Nuclear Industry Give-aways

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by nuclear power. I checked out every book on the subject I could out of the local public library, and even then I understood the social and political significance of the promise of energy "too cheap to meter".

Like many people, however, my enthusiasm waned over the years. Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and the permanent problem of nuclear waste certainly exposed the technical risks. But time also demonstrated that nuclear power just wasn't commercially viable without substantial government subsidies and liability protections.

Now, I'm certainly not a free-market absolutist — there are a lot of industries that I wish the government would spend more resources nurturing. But nuclear power just isn't one of those. As the refrain of pro-nuclear advocates has gone from "it's a great leap forward for all mankind" to "if you ignore the strontium, it's better than coal", nuclear power doesn't seem like a technology on the way up. But with Bush in the White House and the Republicans running Congress for the exclusive benefit of corporate America, don't expect the nuclear power industry to give up so easily.

Thus my interest in this article in yesterday's Washington Post about a call by the nuclear power industry for the Feds to get off the pot and let the taxpayer money start flowing. And apparently, the industry thinks it needs a lot of taxpayer money to bring the next generation of power plants online.

"A new 1,400-megawatt nuclear power plant is going to cost about $2.6 billion," [Dominion Resources CEO Thomas Capps] said. "It is going to take 6 1/2 years to build. While you are building, you have to issue equity, you have to service that equity. You have to issue bonds; you have to service the bonds with interest. You don't have any money coming in. You have an average of $1.3 billion out for 6 1/2 years that is not earning anything."

"We are not going to build one under those financial conditions," he said.

As the debate over give-aways to the nuclear industry continues, expect to hear a lot about the need to offer targetted subsidies, insure companies against delays, remove uncertainties from the licensing process, protect the industry with liability caps, and find some way to stop those hippies from protesting so much. If the nuclear power industry were commercially viable, I might think twice about some of these measures.

However, according to Capps, the industry can't even solve the basic problem of how to build a nuclear plant without losing money. And I just don't see how the public good is served by throwing our money at their problem.