Speaker Pelosi: Here's $50 Billion to Restore to the Stimulus in Conference(In loving memory of Guy Chichester of Rye, New Hampshire, 1936-2009.)<snip>
One of the changes made by the Senate version, however, was to add a $50 billion dollar bailout for the nuclear power industry. These projects are not "shovel ready," they won't be for years, they will not be labor intensive, and would take at least 10 years before supplying any energy, if at all.
Worse, the addition of the nuclear bailout literally robs many Americans of jobs, and children of schools and food.
Removing the atomic pork is the simplest and soundest way to put that $50 billion to work truly stimulating the economy rather than trying to resurrect a failed and dangerous industry.
The House-Senate conference committee will attempt to balance many competing interests. First and foremost is that Senator Sue Collins (R-ME), one of three Republicans to support the Stimulus, has said outright that she won't vote for final passage if the overall $828 price tag increases. That is also possible not only with the two other Republicans but with some conservative Democrats in the Senate. If the bill loses just two votes on the Senate side, it will die.
Simply by removing the nuclear bailout provision, the conference committee can find $50 billion dollars to allocate to greater and better priorities without jeopardizing final passage of the bill in the Senate.
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Senator Robert Bennett (R-UT) is the culprit who inserted the $50 nuclear bailout into the Senate version. He didn't even vote for the Stimulus Bill.
Bennett denied to the Salt Lake Tribune that the $50 billion is for nuclear power. "It is not a bailout for the nuclear industry in any sense of the word. It is a method of attracting private capital into renewable energy."
That's a flat-out lie, according to Brad Johnson at Think Progress:
Although the loan guarantee program covers nuclear technology, carbon capture and sequestration for coal plants, as well as renewable energy, the vast bulk of requested loans - $122 billion - are for new nuclear power plants. This $50 billion nuclear throwaway nearly matches the total allocation for genuinely clean energy in the House version of the stimulus package: only $52 billion in total for smart grid, renewable energy, and energy efficiency investments.
According to a Department of Energy press release in October of 2008, the program will most certainly go to nukes:
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced it has received 19 Part I applications from 17 electric power companies for federal loan guarantees to support the construction of 14 nuclear power plants in response to its June 30, 2008 solicitation. The applications reflect the intentions of those companies to build 21 new reactors, with some applications covering two reactors at the same site.
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