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
Greenpeace co-founder and current co-chair of the Clean and Safe Energy (CASEnergy) Coalition, Patrick Moore, will be appearing on C-SPAN's Washington Journal this morning at 9:30 ET. (Extra bonus: Greta
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ESKOM just dumped a 2 unit EPR project in South Africa even with France offering to tender 85% of the cost of construction. Even this residual financial risk was to great to bear for the government owned utility.
In fact, new nukes run the risk of being the ultimate in toxic mortgages.
According to a Moody's assessment of the credit risk that wading back into this quagmire brings on will not be removed by socializing the up front costs for the builders. Moore may not believe in the conclusion of the Congressional Budget Office's concern of greater than 50% default rate on these loans, but he is wrong again to dismiss it as some figment of CBO's imagination projected into the future. If you read it, the conclusion is based on the very real product of this industry's financial history and the fact that nobody knows just how high the cost of construction will soar. Even this 2003 assessment was using $2.5 billion for an 1000 MWe unit. The projected price tag is now far far and away from that guesstimate.
Moore's gets it wrong again to blame the abandonment of construction in the 1970's on politics. It was the financial collapse, pure and simple, as the result of the industry's gross failure to bring reactors online on budget and on schedule.
He stumbled through the question about the "nuclear exclusion clause" in homeowner insurance policies because the professional risk assessors won't risk to match the cost of an accident however remote the probabilities, hence the liability cap and leaving the taxpayer holding the tab.