“The New Nuclear Push” — Beyond Nuclear board member Karl Grossman interviews our radioactive waste specialist, Kevin Kamps

Enviro Close-Up #689 The New Nuclear Push with Kevin Kamps of Beyond Nuclear

Part 1

“We are up against the biggest push for nuclear power that I’ve ever experienced in 32 years of anti-nuclear power activism,” says Kevin Kamps of the organization Beyond Nuclear. Kamps refutes the claim of the nuclear industry that nuclear power is carbon-free. “It’s not true. It’s not carbon-free by any means,” he says, and “not even low carbon when you compare it to genuinely low carbon sources of electricity, renewables like wind and solar.” But the nuclear industry is involved in a “propaganda campaign” attempting to validate itself by citing climate change. He speaks of many in government having “fallen for this ploy.” He discusses the move now to restart the long-troubled Palisades nuclear power plant in Michigan, “closed for good reason” by its owner Entergy in 2022. Its current owner, Holtec, wants to restart this “Zombie reactor” and keep it operating until 2051. And Holtec is receiving billions of dollars in federal and state “bailouts” for this. Kamps tells of the hundreds of billions of U.S. government dollars now or soon going to nuclear power and identifies specific pieces of enabling legislation. And he talks about the extension of the Price-Anderson Act to 2065. The 1957 act limits liability from losses from injury, death and property damage caused by a nuclear plant accident, originally for 10 years—until, as “introductory language of the 1957 bill” said, the industry got on its “own two feet.” Now under Price-Anderson, liability would be limited to no more than $16 billion although “estimates of damages” from the Fukushima catastrophe “have reached out to the $600 billion range.” Price-Anderson would continue until 2065—or rather than 10 years, notes Kamps, for 108 years. He tells of how the nuclear and fossil fuel industries “have done their best to sabotage renewable energy because they don’t want the competition.” Yet still, “solar and wind are growing by leaps and bounds.”  View Full Program Here

[See Part 2, here.]