Search The Oil Drum with Google
Recently on TOD:World
TOD:Local
- Home Buyers Demand Short Commutes, Efficient Homes (with Backyards, Parking, lots of Square Feet)
- Streets: Utilitarian Corridors or Livable Public Space
- Summer Streets a Success!
TOD:Europe
- IEA WEO 2008 - NGLs to the Rescue?
- IEA WEO 2008 - Fossil Fuel Ultimates and CO2 Emissions Scenarios
- The IEA WEO 2008: Will coal usage be phased out?
TOD:Canada
- The Round-Up: October 24, 2008
- Compressed Air Energy Storage - How viable is it?
- Oil Megaproject Update (July 2008)
TOD:ANZ
Blogroll
Energy Sites
- The Coming Global Oil Crisis
- Die Off
- Dry Dipstick
- Energy Bulletin
- From the Wilderness
- Life After the Oil Crash
- Peak Oil Crisis
- Peak Oil News and Message Boards
- Powerswitch
- Rigzone
- Matthew Simmons
- Wolf at the Door
Environment & Sustainability Sites
- The Daily Green
- EcoGeek
- Eco Street
- Green Car Congress
- Green Options
- green.alltop.com
- Gristmill
- RealClimate
- Sustainablog
- Treehugger
- WorldChanging
Blogs
- The Big Picture
- Casaubon's Book
- Cleantech Blog
- Clusterf
k Nation (Jim Kunstler) - The Cost of Energy
- David Strahan
- The Energy Blog
- Entropy Production
- European Tribune
- GraphOilology
- jeffvail.net
- Mobjectivist
- Peak Energy (Australia)
- Peak Energy (USA)
- R-Squared
- Resource Insights
Finance & Economics Blogs
- Calculated Risk
- Ecological Economics
- Econbrowser
- Environmental Economics
- Infectious Greed
- The Mess That Greenspan Made
- Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
Organizations
“No civilization can survive the physical destruction of its resource base.”
—Bruce Sterling
User login
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
Personnel
- Editors: Prof. Goose, Heading Out, Stuart Staniford, Nate Hagens
- DrumBeat Editor: Leanan
- Contributors: ace, Engineer-Poet, Gail the Actuary, jeffvail, JoulesBurn, Khebab, Robert Rapier
- TOD:Local: Glenn
- TOD:Europe: Chris Vernon, Euan Mearns, Francois Cellier, Jerome a Paris, Luís de Sousa, Rembrandt, Rune Likvern, Ugo Bardi
- TOD:Canada: benk, Libelle
- TOD:ANZ: Big Gav, Phil Hart, aeldric
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
GAIA Host Collective
A loan guarantee *IS* a subsidy !
It takes a sub-prime risk (a VERY bad risk BTW, see dozens of started but never finished nukes !) and with a promise of gov't $, makes it prime.
Personally I don't know even a single case when the government had to actually kick in and repay the loan for a nuclear plant
TVA is an arm of the government and they have paid the bonds for long delayed and never finished nuclear power plants ($6 billion of 1980s $ for Bellafonte (which, after 32 years, had it's construction permit canceled), Browns Ferry 1, Watts Bar I & II (those 30 year bonds are almost paid off), Yellow Creek I & II, Hartsville I, II, III & IV, Phipps Bend I & II.
That is eleven nuclear reactors and two of them have produced minimal amounts of power since they started construction in 1974 and 1979. The rest are like WHOOPS I, III, IV & V, writeoffs !
The gov't has not guaranteed commercially owned reactors before, so they were not stuck with River Bend #2, Ft. St. Vrain, Zimmer, et al.
The risk is *NOT* a "political" risk, the risk is the nuclear power building industry having massive cost over-runs and lengthy delays. My guess is that less than half of US nuclear reactors were within 25% of budget and within 1 year of scheduled completion.
I am willing to give this non-economic technology subsidies, but they are not my first priority for subsidies.
New nuclear reactors are simply NOT commercial today in the USA, and the fault lies with the industry building them and the technology. See the quote from the Constellation exec at top.
I have not followed Finland closely, but I understand that they are running into delays and cost overruns already, whilst they are still less than half complete.
Alan
Part of the problem is our absolutely mindless, knee-jerk adherence to hypercapitalist ideology. Had we settled on a national standardized set of siting, design & construction specifications, all of these facilities could have been built and put online on a reasonably fast track. That's how the French did it. But we are SO superior to those "cheese eating surrender monkeys", right? That's why they're only producing something like 70% of their power from operating nukes, while we've got all of these unbuilt and unpaid for ground disturbances as symbols of our mighty national technical prowess.
That's how the French did it.
