Get all the details from Idaho Samizdat.
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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Seems to me that Dr. Diaz is clean on this. As a former chairman and professor emeritus of nuclear engineering (he was my faculty advisor), he can certainly advise potential licensees about the process and the engineering. He can even be a principal at this stage.
A potential conflict MIGHT arise years down the road if he lobbied the NRC during the license application process or during operation. However, the project is certainly YEARS from that stage and I believe there is a temporal limitation of such restrictions.
Transition Power is talking about a new industry structure for nuclear where project developers get the ball rolling then sell the project to bigger money at some stage when the political risks are clearer and the economics can pass due diligence.
This business model happens all the time with independent power producers and especially with renewables. The guys in Fresno California and Boise Idaho are trying something similar with their nuclear projects.
I'll let Utahans judge the ethics of their own politicians!