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John Shelk, the president and CEO of the merchant utility group Electric Power Supply Association, has raised the possibility of such a bailout ahead of Tuesday’s hearing in the Senate on the bill, the bipartisan Nuclear Energy Leadership Act introduced by Energy Committee chairwoman Lisa Murkowski and backed by high-profile Democrats like presidential candidate Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey.

Shelk tells John he will be sitting down with Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee staff as soon as this week to discuss changes to the bill to assure that it is narrowly focused on only advanced nuclear reactors and not the current fleet of reactors that are pushing for incentives in a challenging energy market.

What’s at issue: The bill would extend the contract time for federal power purchase agreements, which are used to secure electricity from a utility company for 10 to 40 years.

But the language is too open-ended and could benefit the existing fleet of reactors in addition to more advanced types, Shelk tells John.

Why the concern? Shelk’s group has been waging a national fight against state incentives for nuclear plants, and sees the bill becoming “yet another front in the fuels battles” to use government power to tip the scales in favor of less-economic resources like older nuclear plants.

In talking to sponsors of the bill, Shelk says he is “getting conflicting information … on why they want to keep the 40 year [power purchase agreement] open ended.”

Some offices say the idea is meant to make the federal contract fuel-neutral and open to other resources like geothermal and hydropower. But the problem is that a committee section-by-section summary of the bill describes nuclear power — not more advanced reactors — as “disadvantaged” when it comes to securing federal contracts. That raised the alarm for Shelk that the bill could be used as a means to give preferential treatment to all nuclear plants, undermining the free market system for electricity that supports competition.

Reminiscent of the Perry plan: Shelk says that when Energy Secretary Rick Perry was pushing for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to install market-based incentives to benefit coal and nuclear, the idea of using federal procurement rules to benefit generators was kicked around on the sidelines. Shelk and dozens of other groups opposed Perry’s push, and FERC rejected it in a unanimous vote.

Not everyone is a fan of the bill: Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, said the bill offers a backward approach to nuclear power.

“I think we’ve got it backwards; let’s solve the waste problem and then talk about promoting nuclear power,” King said at Tuesday’s hearing.

Murkowski, in almost anticipation of the criticisms King raised, introduced a bill Tuesday evening to rekindle the federal government’s obligation to move waste from existing power plants.

The bill would look for alternatives to less politically viable projects like Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

Meanwhile, the Environment and Public Works Committee held a hearing on Wednesday on a bill to jumpstart a new repository program separate from Yucca Mountain. Sen. Catherine Cortez-Masto, D-Nev., led the charge at the hearing on why the Yucca site was unworkable, citing its many structural flaws such as its proximity to a known earthquake fault.

Climate concerns should trump the need for the bill: “Time and money spent on unproven, new nuclear reactors is a distraction from the pressing need to address climate change,” Damon Moglen, senior strategic adviser at the left-leaning Friends of the Earth, tells John.

His group says the focus should be turned to zero-emission renewables, calling nuclear a “failed technology.”