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Multinational Monitor

Nuclear’s Power Play: Give Us Subsidies or Give Us Death Multinational Monitor By Tyson Slocum SEP/OCT 2008 Most energy analysts in the early- and mid-1990s assumed nuclear power in the United States was dying a slow death. Utilities were saddled with unmanageable debt, mainly from the $60 billion in cost overruns and plant shutdowns due to the industry’s misadventures in the 1970s (when nukes were promoted as a solution to crippling high oil prices and calls for energy independence). Components in aging plants were failing, solutions to highly radioactive waste were non-existent, and the industry was still haunted by the Chernobyl catastrophe and the near meltdown of Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island reactor………………………..

To top it off, 9/11 and its aftermath placed nuclear power facilities at-risk as targets, which prompted some to begin writing nuclear’s obituary. After all, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others boasted that Al Qaeda had commercial nuclear reactors on their hit lists.

But a funny thing happened on the way to nuclear’s funeral. In 2008, nuclear power is on the brink of a revival, as unprecedented federal subsidies offered as part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, combined with generous state incentives, have triggered a race to build the first commercial nuclear reactor in the United States in a generation………………………….

The nuclear industry has aggressively touted nuclear power’s low-carbon emissions as a reason to heap nearly all “clean” technology subsidies on expensive new reactors.

Without those subsidies, there would be no prospect of a nuclear revival. “The supposed nuclear revival is a carefully manufactured illusion that seeks to become a self-fulfilling prophecy,” write Amory Lovins and Imran Sheikh, of the Rocky Mountain Institute, “yet it cannot actually occur in a market economy, as many energy-industry leaders privately acknowledge.”……………..nuclear power is so uneconomic that there is no reason to debate how safe it is — the technology should be ruled out on economic grounds alone. Write Lovins and Sheikh, “In fact, nuclear power is continuing its decades-long collapse in the global marketplace because it’s grossly uncompetitive, unneeded and obsolete — so hopelessly uneconomic that one needn’t debate whether it’s clean and safe.”………………………..political power gives utilities the ability to extract various supports from state governments, including authorizations to charge consumers to cover the costs of utilities’ failed investments. It also gives them considerable influence with their state’s Congressional delegation.The second asset of the industry is its willingness to spend lots of money to influence political outcomes. The nuclear power industry has made $67 million in campaign contributions to federal candidates since 2001, with 63 percent going to Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics……………………………..The nuclear industry’s very existence is predicated on the Price-Anderson Act, which limits the liability of a nuclear reactor operator for any accident…………………………..Wall Street investment banks joined the nuclear industry in pushing for a large-scale loan guarantee program. Investment banks would like to broker financing deals for nuclear plants, but they know no deals will be forthcoming without government guarantees………………………

Chronic Corporate Welfare Federal loan guarantees and Price-Anderson are not the only subsidies that the nuclear industry has obtained or is seeking.

The 2005 Energy Policy Act provided $2 billion in “risk insurance” payments to cover delays in nuclear reactor construction, and promised nuclear power companies 1.8 cents for every kilowatt of power produced from their new facilities. Taxpayers also cover half of all administrative and legal costs associated with new reactor applications.

Even as the industry aims to build new plants, there remains no U.S. system for managing high-level nuclear waste. The industry favors initiation of a dumpsite in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. Not only does this proposal pose grave safety risks — including those related to shipping high-level waste across the country — it would impose tens of billions of dollars of costs on taxpayers.

At the state level, utilities are obtaining pledges of full cost recovery — state regulatory agency assurances that the utilities will be able to pass costs of nuclear construction, whatever they are, on to ratepayers.

Multinational Monitor

Tags: nuclear, antinuclear, uranium, radiation

September 20, 2008 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs