Ohio faces a decision soon about its two nuclear reactors, Davis-Besse and Perry, and on Wednesday, neighbors of one of those plants issued a cry for help. The reactors’ problem is that the price of electricity they sell on the high-voltage grid is depressed, mostly because of a surplus of natural gas. And the reactors do not get any revenue for the other benefits they provide. Some of those benefits are regional – emissions-free electricity, reliability with months of fuel on-site, and diversity in case of problems or price spikes with gas or coal, state and federal payroll taxes, and national economic stimulus as the plants buy fuel, supplies and services. Some of the benefits are highly localized, including employment and property taxes. One locality is already feeling the pinch: Oak Harbor on Lake Erie, home to Davis-Besse. The town has a middle school in a building that is 106 years old, and an elementary school from the 1950s, and on May 2 was scheduled to have a referendu
Comments
In fifty years, has a red cent ever been dished out as a result of PA? I don't think so. I suppose that in 1958 it might have been fair to call PA a subsidy, but it's been fifty years now.
Moreover, the "fair value" of the act is extremely small. The PA act only matters if an accident occurs where total costs exceed $10 billion. The likelihood of such a scenario is extremely small (once every million rx-yrs?), making the annual cost (or value) of PA insurance practically negligible. It's been 10,000 rx-years now for LWR, and only one incident of any note has occurred. That accident never came anywhere close to $10 billion in settlements.
Now from the standpoint of the federal government consider the benefits of the PA act. How much does the PA generate in local, state and federal taxes revenues? Based on NEI stats, it might be $7 billion or so annually, maybe even $10 billion. Much of that goes to the federal government. Some subsidy: not one red cent in exchange for billions annually.
Of course the most important benefit of the act is that 788 billion kw-hrs are NOT generated by fossil fuels. This benefit is infinite by any sane measure. I wouldn't even bother to put a dollar value on this, as the real benefit is the countless lives that were not cut short by choking on emissions from a coal plant.
Plus, the $10B cap isn't really a cap. If costs exceed that amount (which is very unlikely anyway), then Congress has the authority to decide what to do.
I don't believe that the $100 million figure attached to TMI-2 was paid out as part of the PA act. I think the industry paid the tab.
Yes, so essentially the federal government may or may not pick up the tab if it gets to over $10 billion. PA is merely the mechanism for streamlining the process. How anyone can view this as a subsidy to the nuclear power industry is beyond me. As a piece of insurance handed to the nuclear power industry, PA is of little value.