Urgent: Stop New Nuclear Power Plants

AN URGENT CALL TO STOP THE $50 BILLION NUKE POWER GIVE-AWAY From Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Graham Nash and Harvey Wasserman: Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE) As early as this Friday, Congress may approve legislation allowing the Department of Energy to approve $50 billion and more in federal loan guarantees to build new nuclear power plants. Take Action! The nuclear industry itself has made it clear that this astonishing taxpayer give-away is the only way new atomic reactors will be built in this country. After fifty years of proven failure, neither Wall Street nor the utility industry wants to finance new atomic construction without your taxpayer dollars to guarantee their investments. You might think that after half a century, technology once sold on the promise of being "too cheap to meter" would be able to raise its own funding. But it can't. By contrast, no federal guarantees are needed for the billions of dollars being invested in building new wind farms all over the world. Now the reactor industry falsely claims that it can help solve the global warming problem, even though nukes cause major CO2 emissions in the mining, milling and enriching of nuclear fuel, in the reactor construction and decommissioning process, and in the long-term management of spent radioactive fuel, for which there is no real solution. No New Nukes! A single dollar spent on increased efficiency saves as much energy as ten dollars spent on nuclear power can produce. But under a phony "green" guise, the industry wants to exploit a single-sentence loophole in the Energy Bill passed by the U.S. Senate to cash in on virtually limitless federal loan guarantees. The sentence was slipped into the law without open debate. It is essential that we stop this gargantuan nuclear rip-off from happening. This is just the first major battle in what will be a long, hard fight to stop atomic energy from once again derailing the necessary transition to a global economy based on the efficient, equitable use of natural energies provided by our Mother Earth. Thanks and No Nukes! Bonnie, Jackson, Graham & Harvey