What Exelon’s Wind Energy Buy Means For the Future of Nuclear Power

[jpak]

http://www.bnet.com/blog/clean-energy/what-exelon-8217s-wind-energy-buy-means-for-the-future-of-nuclear-power/2441

Exelon (EXC) announced this week it was buying John Deere Renewables for as much as $900 million, a purchase that marks the company’s entrance into the wind generation business and suggests its lack of confidence in a nuclear energy renaissance. As the largest U.S. utility owner and the country’s biggest nuclear generator, Exelon’s actions often foreshadow where the energy industry is headed.

It wasn’t so long ago that President Obama gave nuclear power a huge boost by endorsing the energy source in his State of the Union speech. A month later, the Energy Department announced $8.3 billion in government-loan guarantees to help Southern Co. (SO) to build a new nuclear power plant — the first in more than 30 years — in Georgia.

But in the months since, the momentum for the much-touted nuclear renaissance has slowed to a crawl for a number of reasons. For one, energy prices are too low right now to justify the expensive and lengthy process of secure financing and receive regulatory approval for a new nuclear plant, let alone building the reactor itself.

Plus, the Obama administration, which had hoped to triple the amount of available loan guarantees for new reactors to $54 billion, has been unable to get that funding measure passed. Even the remaining $10 billion in loan guarantees that is still available has yet to be awarded by the DOE — although that announcement is expected. And that’s the problem with nuclear power: It’s impossible to get the financing to build a new reactor without loan guarantees from the government. Finally, without a climate-change bill that puts a price on carbon, nuclear power has difficulty competing with other low-cost, heavy polluting forms of energy, like coal.

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[greenman3610]

1. the Obama loan guarantees are a feint

They know damn well that no one is going to be able to get a public
utility commission's approval for a plant that will raise rates 20 to 30 percent
minimum.
Loan guarantees? Sure! Oh yeah. we're all for nucyular power.
they know the technology is moribund, but it keeps the energy
troglodytes off their backs, while renewables continue to ramp up.

[NNadir]

2. Four or five of the twenty-four reactors now under construction in China will easily produce

more energy than all of the United States wind plants combined.

Only provincial parochials think that the future of nuclear power is a function of what oblivious Americans think. America is fast becoming irrelevant and the fault for that lies with Americans who take this horseshit seriously.

Wimd power fantasies by bourgeois Americans with their heads of their asses scraping for that last gas well to back up the wind garbage mean nothing about the future of nuclear power.

Nuclear power's future does however does determine where wealth will be in the future. China announced plans to build 200 reactors in the next twenty years, meaning that they will have twice as many as the United States has now.

They couldn't care less about the conservative 30 year old fantasy talk about wind power will do. Soothsaying is passe in China.

Have a nice day.