Unfortunately, two others – “clean coal” — were included.

An increasingly desperate reactor industry just tried to sneak a $50 billion loan guarantee package into the stimulus bill. But for the third time since 2007, it got beat by a powerful national grassroots movement and key Congressional leaders.

Nuke pushers now want reactors painted “green” in a renewable standard Congress may soon set.

Hordes of radioactive lobbyists will swarm around that and new energy and global warming legislation. Every obscure sentence in those bills will be targeted for hidden handouts. Unfortunately, some money may already have slipped through from previous Bush-Cheney maneuvering.

EDF, the French national utility, wants to force its nukes into the American market. With Wall Street unwilling, Areva — the EDF front company — would use French tax money here as in Finland, where a new reactor project is already years behind schedule and billions over budget.

In Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Maryland, Texas, Missouri, Wisconsin and elsewhere, the industry wants to tax ratepayers for reactor construction in advance. In Florida and Georgia, rates are already soaring. A Missouri utility is trying to overturn a 1976 public referendum banning such scams.

Obama’s position has been largely opaque. Close to pro-nuke Illinois utilities in his early days, he has never renounced the technology. But he’s firmly opposed Nevada’s Yucca Mountain high-level repository, whose failure — after fifty years — leaves the industry with no solution to its waste problem.

Energy Secretary Stephen Chu has made pro-nuke rumblings. But the critical component — massive federal funding — has not materialized. So we green energy advocates held our collective breath when Obama promised to “invest fifteen billion dollars a year to develop technologies like wind power and solar power; advanced biofuels, clean coal, and more fuel-efficient cars and trucks built right here in America.”

In his acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination, Obama included nuke power. Now the reference is gone. Let’s hope that signals an end to all taxpayer funding for this catastrophic failed technology.

Unfortunately, Obama did mention “clean coal,” which — like “safe nukes” — does not exist. On March 2, there will be non-violent civil disobedience against a coal burner in the nation’s capital. This welcome action follows in the tradition of mass occupations at the Seabrook (NH) and other reactor construction sites since 1976.

Back then, grassroots organizations like the Clamshell Alliance developed a Solartopian vision of a world totally free of fossil fuels and atomic power. The plan was born in part at a “Toward Tomorrow” energy fair in Amherst, Massachusetts that featured wind power pioneer William Heronemus and efficiency guru Amory Lovins.

A green-powered Earth means ending both fossil and nuke power, to run totally on solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, non-food-based biofuels and other true renewables, with increased efficiency and restored mass transit.

Like stashing nuke waste in an earthquake zone surrounded by dormant volcanoes, as at Yucca Mountain, carbon sequestration for coal is unworkable, unacceptable — and unnecessary.

The upcoming march against that coal burner will be ushered along by three decades of anti-nuke activism. Let’s hope it prompts Obama to omit that clean coal oxymoron from his next speech — and from all proposed government funding.

And those of us who’ve been fighting them for decades are doing it again, now with help from the musicians’ community, and a petition drive (at nukefree.org) aimed at stripping the radioactive subsidies from the national Energy Bill now before Congress.

Time after time over the past half-century, the atomic energy industry has gone to the government to demand massive amounts of money. The most recent public gouging came during the Great Deregulation Scam of 1999-2001. As Enron and its cronies contrived phony energy shortages and nearly bankrupted California, the atomic pushers went before America’s state legislatures and asked for a massive bailout. They complained that with the coming age of deregulation (about two dozen states deregulated their electricity businesses) nuclear power plants were too expensive, inefficient and obsolete to compete in the coming green age.

So they demanded — and got — more than $100 billion in “stranded cost” payouts. These were the ultimate admission that atomic power simply could not make it in the marketplace. As deregulation failed throughout the US, what Forbes Magazine labeled “the largest managerial disaster in business history” stayed alive as America’s ultimate welfare cheat.

Now the industry is back for more. After complaining about its old reactors’ lousy economic performance, it now argues that the new ones will be magically transformed, and that billions more should be spent building them.

The first of those is already under construction in Finland. Ground was broken just two years ago, but the project is already two years behind schedule and $2 billion over budget.

So a whole new cover story has been invented: nuke power will “solve global warming.”

