Like some B-movie space alien, "The Thing" is back, and it's coming at us with an insatiable appetite. It is the return of the nuclear power industry.

After the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979, nuke power finally seemed to be dying in America. The fission plants were too expensive to build, the multimillion-dollar taxpayer subsidies were ridiculous, the potential for atomic catastrophe was chilling, and the unresolved question of where to put tons of radioactive waste was damning.

Like a grotesque phoenix, here it comes again. The big utilities, along with such powerhouse nuclear equipment makers as Generl Electric Co., were generous funders of George W's run for the White House, and their payback was the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which resuscitated the beast by pumping it full of new government subsidies.

This bloated law offers $125 million in tax breaks for each new nuclear plant and provides loan guarantees for 80 percent of a plant's cost - including overruns. Utilities also get exemptions from legal liability in case of catastrophic incidents such as meltdowns. Meanwhile, these profitable corporations are not made responsible for the disposal of the nuclear waste their reactors generate.

All the industry's old problems remain, but government money has revived The Thing. As one candid utility executive says, the new subsidies are "the whole reason we started down this path. If it were not for the nuclear provisions in [the bill], we would not have even started developing this plan."

Instead of subsidizing a future disaster just to fatten the profits of the nuclear iindustry, our tax dollars should be invested in safe, clean, renewable energy and conservation.

-Jim Hightower, November 2, 2007 edition of the Texas Observer