Nuclear policy experts Bob Alvarez (Institute for Policy Studies) and Brent Blackwelder (Friends of the Earth) offered a peek at this country’s nuclear future at a seminar this afternoon at USC. And it looks pretty bleak.
The two talked about the wildly expensive (Bush wants to spend $405 million in fiscal year 2008) Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) – a program that plans to render plutonium inert in nuclear weapons but still useful in nuclear power plants.
The GNEP program raises concern about the costs of radioactive wastes it would produce. Some were outlined in an Institute for Policy Studies report released on April 23. Directed by Alvarez, Senior Policy Advisor to the U.S. Secretary of Energy from 1993 to 1999, the report concludes that the program is likely to cost billions in taxpayer dollars on an unproven reprocessing technology that will generate unprecedented amounts of highly radioactive wastes without plausible disposition paths.