The assertion is absurd. All reactors emit radioactive carbon, along with numerous other “hot” isotopes. Massive quantities of greenhouse gasses are spewed into the atmosphere during the mining, milling and enrichment of uranium fuel. The reactors themselves emit huge plumes of heat directly into the air and water.

Nukes perform poorly in hot weather, which is precisely when they’re supposed to help with global warming. Reactors in both France and the US have been forced to shut because the rivers into which they dump their waste heat have exceeded 90 degrees Farenheit.

Still more greenhouse gasses have been created with the partial construction of the proposed Yucca Mountain waste dump in Nevada, which has already cost the public $11 billion. If it ever opens — it’s not yet licensed, and many say it will never be — Yucca could cost $60 to $100 billion. Even then it couldn’t handle the waste from the new reactors the industry wants to build — or even all the spent fuel from the old ones now in existence.

Yet the industry wants Congress to give the industry essentially a blank check for loan guarantees to the tune of $25 billion in 2008 and $25 billion more in 2009, with countless billions more still to come down the road.

Why? Because Wall Street just isn’t buying. After fifty years, nuke power is the most expensive technological failure in US history. It can’t get investors, liability insurance or a solution to its waste problem. It can’t compete with new conservation, efficiency or renewables like wind power.

Since 9/11/2001, it’s also become obvious that atomic reactors cannot be defended from terror attack. They are pre-deployed weapons of radioactive mass destruction.

It’s thus no accident that the push for new nukes with federal loan guarantees also comes with a demand for extended federal liability insurance. Who would invest in a reactor that might irradiate thousands of square miles and kill hundreds of thousands of human beings? The answer is simple: after fifty years, without federal guarantees — nobody!

Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were tragic warnings, as was the fact that the first jet to hit the World Trade Center flew directily over the Indian Point reactor complex, 45 miles north. Had those reactors been hit, the death toll could have been in the tens of thousands by now. The property damage from irradiating southern New York, Long Island, and all of downwind New Jersey and New England would be beyond calculation.

Despite all that, Pete Domenici, the Senator from Nuke Power, slipped these loan guarantees into the 2007 Energy Bill that could become one of the most expensive and lethal rip-offs in US history.

Meanwhile, the renewable energy industry is soaring to new heights of power and profitability. Wind farming has boomed to a $10-15 billion per year industry, with worldwide growth rates surpassing 25%. Breakthroughs in silicon solar cells are taking rooftop photovoltaics (PV) to vastly increased levels of efficiency and profitability. Bio-fuels, tidal, geo- and ocean thermal, wave energy and many more rapidly developing forms of green power are also booming ahead.

In 1979, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne and Graham Nash, through Musicians United for Safe Energy, helped organize five nights of No Nukes concerts at Madison Square Garden. The accompanying rally at Battery Park City drew 200,000 people.

All of it was part of a successful grassroots campaign to stop the nuke industry. In 1974 Richard Nixon predicted there would be 1000 reactors in the US by the year 2000. But in the year 2000, there were just 103.

That’s still 103 too many. Browne, Nash and Raitt are now working to help stop this latest bailout. In singing Stephen Stills’s classic “For What It’s Worth,” they joined Ben Harper and Keb Mo for a video that’s linked through the www.nukefree.org web site, where a petition is being circulated and signed.

On October 23 they’ll present the first round of petitions to Congress. In demanding the nuke subsidies be removed from an Energy Bill that contains many positive green features, they’ll be joined by their fellow musician John Hall (D-NY), now a US Representative committed to shutting Indian Point.

They’ll also be working with one of the most successful non-violent grassroots campaigns in US history. Should they stop this latest atomic assault on the public treasury, the door could finally open for a truly green-powered future.

It also produced one of the most terrifying sentences ever buried in a newspaper. As reported deep in the New York Times, the Tokyo Electric Company has admitted that, “the force of the shaking caused by the earthquake had exceeded the design limits of the reactors, suggesting that the plant’s builders had underestimated the strength of possible earthquakes in the region.”

There are 55 reactors in Japan. Virtually all of them are on or near major earthquake faults. Kashiwazaki alone hosts seven, four of which were forced into the dangerous SCRAM mode to narrowly avoid meltdowns. At least 50 separate serious problems have been so far identified, including fire and the spillage of barrels filled with radioactive wastes.

