Nuclear bailout war rages on in Ohio -- please take action or spread the word!

Nuclear bailout war rages on in Ohio -- please take action or spread the word!

The Cincinnati Enquirer is wondering, "Who paid all that money to buy all those nuclear bailout ads raining on Ohio?" The Wall Street Journal reports "Ohio Lawmakers Miss Deadline to Save Two Nuclear Plants, Vow to Keep Trying." The nuclear bailout war continues to rage in Ohio. Resistance has blocked the nuclear bailout thus far, for the past several years. But the next ten days could decide this fight. As NIRS executive director, Tim Judson's, testimony to State of Ohio legislative committees predicted, bankrupt FirstEnergy Nuclear's claim, that it needed the multi-year, multi-billion dollar bailout, to be approved by June 30, 2019 -- so that it could order nuclear fuel for its Ohio reactors to keep operating -- was a bluff. "Magically," FirstEnergy has announced it can wait a bit longer. So its friends in the Ohio legislature have obliged, and extended their legislative session by two weeks, in order to ram the bailout through. This is unacceptable from a nuclear safety perspective -- one of the reactors in line to receive the bailout, Davis-Besse on the Lake Erie shore near Toledo, is one of the single most age-degraded and high-risk atomic reactors in the country. (See photo, above, of local residents protesting in 2011 -- with street theater appearances by the likes of Humpty Dumpty, King Kong, Homer Simpson, Mr. Burns, and Flying Pigs -- after revelations of severe cracking of Davis-Besse's concrete containment Shield Building, at the atomic reactor's front entrance.) It should have been shut down long ago, and should not be bailed out, enabling it to keep operating for years or decades to come!

 

The potential cataclysm that could unfold, if the Davis-Besse reactor melts down, and its containment fails, releasing catastrophic amounts of hazardous radioactivity into the environment, is unimaginable. The CRAC-II report (Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences, also known as the Sandia Siting Study, or NUREG/CR-2239), commissioned by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and carried out by Sandia National Lab, reported that 1,400 peak early fatalities (acute radiation poisoning deaths), 73,000 peak early injuries, 10,000 peak cancer deaths (latent cancer fatalities) would result. So too would $84 billion in property damages. But the Associated Press reported in 2011 that populations have soared around atomic reactors like Davis-Besse since 1982, so casualty figures would be much worse today. And when adjusted for inflation alone, property damages would now surmount $220 billion. Also, the Great Lakes downstream -- drinking water for many millions in multiple states and provinces in two countries, as well as a large number of Native American First Nations -- could be radioactively poisoned.  

 

If you live in Ohio, please take direct action. If you know anyone in Ohio, please spread the word to them ASAP, to take action! See a recent update, as well as a recent action alert, from Sierra Club, to learn more about what's happening, and what can be done about it. As Becca Pollard of Sierra Club has just reported, the Ohio State Senate committee is not meeting this week...but there will likely be more hearings next week. In the mean time...keep generating phone calls, tweets using the #NoOnHB6 tag, and letters to the editor. (See Beyond Nuclear's recent letter to the editor, here.) To learn more about the Ohio nuke bailout scheme, and other atomic subsidies (and the countless misrepresentations underlying them), see our running updates at our Nuclear Costs website section.