Swiss Nuclear Power

Swiss citizens voted in late September to ban all new construction and licensing of nuclear power facilities for the next ten years. The Swiss defeated a stronger measure, which would have required that all five of the currently operating nuclear plants be shut down and dismantled within the next 30 to 40 years.

Although nuclear power plants now provide about 40 percent of Switzerland's total energy usage, representatives of Contra-Atom, a Swiss anti-nuclear group, believe greater energy efficiency and conservation could easily make up for the loss of nuclear power sources. In addition, they claim that Switzerland actually exports more power than it imports.

The defeat of the shutdown resolution came as a surprise to environmentalists, who believed that post-Chernobyl sentiments would guarantee a victory. The Swiss Socialist Party attributes the referendum's defeat to a massive, pro-nuclear publicity campaign by power companies and multinational corporations operating in the region. Tracey Hepburn of the Amsterdam-based World Information Service on Energy says that power utilities and their contractors spent over $80 million in the years preceding the referendum in efforts to convince voters to keep nuclear power. Among those paying for the campaign, according to Theo Uss of the World Council of Churches in Geneva, was the Swedish multinational Asea, Brown, Bovieri, which provides materials for power plant construction.

Ivory Coast Pollution

The government of the Ivory Coast plans to skim pollutants from the lagoon surrounding its largest city, Abidjan, and then pipe the waste into the ocean, where it will be diffused into the water. The World Bank is funding close to half of the controversial project's $50 million construction costs and considers the plan a potential model for inexpensive waste treatment.

Abidjan, which has 2 million inhabitants and industries ranging from local agricultural companies to multinationals such as Unilever and Union Carbide, currently discharges all of its waste into the lagoon. The lagoon is shallow and considered ecologically fragile. The planned skimming plant will suck the floatable waste from the surface and send it approximately 2 kilometers out to sea where, according to an official of the Ivory Coast Embassy in Washington, D.C., it will break up in the natural motion of the water. World Bank scientists have even higher hopes for the discharged waste. A sanitary engineer quoted in a United Nations newsletter stated that "once [the effluents] are decomposed, the wastes will contribute nutrients to the ocean and support aquatic life there."

Environmentalists denounced the project. The Envrironmental Defense Fund's Korinna Hart, who has just returned from the Ivory Coast, says 'Proper treatment is obvioulsy necessary for a system like this. The sewage will eventually come back."

In a more promising development, the government of Abidjan is considering requiring companies to pre-treat waste before they send it to the lagoon.

Uranium Scheme

The Department of Energy (DOE)'s uranium enrichment program has accumulated a debt of at least $8.7 million, three times higher than previously estimated, according to figures contained in a recent DOE report. This sum is largely owed to the U.S. Treasury by the domestic nuclear industry for uranium enrichment services it has received from the DOE since 1971. Uranium enrichment services are needed to make fuel for conventional nuclear power plants.

The report concludes that the enrichment program's debt is a result of the nuclear industry's pressure on the DOE to overbuild its uranium enrichment capacity and the DOE's poor management of the program.

The DOE hired Smith Barney, Harris Upham & Co. in January 1990 to assess the feasibility of restructuring the program. Though the DOE released the report in May 1990, Public Citizen, a Washington, D.C.-based public interest group, claims that the DOE withheld some of the findings. In early September, Public Citizen published the deleted findings along with an analysis of the report.

Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy William H. Young defends the deletion of sections of the report on the grounds that DOE's uranium enrichment pro-gram is a business which "generates commercially sensitive information that it does not wish to disclose to either customers or its European competitors."

The Smith Barney report also indicates that decontamination and decommissioning of the DOE's three existing enrichment facilities in Tennessee, Kentucky and Ohio may cost at least $10 billion and possibly over $19 billion. Decontaminating and decommissioning the DOE's Oak Ridge enrichment facility alone may cost $8.1 billion, five times more than the DOE's estimate, according to Smith Barney.

"The Energy Department does not want taxpayers to know that it is trying to stick them with a bill that could reach more than $30 billion," charges Daniel Borson, a nuclear economics analyst for Public Citizen. "Consequently, DOE is attempting to sweep the findings of the Smith Barney report under the rug."

Public Citizen called on Congress to suspend action on all pending legislation to restructure the uranium enrichment program until it has made a comprehensive assessment of the Smith Barney report. The legislation would shift all or most of the burden of the uranium enrichment debt from the nuclear industry to the taxpayers. "Forgiving the nuclear industry's debt constitutes one of the biggest government bailouts of the private sector � second only to the savings and loans industry," argues Ken Bossong, director of Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy Project.

� Jim Sugarman