Coal, Nukes - Is There Any Polluting Energy Kentucky Won't Embrace?

The Kentucky General Assembly never disappoints: sometime after the reality-based world gives up on something stupid and destructive as a bad job, the KY Gen Asses decide it's just what we need.

A bill that would lift a more than 25-year-old moratorium on the building of nuclear power plants in Kentucky passed a Senate panel Wednesday with only one dissenting vote.

The Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee voted 9-1 Wednesday to approve Senate Bill 26. The bill now heads to the full Senate.

This is the third year that the measure has been filed. The bill passed the Senate and a House committee last year but the full House was not able to vote on the bill before the House ended the 2009 session.

SB 26, filed by independent Sen.Bob Leeper of Paducah, would overturn a 1984 state law that put a moratorium on the building of nuclear power plants until the federal government determines how to safely dispose of nuclear waste.

And because turning to a technology that landed on the dustheap of history twenty years ago isn't stupid enough ...

Sen. Ray Jones, D-Pikeville, was the lone dissenting vote. Jones said he was not convinced that nuclear power was safe and questioned why the state wasn’t doing more to help the coal industry.

Setting aside that Kentucky is literally starving the state in order to shower the coal industry with tax breaks, let's look at just why nuclear power is even less viable than the Magic Buggy Whip Industry.

In May 2008, The Nation asked "What Nuclear Renaissance?"

The fundamental fact is that nuclear power is too expensive and risky to attract the necessary commercial investors. Even with vast government subsidies, it is difficult or almost impossible to get proper financing and insurance. The massive federal subsidies on offer will cover up to 80 percent of construction costs of several nuclear power plants in addition to generous production tax credits, as well as risk insurance. But consider this: the average two-reactor nuclear power plant is estimated to cost $10 billion to $18 billion to build. That's before cost overruns, and no US nuclear power plant has ever been delivered on time or on budget.

SNIP

This much seems clear: a handful of firms might soak up huge federal subsidies and build one or two overpriced plants. While a new administration might tighten regulations, public safety will continue to be menaced by problems at new as well as older plants. But there will be no massive nuclear renaissance. Talk of such a renaissance, however, helps keep people distracted, their minds off the real project of developing wind, solar, geothermal and tidal kinetics to build a green power grid.

Eighteen months later, in December 2009, The Nation discovered that the industry had, indeed, given up on building new plants and was instead trying to keep broken, leaking, dying "zombie" plants alive beyond their 20-year lifespan.

This fleet of poorly regulated zombie plants is the real story of nuclear power. Building hundreds of new nukes to save us from climate change is a pipe dream--the time and expense necessary for that would be impossible to overcome in the decade or two remaining. And so the debate about the future of atomic power in the age of climate change functions mostly as a smoke screen behind which these old, leaky, crumbling plants are being pushed to the limit of their endurance. Half the fleet has already been relicensed and many up-rated to run at more than 100 percent of their designed capacity. To avoid dangerous accidents over the next two decades, the industry must be subject to real oversight. For that to happen, the NRC must be reformed.

The motto of the Kentucky General Assembly is: Billions for pollution, destruction and death; not one dime for a high-tech renewable future.