Red-Hot Obama: Importing Japan Syndrome to the Gulf Coast of Texas

As part of its faux green nuclear agenda, the Obama administration wants Congress to provide a $4 billion loan guarantee for two new nuclear reactors on the Gulf Coast of Texas.

The power plants would be honchoed by a local consortium and -- you guessed it -- TEPCO, the outfit that built the toasted reactor at Fukushima Station 1.

Holy cow! Hold on to your iodine pills.

"The failure of emergency systems at Japan's nuclear plants comes as no surprise to those of us who have worked in the field," said Greg Palast, a former lead investigator in several government nuclear plant fraud and racketeering investigations.

And it gets worse, Palast says.

"Last night, I heard CNN reporters repeat the official line that the tsunami disabled the pumps needed to cool the reactors, implying that water unexpectedly got into the diesel generators that run the pumps.

"These safety backup systems are the 'EDGs' in nuke-speak: emergency diesel generators. That they didn't work in an emergency is like a fire department telling us they couldn't save a building because 'it was on fire,'" Palast says.

He reports that those EDGs also were designed by -- right again -- Toshiba (formerly Westinghouse).

Another corporate footnote: Most of the other troubled reactors were built by General Electric, a major Obama contributor that also happens to be angling for some of the administration's proposed $54 billion in taxpayer-backed nuclear-plant loan guarantees.