(Originally published December 6, 2015 on https://athf3.wordpress.com/)
If you live in Michigan, you may have gotten in the mail a big, slick and ominous-looking flyer asserting that the Nesbitt Energy Bill in the Michigan Legislature will solve “Michigan’s looming energy shortfall.” You may have seen television ads promoting the same idea.
If you print this thing out, it runs to 67 pages, so the obvious thing is it’s quite a complex bill that changes many parts of current law. The short story is that this bill is an attempt to impose a whole new direction on state policy for the electrical utilities, and the change is not in a good direction.
One of our members has summarized this in a letter he sent to the Detroit Free Press and the Toledo Blade. We don’t know if they will see fit to publish it, but we certainly can. it goes as follows:
NO TO MICHIGAN HOUSE (NESBITT ENERGY) BILL 4298!
This bill strangles and virtually eliminates competition in energy production in Michigan, favoring existing large utilities who become monopolies who are also eligible for approval of customer rate increases for “construction work in progress for capital improvements prior to the assets being considered used and useful”. We the consumer pay for the construction of assets that are owned by the utility and are not providing energy. This can include dangerous nuclear reactors whose only real and permanently enduring product is radioactive material including withdrawn fuel rods that are lethal in minutes and dangerous for up to a million years and need to be shielded and monitored in every generation into eternity. The cost for that has never been calculated or discussed. 600 tons of this material sit outside of containment next to Fermi 2 near Monroe and 72,000 tons have accumulated around the U.S.
If energy production is to be a monopoly it should be owned by the public and should not include nuclear power producing the most dangerous and enduring poisons on earth.
Vic Macks, Alliance to Halt Fermi 3 http://www.athf3.org
20318 Edmunton St.
St. Clair Shores, MI 48080-3748
[end of Vic’s letter]
The slick flyer urges you to call your State Representative, to tell them to vote yes on the Nesbitt Energy Bill. As a 501C3 organization, we can’t take a position on a candidate or a ballot issue, but we can encourage discussion and public education on nuclear power. We hope you look into this bill, form your own opinion, and then take appropriate action.
As always, comments are welcome.