Assemblymember Lloyd Levine and Major Environmental Groups to Schwarzenegger: Say No to Nuclear Power

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

Assemblymember Lloyd Levine, the Sierra Club California, Environment California, Coalition for Clean Air and Clean Power Campaign delivered the following letter to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger stating why they oppose giving nuclear power a second chance. The Governor earlier said nuclear power has a great future because it has no greenhouse gas emissions and it’s clean.

Dear Governor Schwarzenegger:

We are very concerned you are pushing the idea of giving nuclear power a second look as an answer to global warming when California has made a commitment to supporting other alternative energy solutions like wind, solar and geothermal technologies for the past four years.

Nuclear power comes with a vicious pollution cycle. The production process of mining uranium to fuel nuclear plants requires massive diesel powered machinery that grossly pollutes the air. The mined uranium would then have to be shipped to the United States in large, diesel powered ships and reprocessed into nuclear fuel in pollution producing coke ovens.

Nuclear power is expensive. It costs $10 billion dollars or more to construct a single nuclear power plant.

Construction is so expensive that no utility is willing to undertake the endeavor without massive subsidies. Additionally, nuclear power plants are so risky that for the last 50 years the federal government has had to provide liability protection for plant operators to cover potential disasters. That does not inspire confidence in a state like California. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, California is filled with thousands of identified and unidentified earthquake faults capable of causing a 7.0 magnitude earthquake.

The California Legislature enacted nuclear power plant safety laws in 1976. These laws have served us well. Before new nuclear plants could be built in California, we would need to repeal those laws and give up the protection they provide. One of those laws prohibits construction of new nuclear plants until there is a proven means for safe dispose of the highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel the plants produce. In the 28 years since those safety laws were enacted, we have come no nearer to a solution to the nuclear waste disposal problem today than we were then. And remember, that spent fuel has a lethal half life of 500,000 years.

Today there is highly radioactive waste stored at four nuclear plants in California including two that were shut down more than two decades ago. That’s because the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission still hasn’t provided a disposal facility for the toxic waste at Sacramento’s Rancho Seco plant and PG & E’s Humboldt Bay plant. On California’s pristine coast nuclear material is being stored on-site at San Onofre and Diablo Canyon nuclear plants.