Commentary: Stealth nuke effort should be stopped

[OKIsItJustMe]

A commentary by 4 of our most respected nuclear experts... :P

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/10/11/nuclear.commentary/index.html

updated 10:50 a.m. EDT, Fri October 12, 2007

Commentary: Stealth nuke effort should be stopped

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By Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Graham Nash & Harvey Wasserman
Special to CNN

Editor's note: Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Graham Nash and Harvey Wasserman are among the co-founders of Musicians United for Safe Energy. They recently recorded a music video that can be seen at NukeFree.org.

LOS ANGELES (CNN) -- In 1979, we helped organize five nights of concerts at Madison Square Garden and an anti-nuke rally that drew 200,000 people. These efforts and the ongoing work of many grassroots and national safe energy groups have helped to hold off the building of new nuclear reactors ever since.

But three decades later, we're facing the same nuclear issues. And to counter this threat, we are organizing once again.

One of America's most critical financial and ecological decisions is now before Congress. The atomic energy industry wants at least $50 billion in loan guarantees for a "new generation" of reactors that have already begun to fail, and that Wall Street won't finance. Bonnie Raitt answers your questions

If these subsidies pass, scores of new radioactive terror targets, thousands of tons of radioactive waste and untold billions in bad debt could haunt us and our children for a long time to come.

Yet the sentence allowing all this to happen was slipped into the Senate version of the 2007 energy bill without serious public debate. Without strong public opposition, it could become part of the new energy bill. And with the millions the nuke lobby is spending, defeating this huge taxpayer rip-off will require a maximum effort from everyone committed to a safe energy future.

The push for new nuclear plants is full of irony. The terror attacks of September 11, 2001, made it clear no reactor can be protected from a jet crash. The first plane that hit the World Trade Center flew directly over the Indian Point reactors, 45 miles north of New York City. Had it hit the nuke complex, the death toll would by now be in the hundreds of thousands, based on a study by the environmental group Riverkeeper.

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[RC]

1. Yeah, but...

9/11 was an inside job. cheney would not allow the nuke power plants to be hit. they're safe from attack.

[phantom power]

2. I agree with them about one thing.

There should be a public debate about nuclear energy. A public debate about energy, really, nuclear energy being just one topic among many.

[OKIsItJustMe]

3. Nice idea

However, in all honesty, how do you go about organizing a public debate? Do people remember how that is done?

Does real debate even take place in Congress these days? (Maybe it does when the cameras are turned off...)

[phantom power]

4. No, I was mostly pipe-dreaming.

I think, if you take a cold, hard look at history, you can see that there has never really been an organized and rational "public debate" about issues of importance. Human politics just doesn't seem to work that way.
:(