NEW DEVELOPMENTS IN ONGOING ACTIONS | NIRS

NEW DEVELOPMENTS IN ONGOING ACTIONS!

STOP THE VOGTLE LOANS!

STOP A MOBILE CHERNOBYL!

YOUR ACTIONS MATTER.

June 27, 2013,

Dear Friends,

There are major developments in two of our most important ongoing actions and your help is needed now more than ever.

*Stop taxpayer loans for new reactors in Georgia. In February 2010, President Obama announced a conditional $8.3 Billion taxpayer loan for construction of two new reactors at the Vogtle site in Georgia. Those reactors are now under construction. But the taxpayer loan has never been granted.

Why? Because, to his credit, Obama didn't promise a sweetheart deal. And the White House's Office of Management and Budget, which along with the Department of Energy must approve the deal, has steadfastly refused to bow to the demands of Southern Company and its partners for a deal that would place all of the risk on taxpayers instead of the utilities.

The offer of a loan expires June 30. Probably the offer will be extended, as it has several times before. But right now is the best possible time to put pressure on the Department of Energy--the only entity which seems to really want this deal to go through. The more pressure we can put on DOE, and the more light we can shed on this likely financial disaster, the more likely we can kill this deal all together.

Just today, a major investment firm downgraded Southern Company stock and warned of likely cost overruns at Vogtle that could cause the price to rise to $20 Billion.

While Southern Co. and its partners are building Vogtle now because of their access to ratepayer money through Georgia's CWIP law, we believe that this project will crumble if the federal loan offer is withdrawn. In particular, Vogtle's partners, mostly much smaller electric co-ops and municipal utilities, need the loan even more than Southern Co.

Please be sure you have sent your letter to new DOE Secretary Moniz, President Obama, and your members of Congress. Do it here. And please share this action as widely as possible.
*Stop a Mobile Chernobyl. Today, the Senate Energy Committee Gang of 4--Sens. Wyden, Feinstein, Murkowski and Alexander--formally released their new radioactive waste legislation. You can download it here.
Unfortunately, despite your thousands of comments to the Committee, the Gang of 4 is continuing to bow to the nuclear power industry and is encouraging "interim" storage of high-level radioactive waste. But shipping thousands of casks of lethal high-level radwaste over our roads, rails and waterways to insecure, "temporary" storage sites is not a solution to our radioactive waste problem. Rather, it's an invitation to a Mobile Chernobyl.

Please be sure you have signed the petition to Stop A Mobile Chernobyl and stop the concept of "interim" storage. We need solutions, not dirty band-aids. And please share this action widely too.

If you're on our snail mail list, watch your mailbox. We just sent out 20,000 of these petitions to you; we hope you'll take them (and print more!) to your meetings, churches, grocery stores, bars--whereever you gather with people--and help gather more signatures.

We've had a lot of victories already this year--Calvert Cliffs-3, San Onofre, Kewaunee, Crystal River, etc. Let's add to them now!

As always, thank you for your activism, thank you for your much-needed financial support. You can make a tax-deductible donation here.

Thanks for all you do,
Michael Mariotte
Executive Director
Nuclear Information and Resource Service www.nirs.org
nirsnet@nirs.org

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see also 

ANTI-NUCLEAR ACTIONS 2013 - NIRS