Following up on my recent post about the US-India nuclear deal, Reuters is reporting today that at least 40 private companies (Indian) are now lobbying their government to allow privately owned and operated nuclear power plants. It's a nice idea, diversifying the energy sector and not putting the entire financial burden of that on the state. i'd put it in the same league as applauding oil companies for their leadership in finding a way out of our addiction to petroleum. As a wise man once said, "To hell with facts! We need stories!" One story we can always depend on hearing from the private sector is that in the event of fiscal or material meltdown, the burden of bailout and clean-up must fall on the shoulders of the state.

This is yet another facet of the nuke industry's self-deception. Clean and efficient electricity production? Sure, as long as one doesn't take into account uranium mining and processing, spent nuclear fuel reprocessing, transportation hazards, long-term waste storage (let's say 24,000 years minimum), rampant plant cost overruns and impacts of any accidental releases or Chernobyl style meltdown. You can bet that as soon as detectors in Abu Dhabi start picking up high levels of cesium, the Indian government would be asked to step in and manage the emergency response. (If i remember correctly, Exxon was not in charge of trying to salvage the oil-soaked animals who happened to find themselves in the Valdez' spill zone... notice any kind of pattern here?) These nuke people are just living in a dream world and yes, i'd certainly add Candidate Obama to the list of dreamers. Building NPPs in a country whose basic infrastructure is either collapsing or on the verge of collapse is pure stupidity. Building them in countries which are disastrously impacted by earthquakes, monsoons, hurricanes and tsunamis increases the stupidity variable ten-fold. They consume a huge amount of resources to build and maintain, leave a wake of environmental havoc, and pose too great a risk in a world run by incompetent extremists.

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Few days later. Reading this again, i realized that i neglected to point out that the US "civilian" nuclear power industry was privatized from the get-go and is a good case in point against privatization. elsewhere. The weapons manufacturing network is a joint private-public venture: GE, Dupont, Westinghouse.... all of whom also profit from the civilian nuke sector. (Ironically, in some aspects the two were more distinct in the USSR than the US.) The nuke lobby likes to claim that the number of accidents and other mishaps at US NPPs is very low, but they are not including the weapons plants, managed by the very same corporations. These places are so dirty, their workers suffer the same health crises as veterans of atomic tests, and the only reason we know so much more about the nightmare that is Hanford, et al. and have seen so much more effort put into cleaning them up is because they are ultimately owned by the DOE. Investigating the history of any NPP, one sees a lot more near disasters than might be expected and a whole lot less transparency. The companies have not built up the piggy banks they are required by law to have - a set percentage of plant costs, annually - to collectively pay for a permanent waste storage site. Cooling ponds are filling up, the current nuke waste dump has or will soon reach capacity and stop accepting wastes - this is a big problem, and the taxpayers are going to end up paying the utilities again (essentially) to deal with it because inaction is not an option.

Energy production is too crucial and complex to manage on the basis of profits. On the basis of economics - sure, of course, we must - but even that needs to come through a democratic decision-making process, which is not what private energy companies are about. Remain ever vigilant, the guys are not to be trusted on any continent.