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The election of George W
Bush, and the Californian “energy crisis” has renewed the
push by the nuclear industry to sell itself as the solution to both
the “energy crisis” and the greenhouse gas problem. Mr Bush
views nuclear power favourably, and his election campaign received significant
contributions from this industry, directly related organizations and
lobbyists. Nuclear energy executives have had extraordinary access to Bush’s officials, and his “energy task force” includes several members with strong links to the nuclear industry.
The nuclear industry argues that nuclear power emits few greenhouse gases and can provide almost unlimited electricity. However data from comprehensive life-cycle analyses of greenhouse gas emissions of a range of power generation methods conducted by researchers from Germany’s Oeko Institute show that nuclear power produces significant quantities of greenhouse gases during mining, processing, transport and decommissioning. California’s power supply crisis has resulted from badly-managed partial deregulation of the power industry using Thatcher’s “common pool” method of deregulation where all power produced must be sent to a single common market, and sold on to distributors (retailers) at the price paid by the last distributor on any given day – distrbutors still forced by regulation to sell at a capped price to consumers. It has been alleged that producers sometimes deliberately restrict supply in order to drive prices up - at times up to 25% of generating capacity has been off-line for ‘maintenance.’ This partial deregulation occurred at a time when power consumption in California was increasing dramatically, despite international obligations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Politically conservative groups claim that the Californian crisis is the fault of “environmentalists” preventing the construction of more fossil and nuclear power plants, and power lines. Californian industries, lobbyists and individuals were second only to oil-rich Texans in the amount of money they donated to George Bush’s campaign. George Bush is now serving two energy industry masters - the fossil fuel industry, and the nuclear industry. In May, Mr Bush announced that the US would not agree to the terms of the Kyoto protocol on greenhouse gas reduction, saying that the only issue to consider was the US economy. He also announced an expansion in the nuclear power industry, declaring it “clean and safe”. The US nuclear power program had been stalled since the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown, this plant having been hailed a “scintillating success” six months earlier by the Carter administration. Before this, nuclear power plants had proliferated due to the financial guarantees offered by government under the Price Anderson Act, which protects contractors and individuals from incurring financial hardship resulting from nuclear accident. The Bush administration plans to renew this Act beyond its current expiry date of 2002. Throughout the past 11 years, consumers in nuclear-powered states such as California have been paying higher than US average prices to enable utilities to recover financial losses due to unprofitable investments in nuclear power plants. And 11 nuclear power reactors have closed for economic reasons. The danger of deregulation, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists’ David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer, is that it is forcing nuclear plant owners to become competitive, which will mean skipping safety tests and inspections, trimming staffing levels, and delaying repairs. (The pride of American science and technology- the space shuttle Challenger - was brought down by cost-cutting by the contractors involved.) Australia’s
looming ‘energy crisis’ See this excellent
US website: Nuclear Information and Resource Service www.nirs.org
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the Anti-Nuclear Alliance of Western
Australia
email admin@anawa.org.au |
