Lift of nuclear power ban passes Senate committee
State Sen. Bob Leeper, I-Paducah
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FRANKFORT — A bill that would lift a more than 25-year-old moratorium on the building of nuclear power plants in Kentucky passed a Senate panel Wednesday with only one dissenting vote.
The Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee voted 9-1 Wednesday to approve Senate Bill 26. The bill now heads to the full Senate.
This is the third year that the measure has been filed. The bill passed the Senate and a House committee last year but the full House was not able to vote on the bill before the House ended the 2009 session.
SB 26, filed by independent Sen.Bob Leeper of Paducah, would overturn a 1984 state law that put a moratorium on the building of nuclear power plants until the federal government determines how to safely dispose of nuclear waste.
Nuclear plants currently store waste at their facilities. There are no permanent storage or disposal facilities in the country, Leeper said.
Leeper said waste can be stored on-site for up to 100 years, which would provide ample time for the development of long-term solutions.
Environmentalists have opposed the measure, saying it’s premature to allow more nuclear waste before scientists know how to dispose of the toxic material.
Sen. Ray Jones, D-Pikeville, was the lone dissenting vote. Jones said he was not convinced that nuclear power was safe and questioned why the state wasn’t doing more to help the coal industry.
– Beth Musgrave
Filed Under: KY General Assembly
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I guess that means we are going to store all the waste in Paducah, aye there Senator Leeper? Sounds great to me.
Then it can all leak into the river and go south!!!
COOL! Paducah already glows from the waste of it’s GASEOUS DIFFUSION PLANT DEBACLE.
Obviously Senator Leeper was raised close by.
Or the nuclear lobby has him in their pocket. Why else in the world would anybody think about generating nuclear waste in a state with so much groundwater? See maxey Flats or look at the files of the KY Division of Waste Management concerning the nuclear contamination plume in the groundwater at the Paducah Diffusion site.
But hey, if they want it to keep it in Paducah – Great, they already glow as it is!!! What a irresponsible idea on all fronts – economically, environmentally and ethically.
It is atrocious that any person living in this state would favor placing nuclear plant and its waste here. This guy must be the least informed guy ever, or he is ignorant and dumb.
Nuclear waste is dangerous, we can’t drill our own oil reserves, the coal industry is dangerous and dirty, so what now? We continue as hostages to foreign oil forever?
We need energy independence and we need it now. This is the way to go about it. A nuclear power plant would provide good high paying jobs that our educated kentuckians need to have available.
IDGITS ALL!
Environmentalists do not want coal. The only viable alternative in Kentucky is Nuclear and they do not want that. I WISHED THAT THEY LIVED HERE.
I’ll take nuclear. absolutely. the french use it quite successfully.
You people are either idiots or bi$ches for the coal industry. Nuclear power is far cleaner than coal and therefore safer. Nuclear waste is not the issue-independence from non renewable fuel sources is. Heck, the French are closer to energy independence than we are. Hell yeah, go nuke today!!!!
Can we put the new plant in Springfield. That would be glorious.
I suggest that we start building nuclear power plants in Kentucky and store the waste underneath the Capitol Building in Washington, DC.
If we lose a few members of the House and Senate (who’ve not yet agreed upon nuclear waste storage facilities which the country desperately needs), well, you can’t win them all!
Cappy, DOH!
Nuclear Power is safe and efficent. Of couse they need to be built near either the Ohio or Mississippi River. Tennessee has several as do other neighboring states.
if you think nuclear energy is cleaner than coal you’d better think again an accident with nuclear power will take 100′s of 1000′s of year to clean up. if that happen all slurry pond impoundment breaks and spills that have happened in this country will only seem like a turned waste basket sitting by you pc.think about that before slobber to much over nuclear power.
Ted Kennedy killed more people in American than nuclear power has.
Many of the comments above are absurd, given that Kentucky is getting almost all of its electricity from coal. There is universal scientific concensus that the health risks and environmental impacts from nuclear are tiny compared to coal, with every scientific study on the matter concluding that coal is at least 10 times as bad.
Coal plants cause 25,000 deaths every single year in the US alone, whereas US nuclear power plants have never had any measurable impact on public health, over their entire 40+ year history. Coal plants are the largest single source of global warming in the US (33% of total emissions) whereas nuclear has negligible impact.
continued…
Estimates of total eventual deaths from Chernobyl range from 100 to 10,000. The maximum consequences of any concievable event at a US plant would be far smaller. Thus, even a worst-case accident at a nuclear plant (unlikely to ever happen) would pale in comparison to the ANNUAL impacts of coal plants, which KY residents are suffering right now.
No possible event at a Western nuclear power plant would result in any significant land area having radiation levels outside the range of natural background.
The dumbest thing that the environmental movement ever did was to cause the end to the nuclear power industry in the United States. Fear not fact has driven the opposition to nuclear and it is still a field in which commonly held beliefs are no different than believing in the tooth fairy. If the same standards of potential liability vs. actual harm were applied to cars, we would be riding in buggies drawn by horses.
Totally agree with every comment in here and hope that those who are endorsing Nuclear Power are ready to start a petition to have it placed in their city.
I don’t see too many running to have house their houses below the sludge pond.
There are safer alternatives to Uranium.
Check out these links:
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_new_nukes
http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/
Have a good one…