Reply #5: Those comments would be true if they were not false. [View All]

[kristopher]

When the government transfers costs and risks that raise costs it is a subsidy. The fact is that when reviewed in their totality, the subsidies received by the nuclear industry OFTEN EXCEED THE MARKET VALUE of the electricity that the industry produces.

Contrary to nuclear industry claims the actual subsidies for nuclear come to about $70/mwh.

What is absolutely unfathomable is the degree of trust you place in the self-serving claims of an industry intent on marketing an undesirable product.




From the USC press release:
"The key subsidies for nuclear power do not involve cash payments, the report found. They shift the risks of constructing and operating plants -- including cost overruns, loan defaults, accidents and waste management -- from plant owners and investors to taxpayers and ratepayers. These hidden subsidies distort market choices that would otherwise favor less risky investments.

The most significant forms of subsidies to nuclear power have four principal objectives: Reduce the cost of capital, labor and land through loan guarantees and tax incentives; mask the true costs of producing nuclear energy through subsidies to uranium mining and water usage; shift security and accident risks to the public via the 1957 Price-Anderson Act and other mechanisms; and shift long-term operating risks such as radioactive waste storage to the public.

The report evaluates legacy subsidies that helped build the industry, ongoing support to existing reactors, and subsidies available for new projects. According to the report, legacy subsidies exceeded 7 cents per kilowatt-hour (¢/kWh), well above the average wholesale price of power from 1960 to 2008. In effect, the subsidies were more valuable than the power the subsidized plants produced.

“Without these generous subsidies, the nuclear industry would have faced a very different market reality,” said Doug Koplow, the author of the report and principal at the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based consulting firm, Earth Track. “Many of the 104 reactors currently operating would never have been built, and the utilities that built reactors would have been forced to charge ratepayers even higher rates.”"

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=275881&mesg_id=275881