Yea, so much faith that plants were cited along the German border
http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF8&q=french+reactors+border+germany
No anti-German siting issues that I can see. Two plants, 6 reactors, next to Germany. Germany placed two experimental reactors next to France, and one two reactor plant. The Rhine River is a good source of cooling water.
The next reactor will be built at Flamanville.
Alan
You are right that the risk is high based on past experience. This does not change that there were no taxpayer money ever payed for that. True TVA probably covered the costs in their rates, but this is different - a bad management decision in bad time could result in losses. BTW TVA has a history of that not only in the nuclear sector, check out the Tellco Dam.
It is true that loan guarantees saves money to utilities by saving them the risk premium. But as far as it does not increase my tax bill I don't consider it a subsidy. Actually I consider it a positive and necessary step to help kick start a dormant or developing industry - including wind which is also provided loan guarantees. Which reminds me that loan guarantees are provided for renewable power projects. Why are the double standards?
Take a look here:
http://energy.gov/news/5045.htm
IMO what is outragious here is the 4bln.for biofuels but nobody is ranting about those.
The ratio of nuclear + clean coal vs renewables is 4 : 1. Compare that to the ration of energy produced by the two, which is something like 50 : 1.
"IMO what is outragious here is the 4bln.for biofuels but nobody is ranting about those."
Nobody is ranting about bio-fuels? Do you read anything not related to nuclear on this forum?
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
Nobody is ranting specifically about the loan guarantees for biofuels. At least I haven't seen it, but I may be missing something.
Please don't misinterpret me.
I am NOT against loan guaranties for nukes, but I expect those guaranties to cost tax payers quite a few billion $ in the end for economically failed nukes (half of them ? fourth of them ?). And I do NOT want to see ethanol loans.
I did NOT see any loan guaranties for wind turbines (they do not need them and would provide very little benefit since WTs are so low risk), but sauce for the goose ...
Many other worthwhile programs (some more worthwhile than new nukes) could also benefit from federal loan guaranties.
Alan
Wind energy is present in the 2006 DOE loan guarantee program.
But I could not find any numbers of how much is applied for and how much is granted. Anyway it is pointless to continue arguing this since we largely agree.
TVA issues state income tax free bonds, so no state taxes are paid on the interest on $28.3 billion; much of which is a residue from the failed nuclear program.
Municipal electric utilities, rural electric cooperatives, the four PMAs, and the TVA are exempt from Federal income tax; this type of support is addressed, but only indirectly
from a GAO report.
So taxpayers have paid a heavy price for the failure of the TVA nuclear program. Figure lost taxes on the interest of $6 billion over the 30 year payout of those bonds just for Bellafonte.
Alan
Figure lost taxes on the interest of mortgage payments. Think we should be talking trillions. With "tr".
I think you are nitpicking here. This was money that was left to taxpayers, so effectively nobody "lost" them but the government coffers. TVA still payed it's bills it's just the govt that decided to yield part of them to taxpayers - which I can only applaud in principle.
Now after dicounting for 30 years etc. we should be talking maybe around hundred million... Hardly a lump change but obviously nothing of significance. The gov machine lost the chance to waste one more $100mln. in Iraq for a single day... I'm shocked, so shocked.
TVA decided to build those 23 nuclear plants based on the demand history it had at the time. Electricity use in its service area had grown steadily ever since TVA's inception and the board considered that this would continue just as many now assume that oil demand will continue to increase at the same rate in the future as it has for the past twenty or so years. They just didn't forecast the dislocations in the economy that happened due to oil peaking in the US and the oil embargo. The biggest factor in the cancellation of those plants was the sudden leveling off of electricity demand that occured then. True there were cost overruns and construction problems, but even without those TVA would have been in trouble because the demand for that much power just didn't materialize as expected.
TVA financed the debt incurred by this fiasco in the rates but also by issuing bonds. No 'taxpayer' bailout occured.
The Tellico dam is another matter since I grew up about ten miles from Fort Loudon and it is still a bitter topic in my home area. But to say that TVA is subject to lots of pressure from political entities is an understatement. One needs to look at TN politics, not TVA management, to determine how the Tellico Dam came to be.
I think this answer should be directed to Alan. He uses the failure of TVA plans as an argument that nuclear power is a risky investment and dismisses all political factors into play.
In fact both are equaly important factors that could fail any kind of investment, not only nuclear. You have to have both preconditions, only one will not work. With oil and NG obviously near peak and coal on the GHG crosshair I think the economics of nuclear power are covered. What is left is the political will to go for it and loan guarantees are... well guaranteeing for it.
IMO if we add to this electric rail, plug-in hybrids and some wind we will have PO and GW solved by the middle of the century. So... why is all this fuss about? :)