nuclear

Federal Loan Guarantees for the Construction of Nuclear Power Plants

Administered by the Department of Energy (DOE), the loan guarantee program encourages private investment in nuclear energy by lowering the cost of borrowing and possibly increasing the availability of credit for project sponsors—usually an individual utility, a consortium of utilities, or a merchant power producer. In exchange for providing a loan guarantee, DOE is authorized to charge sponsors a fee that is meant to recover the guarantee's estimated budgetary cost.

Third Party Insurance: The Nuclear Sector's "Silent" Subsidy in Europe

There are two basic international legal frameworks contributing to an international regime on nuclear liability: The International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) 1963 Convention on Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage (Vienna Convention), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) 1960 Convention on Third Party Liability in the Field of Nuclear Energy (Paris Convention), and the associated “Brussels Supplementary Convention”3 of 1963. The Vienna and Paris liability conventions are also linked by a Joint Protocol adopted in 1988.

Nuclear Power: Still Not Viable Without Subsidies

Conspicuously absent from industry press releases and briefing memos touting nuclear power’s potential as a solution to global warming is any mention of the industry’s long and expensive history of taxpayer subsidies and excessive charges to utility ratepayers. These subsidies not only enabled the nation’s existing reactors to be built in the first place, but have also supported their operation for decades.

Nuclear Socialism: Energy subsidies—of any kind—are bad business

Interesting article by Amory Lovins in The Weekly Standard examining the history and market-related problems associated with nuclear subsidies past and present.  Lovins suggests that the structure of many of the proposed nuclear programs do a poor job aligning incentives and accountability for proper risk management and oversight, and create a significant risk of recreating conditions similar to those that led to the meltdown in mortgage markets two years ago.  Lovins uses subsidy data from Earth Track, and suggests shifting from always adding new subsidies to various ene

Nuclear Energy Loses Cost Advantage

Identifying the real costs of competing energy technologies is complicated by the wide range of subsidies and tax breaks involved. As a result, U.S. taxpayers and utility users could end up spending hundreds of billions, even trillions of dollars more than necessary to achieve an ample low-carbon energy supply, if legislative proposals before the U.S. Congress lead to adoption of an ambitious nuclear development program, Mr. Cooper said in a report last November...

Review of selected nuclear tax subsidies in the American Power Act

This memo evaluates three tax subsidies to nuclear power contained in the American Power Act (APA): 5-year accelerated depreciation for reactors; a 10% investment tax credit; and an expansion of a production tax credit for nuclear. The draft Act was floated by Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) in May 2010. Subsidy costs were evaluated using prototype AP1000 and Areva EPR reactor characteristics, and a range of values for cost of capital.

2009 World Nuclear Industry Status Report: Extract

This Bulletin article is an extract from the longer and more detailed analysis prepared for the German Federal Ministry of Environment, Nature Conservation and Reactor Safety.  The extract focuses primarily on the industry trends and does not address the subsidy components of the original report.  Readers primarily interested in nuclear subsidies should refer to the full report.

Nuclear Power in France: Beyond the Myth

The general message is clear: in France nuclear power works, in 2007 providing 77% of the electricity in the country and 47% of all nuclear electricity in the EU. “The requests by countries that wish to profit from that clean and cheap source of energy are legitimate”, claims French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner. But does it really work that well and is it all that clean and cheap in France?

An assessment of the costs of the French nuclear PWR program 1970–2000

The paper reviews the history and the economics of the French PWR program, which is arguably the most successful nuclear-scale up experience in an industrialized country. Key to this success was a unique institutional framework that allowed for centralized decision making, a high degree of standardization, and regulatory stability, all epitomized by comparatively short reactor construction times.

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