Nuclear Policy

The legacy of the Cold War nuclear arms race remains a danger to the world. The United States and Russia are still possess tens of thousands of intact nuclear warheads with no clear plans for their dismantlement. Meanwhile, efforts to control the global spread of nuclear weapons are being undermined by the radical Bush Administration policy authorizing preemptive nuclear attacks against nations that may be seeking to acquire nuclear weapons.

The Global Nuclear Partnership (GNEP) is a major element of the Bush Administration’s energy policy. Its principal goal is to expand the world-wide growth of nuclear energy as a means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and fostering economic development.

However, our investigation found that: GNEP is a rushed, ill-conceived, poorly supported and technically and economically risky expansion and redirection of the nuclear industry. GNEP will likely worsen the radioactive waste disposal problem and would also make the United States the dumping ground for nuclear wastes from the other participating nations.

In the past several years, there has been renewed interest in nuclear energy as a means to mitigate the impacts of global warming due to carbon emissions. An expansion of nuclear power to effectively mitigate greenhouse gas emissions would be prohibitively expensive and risky, requiring at least 1,000 reactors over the next 45 years. It also would be an extremely slow process, taking decades to achieve any reductions in world CO2 emissions, if, indeed, it ever does. This would be a much longer time frame than implementing energy efficiency measures, distributed generation, or renewable alternatives, such as wind. Such a massive expansion of nuclear power also would divert capital resources from investments in other faster and more easily deployed alternatives for reducing world CO2 emissions.