There are four active reactors in California on or near major earthquake faults, as are the two at Indian Point north of New York City. On January 31, 1986, an earthquake struck the Perry reactor east of Cleveland, knocking out roads and bridges, as well as pipes within the plant, which (thankfully) was not operating at the time. The governor of Ohio, then Richard Celeste, sued to keep Perry shut, but lost in federal court.

The fault that hit Perry is an off-shoot of the powerful New Madrid line that runs through the Mississippi River Valley, threatening numerous reactors. The Beyond Nuclear Project reports that in August, 2004, a quake hit the Dresden reactor in Illinois, resulting in a leak of radioactive tritium. Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, slated as the nation’s high-level radioactive waste dump, has a visible fault line running through it.

More than 400 atomic reactors are on-line worldwide. How many are vulnerable to seismic shocks we can only shudder to guess. But one-eighth of them sit in one of the world’s richest, most technologically advanced, most densely populated industrial nations, which has now admitted its reactor designs cannot match the power an earthquake that has just happened.

In whatever language it’s said, that translates into the unmistakable warning that the world’s atomic reactors constitute a multiple, ticking seismic time bomb. Talk of building more can only be classified as suicidal irresponsibility.

Tokyo Electric’s behavior since the quake defines the industry’s credibility. For three consecutive days (with more undoubtedly to come) the utility has been forced to issue public apologies for erroneous statements about the severity of the damage done to the reactors, the size and lethality of radioactive spills into the air and water, the on-going danger to the public, and much more.

Once again, the only thing reactor owners can be trusted to do is to lie.

Prior to the March 28, 1979 disaster at Three Mile Island, the industry for years assured the public that the kind of accident that did happen was “impossible.”

Then the utility repeatedly assured the public there had been no melt-down of fuel and no danger of further catastrophe. Nine years later a robotic camera showed that nearly all the fuel had melted, and that avoiding a full-blown catastrophe was little short of a miracle.

The industry continues to say no one was killed at TMI. But it does not know how much radiation was released, where it went or who it might have harmed. Since 1979 its allies in the courts have denied 2400 central Pennsylvania families the right to test their belief that they and their loved ones have been killed and maimed en masse.

Prior to its April 26, 1986, explosion, Soviet Life Magazine ran a major feature extolling the virtually “accident-proof design” of Chernobyl Unit Four.

Then the former Soviet Union of Mikhail Gorbachev kept secret the gargantuan radiation releases that have killed thousands and yielded a horrific plague of cancers, leukemia, birth defects and more throughout the region, and among the more than 800,000 drafted “jumpers” who were forced to run through the plant to clean it up.

Since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, the industry has claimed its reactors can withstand the effects of a jet crash, and are immune to sabotage. The claims are as patently absurd as the lies about TMI and Chernobyl.

So, too, the endless, dogged assurances from Japan that no earthquake could do to Kashiwazaki what has just happened.

Yet today and into the future, expensive ads will flood the US and global airwaves, full of nonsense about the “need” for new nukes.

There is only one thing we know for certain about this advertising: it is a lie.

Atomic reactors contribute to global warming rather than abating it. In construction, in the mining, milling and enriching of the fuel, in on-going “normal” releases of heat and radioactivity, in dismantling and decommissioning, in managing radioactive wastes, in future terror attacks, in proliferation of nuke weapons, and much much more, atomic energy is an unmitigated eco-disaster.

To this list we must now add additional tangible evidence that reactors allegedly built to withstand “worst case” earthquakes in fact cannot. And when they go down, the investment is lost, and power shortages arise (as is now happening in Japan) that are filled by the burning of fossil fuels.

It costs up to ten times as much to produce energy from a nuke as to save it with efficiency. Advances in wind, solar and other green “Solartopian” technologies mean atomic energy simply cannot compete without massive subsidies, loan guarantees and government insurance to protect it from catastrophes to come.

This latest “impossible” earthquake has not merely shattered the alleged safeguards of Japan’s reactor fleet. It has blown apart — yet again — any possible argument for building more reactors anywhere on this beleaguered Earth.