The only two U.S. reactor projects now technically under construction are on the brink of death for financial reasons.
If they go under, there will almost certainly be no new reactors built here.
The much mythologized "nuclear renaissance" will be officially buried, and the U.S. can take a definitive leap toward a green-powered future that will actually work and that won't threaten the continent with radioactive contamination.
As this drama unfolds, the collapse of global nuclear power continues, as two reactors proposed for Bulgaria have been cancelled, and just one of Japan's 54 licensed reactors is operating. That one may well close next month, leaving Japan without a single operating commercial nuke.
Georgia's double-reactor Vogtle project has been sold on the basis of federal loan guarantees. Last year President Obama promised the Southern Company, parent to Georgia Power, $8.33 billion in financing from an $18.5 billion fund that had been established at the Department of Energy by George W. Bush.
Until last week most industry observers had assumed the guarantees were a done deal. But the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry trade group, has publicly complained that the Office of Management and Budget may be requiring terms that are unacceptable to the builders.
Southern and its supporters remain ostensibly optimistic that the deal will be done. But the climate for loan guarantees has changed since this one was promised. The $535 million collapse of Solyndra prompted a rash of angry Congressional hearings and cast a long shadow over the whole range of loan guarantees for energy projects. Though the Vogtle deal comes from a separate fund, skepticism over stalled negotiations is rising.
So is resistance among Georgia ratepayers. To fund the new Vogtle reactors, Southern is forcing "construction work in progress" rate hikes that require consumers to pay for the new nukes as they're being built. Southern is free of liability, even if the reactors are not completed. Thus it behooves the company to build them essentially forever, collecting payment whether they open or not.
All that would collapse should the loan guarantee package fail.
A similar fate may be awaiting the Summer Project. South Carolina Electric & Gas has pledged to build the two new reactors there without federal subsidies or guarantees. But it does require ratepayer funding up front. That includes an apparent need for substantial financial participation from Duke Power and/or Progress Energy customers in North Carolina who have been targeted to receive some of the electricity projected to come from Summer.
But resistance in the Tar Heel State is fierce. NCWarn and other consumer/anti-nuclear organizations are geared up to fight the necessary rate hikes tooth and nail. Should they win -- and in a troubled economy there is much going for them -- nuclear opponents could well take Summer down before it gets seriously off the ground.
Progress already has its hands full with a double-reactor project proposed for Levy County, Florida. Massive rate hikes granted for CWIP by the Florida legislature have ignited tremendous public anger. Unlike Vogtle and Summer, Levy County has yet to get NRC approval.
Progress is also over its head at Crystal River. Upwards of $2 billion has been poured into botched repairs at this north Florida reactor. Odds are strong it will never reopen.
The same may be true at California's San Onofre, now shut due to problems with its steam generator tubing, a generic flaw that could affect up to about half the currently licensed 104 U.S. reactors. Nukes at Vermont Yankee, New York's Indian Point and Pilgrim, in Massachusetts, among others, are also under fierce attack.
These elderly reactors have been routinely issued extended operating licenses by the NRC.
But as their physical deterioration accelerates, official licenses may now be beside the point for these old reactors... and for new nukes as well. The major financial trade publications such as Bloomberg's, Fortune et al, now regularly concede that increased efficiency and renewable projects are cheaper, faster to build and more profitable than new reactors. The Tennessee Valley Authority, a federal agency, could conceivably pick up the corpse and try to build new reactors, as it did at the dawn of the nuclear age, when no private utilities would touch the untested but clearly dubious promise of the "Peaceful Atom."
In the decades since, the promise of electricity "too cheap to meter" has proven to be a tragic myth.
And all these years later, the financial pitfalls of what may be America's last two proposed reactor projects may write the final epitaph for an industry whose fiscal failures are in the multi-billions.
At the end of the road, it will still take citizen activism to finally bury this industry. But we may be very close to making it happen, and now is a critical time to push extra hard.
Harvey Wasserman's SOLARTOPIA! Our Green-Powered Earth is at www.harveywasserman.com along with HARVEY WASSERMAN'S HISTORY OF THE U.S. He edits www.nukefree.org. Originally published by www.freepress.org.
Follow Harvey Wasserman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/solartopia
I have been reading several of your articles on topics ranging from nuclear power to gun control and I am afraid that your thought process *fails the test*
Nuclear Industry Welfare. Another outrage re: US Gov, taxpayer's money and Nuclear Power.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/04/13-11
The US is facing a $15 trillion national debt, and there is no shortage of opinions about how to move toward deficit reduction in the federal budget. One topic you will not hear discussed very often on Capitol Hill is the idea of ending one of the oldest American welfare programmes – the extraordinary amount of corporate welfare going to the nuclear energy industry.
'It is shocking that the nuclear industry continues to receive so much federal support at a time of record debt.'
