{"id":327141,"date":"2010-02-16T13:53:18","date_gmt":"2010-02-16T18:53:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.reuters.com\/james-pethokoukis\/?p=3383"},"modified":"2010-02-16T13:53:18","modified_gmt":"2010-02-16T18:53:18","slug":"nuclear-power-and-crony-capitalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/327141","title":{"rendered":"Nuclear power and crony capitalism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Give the POTUS some credit for proposing something, anything on domestic policy that is certain to irk his base. Reuters<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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President Barack Obama announced $8.3 billion in loan guarantees on Tuesday to build the first U.S. nuclear power plant in nearly three decades in a move designed to help advance climate legislation in Congress. … The loan guarantee will go to help Southern Co. build two reactors at a plant in the state of Georgia. “Even though we’ve not broken ground on a … new nuclear power plant in thirty years, nuclear energy remains our largest source of fuel that produces no carbon emissions,” Obama said after touring a union education center in Lanham, Maryland. “To meet our growing energy needs and prevent the worst consequences of climate change, we’ll need to increase our supply of nuclear power. It’s that simple,” he said.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Yet how viable is Big Nuclear without the help of Big Government? An interesting analysis from Cato’s Jerry Taylor<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Tufts economist Gilbert Metcalf, for instance, has calculated that, under current law, the levelized cost of nuclear power in the United States is 4.31 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh). Coal-fired electricity, on the other hand, cost 3.53 cents per kWh and “clean” coal cost 3.55 cents. But even these nuclear estimates are almost certainly too low. That’s because Metcalf uses an “overnight cost” (construction costs minus financing costs) figure of $2,014 per installed kilowatt (kW) which is much too low. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) puts this cost at $2,475 per kW at present-although even this figure is suspicious because it relies on a worldwide average for nuclear power plant construction-including the grossly unreliable estimates from state-managed economies. The Standard & Poor’s overnight cost estimate of $4,000 is likely the most reliable because it is based on nuclear plant construction costs in economies where labor and material costs are very similar to those found in the United States. Industry analyst Jim Harding, who uses overnight cost figures similar to Standard & Poor’s, puts the levelized costs for new nuclear power generation at 12-15 cents per kWh right now.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Will conservatives who complain about government debt guarantees to Wall Street complain about guarantees to energy companies?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Give the POTUS some credit for proposing something, anything on domestic policy that is certain to irk his base. Reuters: President Barack Obama announced $8.3 billion in loan guarantees on Tuesday to build the first U.S. nuclear power plant in nearly three decades in a move designed to help advance climate legislation in Congress. … […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1063,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-327141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1063"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=327141"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327141\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=327141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=327141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=327141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}