Scott Summers-Equal Opportunity Blaster

Yesterday, I ran a statement from 16th congressional district Green Party candidate Scott Summers. It blasted Don Manzullo for wanting to take the oil out of the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge.

Today he takes on Democratic Party candidate Robert Abboud for his emphasis on using nuclear power.

Congressional candidate
Robert Abboud:
All Nuclear, All the Time

On May 3rd, the Rockford Register-Star's Chuck Sweeny ran an article on my Congressional opponents, Don Manzullo and Robert Abboud, and their respective takes on energy policy.

(Memo to self: tell Sweeny that Summers is running, too.)

Wow. Abboud wants one hundred new nuclear power plants. Public-private partnership.

Well, I guess we all should have expected something like this from Abboud.

Don't get me wrong: Abboud strikes me as a highly intelligent man. He's a nuclear engineer. And of course he's going to be a proponent of new nukes. And as part of our three-way discourse in the 16th district this year, he has every right to put it out there for voters to consider.

But excuuuuuuuse me: one-friggin'-hundred? This is as preposterous as it is grandiose as it is ridiculous as it is irresponsible as it is reprehensible.

It will come as no particular surprise to my readers that I am adamantly opposed to the expansion of nuclear power.

Permit me to summarize the ways. For the sake of brevity, I'll limit it to the first one hundred and four.

Reasons 1 – 100. Memo to Abboud: What? What? You want to build one hundred new T-E-R-R-O-R-I-S-T T-A-R-G-E-T-S ????

Reason 101. It's over sixty-five years since Enrico Fermi's team split the atom at the University of Chicago. And we STILL haven't figured out how to store (much less dispose of, much less effectively reprocess) thousands of tons of highly radioactive waste.

Sorry, Bob: as a condition of even PROPOSING more nukes, it's up to proponents like you to have a plan for dealing with the (polite word) stuff. (Oh, and by the way: make the investors, and the stockholders of the utility companies, and their ratepayers – not the taxpayers – pay for it.)

Reason 102. No more subsidies to the nuclear industry for (a) research (b) construction and (c ) disposal. (See investor/stockholder responsibility. Geez, whatever happened to capitalism in this country?)

Reason 103. No more federal insurance caps on nukes: make the nuclear industry pay for its own insurance, at market rates -- if they can get it, that is.

Did you know that the federal Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act caps government insurance for each site at $300 million, plus operator contributions per reactor of $95.8 million? So in the event of an accident -- Three Mile Island, anyone? -- there's less than $400 million to go around. For an incident of such enormity, that's chump change, folks. That's less than two days of war in Iraq. And taxpayers – not operators -- are on the hook for over three-quarters of that pittance!

Reason 104. State insurance regulators should compel insurers to remove nuclear exclusions from policies – or at least offer an optional endorsement at a ridiculously high extra premium. (And did you know that, homeowners? If your home gets irradiated from a nuclear accident at oh, say, Byron, you probably have no coverage, because your insurer pointedly excludes nuclear accidents?)

And not only that: if you personally are lucky enough not to be too terribly irradiated, and can move a thousand miles away for the rest of your life, why, please, just keep paying your mortgage on your uninhabitable home. (Do you really think your lender is going to give you a break?)

Let's talk the obvious. Absent huge public subsidies, and absent a requirement that the nuclear industry (and not the public at large) come up with ways of storing the s**t, and absent the almost complete lack of financial liability in the event of an accident, nuclear energy simply would not be able to compete in the energy marketplace. (See “Whatever Happened to Capitalism, Continued”.)

For cryin' out loud, Mr. Abboud, it's time to STOP building more reactors! And if only we would let market forces rule -- there wouldn't BE any more reactors!

I'll speak on energy solutions in other posts.

This campaign could be fun to watch.

Posted first on McHenry County Blog.