent
per kilowatt-hour efficiency) per dollar.
Former Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Energy Joe Romm has pointed
out that for the quarter century Sen. McCain
has been in Congress, he joined with fellow
conservatives and “repeatedly gutted the
wind budget, then opposed efforts by progressives to increase it, and repeatedly
blocked efforts to extend the wind power
tax credit.” Sen. McCain voted against renewable electricity time and time again. While
calling for fast-tracking subsidies for nuclear
power and coal plants, McCain told Grist
magazine last October that, “I’m not one
who believes that we need to subsidize
things. The wind industry is doing fine, the
solar industry is doing fine. In the ’70s, we
gave too many subsidies and too much help,
and we had substandard products sold to
the American people, which then made them
disenchanted with solar for a long time.”
Sen. McCain and many of his congressional colleagues appear oblivious to the fact
that the United States added more wind
power capacity in 2007 than it added in coal-fired capacity over the past five years combined. Yet to go from today’s 16,000 MW of
installed wind to 305,000 MW by 2030 (that
would be 20 percent of America’s electricity)
is going to take more than believing the
wind industry is “doing fine.”
We need leadership to meet the 20 percent
goal. We need multidecade tax credits and
$60 billion in new transmission capacity. We
need to shift the nuclear research budget to
support wind and solar and geothermal
power. We need to aim at our own targets,
and not build targets for our enemies. ●
Michael Totten is chief adviser on climate,
water and ecosystem services at Conservation
International. Contact him at m.totten@
conservation.org.
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