New Ads Challenge Obama on Nuclear Energy

February began as a banner month for the nuclear industry, but it has ended rather differently.

First, the Obama administration announced that it would triple the value of nuclear loan guarantees for new projects to $54 billion. Obama followed this up with the news that more than $8 billion of those promised loans would go to two reactors in Georgia, to be supervised by a company that went $8 billion over budget building two nuclear plants in the 1980s. But a few recent setbacks suggest that Obama may have embraced nuclear energy too quickly in order to woo support from Republicans for the climate bill limping through Congress.

On Wednesday, Vermont's state legislature voted overwhelmingly to shutter Entergy's Vermont Yankee plant when its permit expires in two years because scientists reported unusual levels of a harmful chemical on the land surrounding the plant. Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists told ABC that "the Vermont Yankee situation clearly threatens to undermine the industry's campaign to spin nuclear power as clean and 'pollution-free' energy."

Responding to such incidents and the consistent economic instability of nuclear power, Friends of the Earth mounted a nuclear challenge to Obama's energy policy. The group released two ads in South Carolina and Georgia, both big nuclear states, to emphasize the financial and safety risks that have plagued nuclear energy in the past.

The first ad, titled "Family" (below), lists past nuclear disasters like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, and finishes with a close up on a child and the voice over "How would you feel about exposing your family to a potential radiation accident?" The second ad, "Risk," tied last year's financial hullabaloo to the potential for another nuclear bailout, similar to the nightmare scenario Mariah Blake describes in Mother Jones. "With cheaper, safer alternatives," the ad concludes, "why should taxpayers foot the bill for a new nuclear bailout?"

The Obama administration should take these setbacks as an opportunity to refocus on developing more efficient renewable technology through wind and solar, and creating green jobs, instead of defaulting to tried and tested options that have failed financially and environmentally time and time again.

Photo credit: StefrogZ