Editorial: Bush loves nuclear power

Friday, May 26, 2006 | 7:16 a.m.

President Bush this week visited Pennsylvania's Limerick Generating Station to again tout the benefits of nuclear power and call for its expansion. While what Bush said - and what he didn't say - was all too familiar, it still doesn't make it any less alarming than his previous statements about nuclear power.

Bush has said repeatedly that more U.S. reactors should be constructed so that nuclear power would represent a bigger portion of the nation's "energy mix" - along with coal, natural gas, oil and a tiny percentage of renewable sources such as wind, water and geothermal - to ease the nation's dependence on foreign oil.

America needs nuclear power to assure its "economic security and national security," Bush said on his tour Wednesday. What he didn't say was that an expansion of nuclear power would do little to curb our oil "addiction" - only about 3 percent of the nation's energy plants are fueled by oil (about half are coal-fired, and almost 20 percent are nuclear).

Bush's visit to Limerick was about 60 miles from the site of the 1979 Three Mile Island reactor accident. Bush contended that nuclear power is safe today, but the record is hardly spot-free; the nation's aging nuclear plants have had several troubling safety violations in recent years.

What Bush did not address this week was the lingering unease that many Americans still have with nuclear power - the fear that it would only take one terrible accident, such as Chernobyl 20 years ago, to create a major catastrophe.

Bush also said that nuclear power offers an "abundant and plentiful" alternative energy source. The president noted that nuclear reactors burn no fossil fuels that pollute the air and contribute to global warming.

But Bush, like so many other nuclear cheerleaders, hasn't come to grips with the most fundamental problem with nuclear power: America has no safe, long-term plan for the waste. The highly radioactive spent fuel from nuclear reactors is some of the most deadly material known to man.

The administration is committed to a deeply flawed, long-delayed plan to launch an unprecedented waste-shipping campaign to transport the nation's most highly radioactive spent fuel to Nevada's Yucca Mountain for permanent burial. The deadly waste and the dangerous plan to bury high-level nuclear waste at Yucca very much contradict Bush's assertion this week that nuclear power "helps us protect the environment."