HW: Oh, by the way, that's utter nonsense. Talk about pie-in-the-sky technology. The recycling of nuclear fuel has been a disaster in Britain, France and Japan. It is not workable technology. It creates much more toxic nuclear waste than was originally dealt with. And it's not economic. We have experience with attempting to reprocess nuclear fuel, and it has failed. That's why the $50 billion in this stimulus package has got to come out.
PM: And that's one of the reasons I left --
AG: Patrick Moore?
PM: One of the reasons I left Greenpeace is because people like Harvey spread this misinformation. The French are fueling twenty-two of their fifty-nine nuclear reactors on recycled fuel. Just go to COG La Hague. They've got a huge facility there. Japan has also built a $30 billion facility to fabricate and recycle fuel.
But on the point of taxpayers, every other country but the United States has state-owned electrical utilities -- Canada, France, Britain, you name it. The government takes 100 percent of the risk on electric utilities, because they are perceived as a monopoly and a national security issue in most countries. The United States is the only place where private capital is expected to pay for electricity infrastructure.
And the only reason wind and solar are being built is because of mandates and extremely high costs being paid to these technologies. It's political. If there was no subsidy for wind and solar, there would hardly be any wind and solar. People would be building base load power like nuclear and fossil fuels. But, you know, I'm not in favor of continuing to build coal plants. I think 50 percent is enough. That's how much electricity in the US comes from coal. And again, it doesn't make sense to charge a plug-in hybrid or run a ground-source heat pump on a coal-fired power plant. It just puts the pollution somewhere else.
HW: No, but it does --
AG: Harvey Wasserman?
HW: It does make sense to run them on wind farms. And Patrick, who is Canadian makes a good--and will not be paying, by the way, for the $50 billion bailout that the nuclear industry wants in advance here. And by the way, the congressional budget office has warned that 50 percent of the nuclear utility--the utilities that build nuclear plants will go bankrupt.
And he has -- Patrick has pointed out, you know, that the nuclear utilities in Europe are all government-owned. All this hype about the French reactors putting out so much energy obscures the fact that these are owned by the government. It is a national socialist form of electric generation. We don't want that in the United States.
And by the way, don't go anywhere near the La Hague reprocessing facility. Every country in Europe has asked France to shut down this reprocessing facility, because it's such a major polluter. It has put huge quantities of radioactive waste into the water bodies around it, and every other country in Europe is asking that this reprocessing facility at La Hague be shut down. The same with Sellafield in England, and the Japanese plant also, the reprocessing plant, has tremendous problems.
Reprocessing nuclear fuel is pie in the sky. We don't want this $50 billion rider stuck into the stimulus bill. People need to call their senators and Congress people and get it out. Patrick, you pay taxes in Canada. You want to pay for it up there, that's your issue, but don't tell us here in the United States that we've got to pay another $50 billion for a failed twentieth century technology that can't stand on its own.
AG: Patrick Moore, your response? Your response on the French plant that you just recommended?
PM: Well, first off, that's total misinformation that other countries are asking France to turn it off. It's just completely ridiculous. Most of the countries in Europe depend on nuclear energy for their electricity -- Slovakia, 60 percent; Belgium, 65 percent; France, 80 percent.
HW: That doesn't speak to reprocessing. Speak to reprocessing.
PM: Yeah, but that's the only way -- it's the only way to get the energy out of the used fuel, Harvey, and people are doing it around the world. The United States is thirty years behind.
