NUKE LOVEFEST?! Cautionary Tale to MI House

[“Burning Money” image by Gene Case/Avenging Angels. It was featured on the cover of The Nation magazine in 2003, accompanying an article by Christian Parenti about the George W. Bush/Dick Cheney administration’s ill-fated nuclear power relapse underway at that time. Of three-dozen gigantic new reactors proposed, almost all were cancelled in various stages of development. Only Vogtle 3 & 4 in Georgia actually fired up, albeit seven years behind schedule, and at a cost of $18.4 billion each, instead of the $2.5 billion each predicted by the Nuclear Energy Institute, as cited by Dick Cheney in his Energy Task Force report of May, 2001. $12 billion of U.S. taxpayer funding could still be lost if Georgia Power fails to pay back U.S. Department of Energy loan guarantees, and hundreds of thousands of low-income Georgia ratepayers have been cut off from electricity for lack of payment. A Construction Work in Progress nuclear power tax has been added to their electric bills, to finance Vogtle 3 & 4’s construction. The budget busting project also contributed to Westinghouse’s bankruptcy in 2017.]

Beyond Nuclear has written all 110 Michigan State Representatives, after yet another round of pro-nuclear power bills got hearings before legislative committees.

Since 2022, when Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s support for the unprecedented restart of the closed Palisades reactor began, the legislature has approved $300 million in state grants for the nuclear “zombie.” The legislature has also approved nuclear power as “clean” energy for climate mitigation, and so far has joined the bandwagon for “Small Modular Reactor” (SMR) new builds. Holtec has also targeted Palisades’ tiny 432-acre site for two SMR-300s. At 300 Megawatts-electric each, this would nearly double the nuclear megawattage at Palisades. We attached Nuclear Watch South and Georgia WAND’s Vogtle Truth report to our letters.