[NYTr] The Nuke Industry: Gore's Biggest Fan

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Counterpunch - Oct 20, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn10202007.html

excerpted from CounterPunch Diary

Gore's Biggest Fan

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

The nuclear industry decorously restrained itself from raising a public
cheer when Norway's Nobel committee gave Al Gore half of this year's
peace prize, but the industry's private emotions of gratitude have
surely been fervent. In practical terms it has been the chief
beneficiary of the uproar about man's supposed contribution to global
warming.

Twenty years ago, as an answer to America's energy needs, nuclear power
stood at a nadir in public esteem, particularly among environmentalists
and precisely that segment of the population most upset today about
global warming.

The objections to nuclear power are as valid today as they ever were.
Nuclear power plants produce large amounts of lethal toxic waste,
trundled, often by rail around the country, often through urban areas
where fire or kindred accident could swiftly produce catastrophe. The
storage sites have been prone to leaks and poisoning of aquifers. The
plants themselves are prone to boiler explosions, also to armed
assault, again with potentially catastrophic human consequences.

Nuclear energy requires uranium, mined at grave human cost. It sustains
the military production of nuclear weapons. It's an energy source using
the centralized grid systems that environmentalists have been assailing
for decades. Since they frequently break down, they have to be backed
by coal-fired plants. Unless the US government assumes liability, the
energy produced is extremely expensive. Finally, to those crediting the
jeremiads of Gore and others about the baneful role of humanly-produced
greenhouse gases, the nuclear plants do badly in this regard.

Yet the immense irony is that many influential greenhouse alarmists
have always been privately well aware that unless the nation shifted to
energy sources and conservation measures which would be anathema to the
most powerful corporate interests in the United States, the prime exit
from the crisis they have been sponsoring is through a door marked
"nuclear power". Gore himself has been a shil to the nuclear industry
from the first day he stepped into Congress entrusted with the sacred
duty to protect the budgetary and regulatory interests of the Tennessee
Valley Authority and the Oakridge National Laboratory, both of them
enormously powerful institutions in Gore's home state.

Already the fixation on anthropogenic global warming stoked by Gore has
done great damage to vital environmental clean-up work, sidetracking
attention and money from work on sewers, toxic waste sites, filthy
smoke stacks, not to mention the vast disaster of agricultural
pollution. Bio-fuels will steal the meals of the Third nuclear World
poor and put them in First World gas tanks.

But nuclear power is the hysteria's prime beneficiary, as Peter
Montague, a thorn in the nuclear industry's side for many years,
narrates in detail our current CounterPunch newsletter, beginning with
the news thay "The long-awaited and much-advertised 'nuclear
renaissance' actually got under way this fall."