The long-awaited Senate Climate Bill, co-sponsored by Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and pushed hard by President Obama, is expected to be introduced on Monday, April 26--assuming the senators working on the legislation can find a compromise that can lower transportation greenhouse emissions without stampeding the 60 votes needed to pass the bill.
But transportation isn't the only controversial issue in the bill. Another is nuclear energy, and the promise of as much as $54 billion in government loan guarantees to revitalize and expand the U.S. nuclear industry. Ironically, April 26, the day the bill with all of those nuclear loan guarantees is supposed to begin its march toward passage, is also the anniversary of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident in Ukraine--the poster event for the global anti-nuke movement.
Radiation from Chernobyl affected more than 3,600 villages and 2.5 million people, disrupted agriculture by contaminating soil and food crops, and forced more than 350,000 people to relocate. According to estimates by several scientific bodies, Chernobyl radiation has already caused thousands of deaths and is expected to cause thousands more.
Global warming has caused many lawmakers and scientists, and even some environmentalists, to start thinking of nuclear power as a clean energy option because it doesn't emit greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. Nuclear opponents argue that there are serious unresolved public safety and national security issues with nuclear energy--and that it isn't as clean as supporters claim.
Judging by the most recent news reports, there's a good chance that the current transportation controversy could stall introduction of the bill for a few days. If that happens, it may save Kerry, Lieberman and Graham some initial negative publicity about proposing a massive expansion of U.S. nuclear power on the anniversary of the world's worst and most deadly nuclear accident--but they won't be able to dodge that bullet for long.
According to The Washington Post's Post Carbon blog, mainstream environmental groups are planning to "praise first and criticize later" when the Senate Climate Bill is introduced. In other words, their initial response will be to congratulate the senators for drafting the bill and to highlight a few of its good points, but they will quickly follow up by attacking what they consider the bill's weaknesses and calling for the Senate to strengthen the bill before it comes to a vote. Heading their wish list is likely to be a call for "no nukes."
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Comments
It’s ironic that Chernobyl was the poster for the anti-nuke movement; Russian RBMK reactors like Chernobyl are prone to exactly that kind of disaster by design; basically, your reactivity control and coolant are different stuff, so when the coolant boils off, reactivity goes way up.
In US, since the dawn of the commercial nuclear industry, we’ve had reactors that use the coolant as the moderator; if the coolant boils off, the reactor naturally drops out of criticality and shuts down. We, in the US, can’t actually suffer a “Chernobyl” event. The closest we can suffer is a Fermi 1 or a Three Mile Island – which were far more expensive than dangerous.
Chernobyl is located in Ukraine