Obama’s Power Grid
Vanity Fair | October 2011
President Barack Obama’s environmental record has prompted eco-minded groups to call his policies “disastrous,” a “nightmare,” and a “sell-out.” Less well-known, however, is the fact that Obama himself has long been allied with Chicago-area pro-nuclear-energy leaders and that several people in his core council have professionally benefited from their association with Exelon, the power company that runs America’s largest nuclear fleet. With Japan’s nuclear accident still looming, many in the environmental movement, who initially supported Obama’s “clean-energy” agenda, have been turned off, but, as Vanity Fair contributing editor Robert Sam Anson brings to light, Obama and his inner circle have vowed not to take the nuclear-power option off the table.
Barack Obama wants you to know that nuclear power is good for you. He really and truly does.
He’s warned of “the worst consequences of climate change” unless new nuclear plants sprout from the land. And of countries like China eating our technological lunch. And of unemployment getting even worse, due to the loss of good, green jobs. And of nothing less than “our economy, our security, and the future of our planet” being at risk.
He’s announced $8.3 billion in federal-loan guarantees to build a pair of nuclear reactors in Georgia (the first in the U.S. in more than 30 years), and said there will be plenty more where that came from. He’s appointed as energy secretary a Nobel laureate who’s pledged to “aggressively” expand nuclear power; nominated as his new commerce secretary the ex-C.E.O. of a power company that thought the world of its nuclear plants (including the two on the California coast adjacent to earthquake faults); and had successive White House energy czarinas who use the modifiers “safe, clean, reliable” when speaking of nuclear power — exactly like the ads of the industry’s trade association.
And what has Barack Obama gotten for his efforts? Trouble on all fronts.
The Greens are apoplectic at his “disastrous” . . . “nightmare” . . . “sell-out” policy, to quote the headlines of their blogs and articles. The polls, which used to report record-high approval of building U.S. nuclear plants, have switched to record-high disapproval—courtesy of the tsunami that left four reactors bathing northern Japan in radiation not seen since Nagasaki. And the Georgia loan guarantee? Turns out that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission hadn’t approved the safety of the reactor design (it still hasn’t); the project owner is one of the worst-polluting major power-plant companies in the world; and Energy Secretary Steven Chu—whose department oversees the guarantee program—had never heard of the “well above 50 percen...
