The nuclear power lobby has abandoned its former motto ⸺ “electricity too cheap to meter” ⸺ and replaced it with the fairy tale that nuclear reactors are “clean” and the “answer to climate change.” The industry has spent so much money lobbying on Capitol Hill and on campaign financing, that Congress bought the whole charade and added nuclear reactor operations to its list of “clean energy” tax credit beneficiaries.
Now, with the Trump backlash against any acknowledgment of climate change or fossil fuel pollution, House Republicans are pushing drilling, mining, and burning and want to rescind all the Congressional “clean energy” tax credits.
Proving that irony is not dead, the myth-making nuclear industry is crying foul, as some of the tax credits identify and “incentivize” reactors as “clean energy assets” ⸺ the very fiction that the industry created.
Consequently, over 100 utilities, industry suppliers, and reactor developers, organized by the Nuclear Energy Institute, wrote to Congress April 30 demanding retention of the tax credits which keep alive dreams of new reactor construction.
The credits are essential to nuclear’s economic future, the letter says, and are “critical to strengthening U.S. energy security” ⸺ meaning the industry cannot compete any more, and its CEO’s have said so.
Speaking in New York City on Nov. 27, 2013, World Bank President Dr. Jim Yong Kim said, “The World Bank Group does not engage in providing support for nuclear power. … we don’t do nuclear energy.”
The U.S. Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism concluded in 2009 that governments should help stop nuclear weapons proliferation by “discouraging … the use of financial incentives in the promotion of civil nuclear power.”
John Rowe, a former chairman and CEO of the nuclear power-heavy Exelon Corp. said “unequivocally,” in March 2012, “that new [reactors] don’t make any sense right now…. It just isn’t economic, and it’s not economic within a foreseeable time frame.”
Even the former CEO of the Nuclear Energy Institute, Marvin Fertel, told Scientific American in 2012, “We won’t build large numbers of new nuclear in the U.S. in the near term. Today, you ought to build gas.” And Bill Johnson, CEO of Progress Energy, said in the same article, “Nuclear can’t compete today.” In 2011, Siemens Corp. declared that, following Germany’s decision to close all 17 of its reactors by 2022 (all built by Siemens), the company would stop building new reactors anywhere in the world. “The chapter for us is closed,” said Chief Executive Peter Löscher.
Calling new reactors “too expensive,” Jon Wellinghoff, a former chair of the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said in 2009, “We may not need any, ever,” adding that renewables “like wind, solar and biomass would be able to provide enough energy to meet base load capacity and future demand.”
Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of the reactor engineering giant General Electric, said in 2010, “If you were a utility CEO and looked at your world today, you would just do gas and wind. … You would never do nuclear. The economics are overwhelming.”
Asked about Duke Power Florida’s August 2013 decision to cancel new reactor plans, former Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chair Peter Bradford told the Tampa Bay Times that a nuclear construction boom, “was just this artificial gold rush. And yes, it does show the renaissance is dead.” ⸺ JL
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