The Global Nuclear Energy Plan (GNEP)is an effort by our present administration to bring about a "nuclear renaissance" in the U.S. by having taxpayers offer billions of dollars in financial incentives to industries willing to build new nuclear power plants. There hasn't been a new nuclear plant built in over 20 years, due to cost and risk factors. As of yet, individual stock holders have not offered up one dollar of their own money for these newly proposed nuclear reactors. But with the promise of taxpayers assuming much of the financial risk as well as the environmental risk, many companies such as Duke Power out of Charlotte, NC and South Carolina Electric and Gas (SCEG) out of Columbia, SC are lining up to be the first to receive tax dollars for siting a new reactor.

There are 24 planned such new reactors and only one of them is NOT located in the South. Our Government has decided that to really make GNEP work, they need to come up with a scheme to get rid of all the spent nuclear fuel rods that have been piling up at all the commercial reactors in this country. At first they promised the commercial nuclear industry that Yucca Mountain in Nevada would become a permanent repository for all their radioactive waste. Keep in mind that the waste from these reactors is lethal for thousands and thousands of generations. As it turns out, the people of Nevada are very opposed to this plan and now if seems that Yucca Mountain is never going to happen. Our government has another plan.

South Carolina's own Senator Lindsay Graham helped pave the way for the reprocessing of nuclear waste by promoting legislation that renamed highly radioactive liquid waste created by reprocessing, "waste incidental to reprocessing". This enables the DOE to circumventing the environmental laws regarding the safe disposal of much of highly radioactive liquid waste.

The Department of Energy (DOE) is very seriously considering building a spent nuclear fuel reprocessing center in one of 11 locations. The site favored by them is one of 2 located near the Savannah River Site (SRS) in Aiken, SC, a DOE weapons production site. Reprocessing of nuclear fuel was outlawed in the 1970's under President Carter because it is a serious proliferation threat. Though the DOE and the nuclear industry present it as a way to "recycle" spent nuclear fuel rods, reprocessing creates millions of gallons of radioactive liquid waste. SRS is considered by many to be the most highly radioactive waste site in this country due to the 36 million gallons of radioactive waste in their tank farms that were created from reprocessing nuclear weapons during the "cold war." There is no solution of what to do with this highly radioactive waste. Reprocessing would only add to the huge amount of waste that SC already has.

In addition to the thousands of truckloads of waste from U.S. processing, the GNEP program also includes a plan to reprocess waste of other countries and sell the fuel created from the process back to them. It is not clear whether this means taxpayers are subsidizing corporations to reprocess waste from other countries as well as our own.

The Notice of Intent was issued January 4th, and can be found here .