Loan Guarantees

So the "all the above" energy strategy now deems we dump another $6.5 billion in bogus loan guarantees down the atomic drain.

Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz has announced finalization of hotly contested taxpayer handouts for the two Vogtle reactors being built in Georgia. Another $1.8 billion waits to be pulled out of your pocket and poured down the radioactive sink hole.

A nuke-powered drone strike on fiscal sanity.

The Department of Energy wants to give the Southern Company a nuclear power loan guarantee at better interest rates than you can get on a student loan. And unlike a home mortgage, there may be no down payment.

Why?

The terms DOE is offering the builders of the Vogtle atomic reactors have only become partially public through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.

We still may not know all the details.

We all knew it was coming.

Radioactive tuna has been caught off the coast of California. The fingerprint of cesium 137 is unmistakably from the exploded reactors at Fukushima.

But Fukushima's hot hands are also on a very welcome debate still stalemating China's plans to build more than 30 new reactors. Fierce No Nukes opposition continues to escalate in India. Reactor cancellations have spread throughout Europe.

The projected price for Georgia's Vogtle Double Reactor Project has jumped at least $900 million in just three months....and that's just for starters.   

There are zero commercial reactors operating in Japan today. On March 10, 2011, there were 54 licensed to operate, well over 10% percent of the global fleet.

But for the first time in 42 years, a country at the core of global reactor electricity is producing none of its own.

Worldwide, there are fewer than 400 operating reactors for the first time since Chernobyl, a quarter-century ago.

The only two US reactor projects now technically under construction are on the brink of death for financial reasons.

If they go under, there will almost certainly be no new reactors built here.

The much mythologized "nuclear renaissance" will be officially buried, and the US can take a definitive leap toward a green-powered future that will actually work and that won't threaten the continent with radioactive contamination.

The global upheaval that is the Occupy Movement is hopefully in the process of changing---and saving---the world.

Through the astonishing power of creative non-violence, it has the magic and moxie to defeat the failing forces of corporate greed.

A long-term agenda seems to be emerging: social justice, racial and gender equality, ecological survival, true democracy, an end to war, and so much more. "When the power of love overcomes the love of power," said Jimi Hendrix, "the world will know peace."

Republicans up in arms about the infamous failed federal $535 million loan guarantee for the Solyndra solar panel producer are finally tasked to apply the same standards to nuclear power.

If that happens, there will be no more commercial reactors built in the United States.

Unlike solar power, atomic energy cannot attract private capital. So if the GOP succeeds in dragging down the entire federal energy loan program, the "Nuclear Renaissance" could be definitively done.

Amidst a life-and-death struggle to finally shut the nuclear energy industry, the power of green music flows again this Sunday.