Obama’s two-faced nuclear energy policy, my article in the Philly Inquirer
President Obama fully supports expanding the U.S. nuclear-energy industry – or so he’d have us believe.
Obama got lots of publicity with his recent promise of more than $8 billion in federal loan guarantees for two Georgia nuclear plants, which would be the first built in more than three decades. He also announced that his budget would triple loan guarantees for nuclear plants, declaring that, “to meet our growing energy needs and prevent the worst consequences of climate change, we’ll need to increase our supply of nuclear power. It’s that simple.”
But it’s not that simple. Antinuclear activists continue to score points by observing that we have no place to store the 2,200 tons of nuclear waste that our approximately 100 nuclear sites produce every year, much less a 66,000-ton backlog. Nevada’s Yucca Mountain was the nation’s designated nuclear-waste storage facility, but it was torpedoed by none other than Obama.
Read why Obama has tried to kill the Yucca Mountain project (yes, you know it’s political) and why we desperately need it, in my Philadelphia Inquirer article.