Before the Michigan House of Representatives could put pen to paper on the new energy bill that passed the House last Thursday (and that was heavily lobbied for by state utilities), The Monroe Evening News reported that Detroit Edison had already applied for a permit for a second possible nuclear plant in Monroe County along the shore of Lake Erie:
Detroit Edison officials today submitted to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) a combined license application for a possible new nuclear power plant next to Fermi 2 that would take six to seven years to complete and produce up to 3,700 jobs for the region.
Edison is a subsidiary of DTE Energy. A new 1,500-megawatt plant in Newport would cost about $10 billion. That’s about 35 percent larger than the cost of Fermi 2, a 1,130-megawatt plant that cost $4.5 billion to build, said Anthony F. Earley Jr., DTE Energy chairman and chief executive officer.

While supporters of the nuclear fuel option are quick to point out that nuclear power plants don’t emit any greenhouse gases, there are other facts that bear consideration when thinking of adding yet another nuclear plant amongst a civilian population.

An in-depth report commissioned by the German government earlier this year (Germany is phasing out all of its nuclear power plants, by the way) revealed some alarming statistics, according to a British television news station Web site:

Just as Britain decides to build new nuclear power stations, new research, commissioned by the German government, reveals that children under five who live within 5 km of a nuclear power plant, have twice the risk of suffering from the blood cancer leukemia.

In Britain, discussion of the health risks has largely been absent from the debate over new nuclear power stations, though it raged post-Chernobyl and in the late 1980s and early 1990s when cancer clusters were found around the village of Seascale in Cumbria, close to the Sellafield nuclear plant, and around the nuclear site at Dounreay in Scotland.

“What is very important about this study is its depth and rigour,” says Dr Paul Dorfman of Warwick University who was co-secretary of CERRIE, the independent committee established by the British government in 2001 to examine the risks of internal radiation.

As if the “normally” emitted radiation concerns aren’t troubling enough, did you ever take a gander at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Web site?

Any and all “events” at all nuclear power plants across the nation are required to file reports of incidents with the NRC, and the NRC is in turn required to post these events to the public. Not only are there reports on nearly any given day, every day of the year, but quite often the norm is multiple event reports on any given day of the year!

Elimination of greenhouse gases is a goal we cannot achieve soon enough, but certainly there must be alternatives that don’t sacrifice the most innocent among us?