You know, it’s kind of sad that no one is willing to invest in nuclear energy anymore. Wait, what? NuScale Power celebrated the news of its company-saving $30 million investment from Fluor Corp. Thursday morning with a press conference in Washington, D.C. Fluor is a design, engineering and construction company involved with some 20 plants in the 70s and 80s, but it has not held interest in a nuclear energy company until now. Fluor, which has deep roots in the nuclear industry, is betting big on small-scale nuclear energy with its NuScale investment. "It's become a serious contender in the last decade or so," John Hopkins, [Fluor’s group president in charge of new ventures], said. And that brings us to NuScale, which had run into some dark days – maybe not as dark as, say, Solyndra, but dire enough : Earlier this year, the Securities Exchange Commission filed an action against NuScale's lead investor, The Michael Kenwood Group. The firm "misap
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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.