nuclear-news

Just how much is President Obama beholden to the nuclear industry?

President Barack Obama has called for an increase to $54 billion in loan guarantees. The U.S. needs a “new generation of clean, safe nuclear power plants,” Obama said in his State of the Union address Jan. 27. …
The administration must weigh its support for nuclear power against limiting the risk that taxpayers will be stuck with the bill should a nuclear utility default,

Constellation Nuclear-Loan Pullout Tests Obama Resolve to Revive Industry, Bloomberg, By Jim Snyder and Katarzyna Klimasinska – Oct 13, 2010 A U.S. loan-guarantee program is testing how much risk the Obama administration is willing to take to revive the nuclear-power industry.

Constellation Energy Group Inc. said last week it was pulling out of talks on a $7.5 billion loan guarantee to build a reactor at its Calvert Cliffs facility in Maryland. The estimated $880 million the company would have to pay the Treasury Department was “shockingly high,” Chief Operating Officer Michael Wallace said in an Oct. 8 letter to the Energy Department.

The administration offered terms no better than Constellation could get from private investors, said Christine Tezak, a senior energy and environment analyst for Robert W. Baird & Co., a Milwaukee-based brokerage…….
The Energy Department has authority to provide $18.5 billion in guarantees to nuclear-power producers, serving effectively as a co-signer to help utilities get financing. The only award so far was to Southern Co. of Atlanta and its partners, which are getting an estimated $8.3 billion in federal backing for a project in Georgia. Southern hasn’t disclosed an estimate of the cost for its federal guarantee.

President Barack Obama has called for an increase to $54 billion in loan guarantees. The U.S. needs a “new generation of clean, safe nuclear power plants,” Obama said in his State of the Union address Jan. 27. …
The administration must weigh its support for nuclear power against limiting the risk that taxpayers will be stuck with the bill should a nuclear utility default, Kenneth Baer, a spokesman for the administration’s Office of Management and Budget, said in an interview……

Constellation Nuclear-Loan Pullout Tests Obama Resolve to Revive Industry – Bloomberg

October 13, 2010 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA | antinuclear, nuclear, nuclear costs, nuclear technology, reactors