Many in Congress talk of getting "big government off the back of private industry". Here's an industry we'd like to get off the backs of the taxpayers.
Man’s greed for “cheap” power has led us down the road to fashion our complete destruction, a total annihilation of the human species and all the other animals, in our insane attempt to grab “cheap power”. We could pay the highest price of all for this “cheap power”.
http://nukeprofessional.blogspot.com/p/uranium-aerosolized-into-atmosphere.html
And they are focusing this article on fuel pool 4
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/04/fukushima-dai-ichi-no-4-an-earthquake-before-spent-fuel-rods-are-moved-to-safe-storage-would-be-the-end.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher
Interview w/Cathy Iwane, special Nuclear Hotseat correspondent based in Japan, about the attempts to burn Fukushima radioactive rubble in Wakayama Prefecture. Despite 30 cities and townships voting unanimously to reject the rubble, the government is currently maneuvering to burn it, despite dangers of spreading contamination from smoke in the air and ashes dumped into the ocean. Interviewed on April 10, 2012 by Libbe HaLevy, producer/host of Nuclear Hotseat Podcast, the weekly report on all things anti-nuclear. www.NuclearHotseat.com - check the blog for each week's podcast or subscribe for free on iTunes.
If Ex-PM Kan can mobilize the Japanese people, then maybe, they can (perhaps) start taking steps to reclaim their Government and their personal safety because the current administration is more concerned with protecting TEPCO than public health!
Good Luck Japan, Northern Japan is now contaminated,
... What other part of Japan is next?
Only Nature knows!
These “head bolts” can be removed and then tested now since the reactors are no longer reactors and just piles of metal scrap…
I believe that inspectio will prove that they have been stressed well beyond their designed loading; that is IF TEPCO will release the data!
Why Fukushima Can Happen Here: What the NRC and Nuclear Industry Dont Want You to Know
http://vimeo.com/39718034
The well-known safety flaws of Mark 1 Boiling Water Reactors have gained significant attention in the wake of the four reactor accidents at Fukushima, but a more insidious danger lurks. In this video nuclear engineers Arnie Gundersen and David Lochbaum
Please share it widely!
Faved, already fanned!
http://www.stltoday.com/news/opinion/columns/the-platform/editorial-lawmakers-should-reject-ameren-s-greedy-money-grab/article_082aab25-a126-5131-bb92-fc9b7bd20038.html
“The bill would allow Ameren to charge ratepayers somewhere between $40 million and $100 million for expenses incurred in obtaining an early site permit for a second nuclear reactor at its Callaway County plant. Under current law, Ameren could get that money back once Callaway II starts producing power. But, in all likelihood, Ameren will never build Callaway II. It wants the money back anyway. Last week, University of Vermont researcher Mark Cooper, one of the nation’s foremost experts on nuclear power, published the latest of many reports indicating that nuclear power in the United States is going nowhere. Because of high costs, safety concerns following the Fukushima, Japan, tsunami disaster last year and market alternatives, particularly natural gas, no new market for nuclear power exists in the United States.
Just VOTE N☢...
Many in Congress talk of getting "big government off the back of private industry". Here's an industry we'd like to get off the backs of the taxpayers!!
End Nuclear Fascism SLAVERY
* http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=nuclear+fascism
http://www.dw.de/dw/article/0,,15881452,00.html?maca=en-rss-en-all-1573-rdf
Four European nations have called on the EU to grant nuclear energy a similar status to solar and wind power, according to a German paper. This could lead to the EU paying out billions to subsidize nuclear power.
WTH? Aren't ALL NPP's Subsidized? By Taxpayers?
Fukushima Nuclear Crisis Update for April 10th – April 12th, 2012
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/nuclear-reaction/fukushima-nuclear-crisis-update-for-april-10t/blog/39941/
After 60 years, the taxpayer should not continue to subsidise multibillion-dollar corporations in the nuclear energy sector
The US is facing a $15 trillion national debt, and there is no shortage of opinions about how to move toward deficit reduction in the federal budget. One topic you will not hear discussed very often on Capitol Hill is the idea of ending one of the oldest American welfare programmes – the extraordinary amount of corporate welfare going to the nuclear energy industry.
Many in Congress talk of getting "big government off the back of private industry". Here's an industry we'd like to get off the backs of the taxpayers.
As, respectively, a senator who is the longest-serving independent in Congress and the president of an independent and non-partisan budget watchdog organisation, we do not necessarily agree on everything when it comes to energy and budget policy in the US. But one thing we strongly agree on is the need to end wasteful subsidies that prop up the nuclear industry. After 60 years, this industry should not require continued and massive corporate welfare. It is time for the nuclear power industry to stand on its own two feet.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/apr/13/nuclear-industry-us-welfare?newsfeed=true