nuclear-news

USA’s nuclear energy prospects are uncertain, despit govt boost

the forthcoming loan guarantees amount to only $18.5 billion, and the nuclear industry says it needs tens of billions more.

Nuclear Power, Long Dormant, Gets Wake-Up Call

The New York Times By MATTHEW L. WALD

December 23, 2009

WASHINGTON — When experts on power grid reliability asked themselves recently how a cleaner energy future would look, seven of eight regional councils imagined how their systems would work with 10 percent wind power.

Only one, representing the southeastern United States, chose a radically different option: doubling nuclear power capacity.

Thirty years after the American nuclear industry abandoned scores of half-built plants because of soaring costs and operating problems like the Three Mile Island accident, skepticism persists over whether the technology is worth investing in………………………..the industry is about to get a big boost. In the next few days, the Energy Department plans to announce the first of $18.5 billion in loan guarantees for building new reactors. The guarantees were authorized in a bill passed by Congress in 2005. It has taken four years for the department to set up a system to evaluate applications and determine how much the borrowers will be charged for the guarantees to compensate the government for taking the risk………………..Historically Republicans have been more enthusiastic about nuclear power than Democrats have. So as the climate bills winds its way through the Senate, some Democratic members are seeking to add to the $18.5 billion in loan guarantees for the nuclear industry to attract Republicans and some industrial-state Democrats. (The House version passed in June, 219 to 212.)

Some of the foremost Congressional climate change campaigners are unenthusiastic………………….

If 28 reactors that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission now lists as planned, half have had major delays, large increases in estimated cost, or have been canceled.

If new plants built with government guarantees prove to be a commercial success, the program costs taxpayers nothing; if they prove too expensive to finish or are completed but cannot earn enough to repay the loans, the taxpayer is on the hook.

Complicating the challenge, the forthcoming loan guarantees amount to only $18.5 billion, and the nuclear industry says it needs tens of billions more.

President Obama’s energy secretary, Steven Chu, acknowledged that the sum was small. He said it could finance at most perhaps one plant for each new reactor design, making it hard to determine which design was most practical………………

Karen Hadden, executive director of the Sustainable Energy and Economic Development Coalition in Austin, Tex., which is fighting a nuclear project there that is in line for a loan guarantee. While she strongly favors carbon limits, she said, she opposes construction of reactors.

She warned that money for solar, wind and geothermal projects could get siphoned off “in these multibillion-dollar projects that may or may not ever get built.”

Daniel L. Roderick, senior vice president for nuclear plant projects at GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy, a partnership between General Electric and Hitachi of Japan, said that a year and a half ago, there were expectations that more than 20 units would be under construction by now in the United States. “That number is currently zero,” he said.

Nonetheless, G.E. and other companies have invested tens of millions of dollars in plans for reactors they hope to build around the world, including dozens in the United States.

Nuclear Power, Long Dormant, Gets a Wake-Up Call, With Government Loan Guarantees – NYTimes.com

December 24, 2009 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, USA | antinuclear, nuclear, nuclear costs, nuclear secrecy, nuclear wastes