Skip to main content

Who Would Benefit From a Resurgence In Nuclear Energy?

Over at Marketwatch, Marshall Loeb, former editor of Money, says that there is money to be made in the American nuclear industry:
Expect construction of the first plants to begin about 2009-2010. But don't expect them to begin producing juice any time soon. The complex process of designing, winning regulatory permissions and building a plant devours at least a dozen years. At best, the first of the new nukes will start coming on line in about 2015.

But even before that, large numbers of people stand to benefit. Among them are producers of many sophisticated goods (steam generators, turbines, pumps, specialty steel and alloys), skilled craftsmen and professionals (pipefitters, welders, engineers, architects), uranium miners, and, of course, shareholders in companies that make and build the plants.

Alas, there aren't many of the last mentioned in the U.S. Only General Electric remains. And its nuclear business -- designing and building reactors and providing services and nuclear fuel -- is about $1 billion a year. Westinghouse, long the other major U.S. manufacturer, sold out in 1999 to British Nuclear Fuels Ltd., which in turn sold the business early this year to Japan's Toshiba.

However, many of the new nuclear plants are planned to be in the U.S. South, and railways, trucking and barge lines in the region are likely to benefit from a broad pickup in traffic.

Says Richard Myers, executive director of the Nuclear Energy Institute, a trade group: "All roads now lead to nuclear power. It's not the total solution to our energy challenges, but it is part of the solution."

The numbers are so big that being only part of the solution could be dramatically profitable.
Technorati tags: , , , ,

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

An Ohio School Board Is Working to Save Nuclear Plants

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

Why Ex-Im Bank Board Nominations Will Turn the Page on a Dysfunctional Chapter in Washington

In our present era of political discord, could Washington agree to support an agency that creates thousands of American jobs by enabling U.S. companies of all sizes to compete in foreign markets? What if that agency generated nearly billions of dollars more in revenue than the cost of its operations and returned that money – $7 billion over the past two decades – to U.S. taxpayers? In fact, that agency, the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im Bank), was reauthorized by a large majority of Congress in 2015. To be sure, the matter was not without controversy. A bipartisan House coalition resorted to a rarely-used parliamentary maneuver in order to force a vote. But when Congress voted, Ex-Im Bank won a supermajority in the House and a large majority in the Senate. For almost two years, however, Ex-Im Bank has been unable to function fully because a single Senate committee chairman prevented the confirmation of nominees to its Board of Directors. Without a quorum

NEI Praises Connecticut Action in Support of Nuclear Energy

Earlier this week, Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy signed SB-1501 into law, legislation that puts nuclear energy on an equal footing with other non-emitting sources of energy in the state’s electricity marketplace. “Gov. Malloy and the state legislature deserve praise for their decision to support Dominion’s Millstone Power Station and the 1,500 Connecticut residents who work there," said NEI President and CEO Maria Korsnick. "By opening the door to Millstone having equal access to auctions open to other non-emitting sources of electricity, the state will help preserve $1.5 billion in economic activity, grid resiliency and reliability, and clean air that all residents of the state can enjoy," Korsnick said. Millstone Power Station Korsnick continued, "Connecticut is the third state to re-balance its electricity marketplace, joining New York and Illinois, which took their own legislative paths to preserving nuclear power plants in 2016. Now attention should