The McCain Plan: Homer Simpson without the Donut
Energy Policy | John McCain
by Greg Palast | August 7, 2008
I'm guessing it was excessive exposure to either radiation or George Bush, but Senator John McCain's comments from inside a nuclear power plant in Michigan are so cracked-brained that I fear some loose gamma rays are doing to McCain's gray matter what they did to Homer Simpson's.
On Tuesday, the presumptive Republican candidate descended into the colon of a nuke to declare we need to build 45 new nuclear plants - that this is the way out of our energy crisis. Nuclear power, declared the senator, is a "safe, efficient
inexpensive" alternative to oil.
Really? We can argue all day about whether nuclear plants are safe (they aren't -period). But there can be no argument whatsoever that these giant radioactive tea-kettles are breathtakingly expensive.
Nuclear plants are cheap until you actually try to build one. Not one of the last 49 nuclear plants cost less than $2 billion apiece. I'm looking down the road at the remainders of the Shoreham nuclear plant which took nearly 20 years to build at a cost of $8 billion - or close to $7,000 per customer it was supposed to supply. When I say "supposed to," it was closed for safety reasons after operating just one single day.
We're told that the new generation of plants will be different. Just like an alcoholic child-beater, the nuclear plant builders promise us that, "This time it will be different." Sure. And McCain believes them.
I don't. Maybe that's because I headed the government racketeering investigation of the Shoreham nuclear plant's builders. Stone & Webster Engineering and its partner paid hundreds of millions of dollars to settle the civil racketeering claim over the evidence we found of fraud and perjury. Now Stone & Webster will cash in big-time under Plan McCain.
The other big builder which will hit the jackpot under the McCain scheme is KBR, the one-time subsidiary of Halliburton, whose best known project is the rebuilding of Iraq. (Halliburton dumped KBR last year. Can't blame them.) KBR has built many nukes -not one within a mile of its promised cost.
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http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/16348
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