It's been a rough few months for nuclear power, with the bankruptcy of Westinghouse, the US nuclear arm of Toshiba; continued cost escalation at both US reactor projects and the UK's Hinkley C; and the decision on Monday to abandon two in-process reactors at the V.C.
1) Reuters attributes sunk costs of German nuclear capacity to renewables. Michael Marriotte of NIRS flagged this one. In a recent post, he pointed out that $75 billion Reuters implied was associated with Germany's transition away from nuclear was actually "for decommissioning Germany's reactors and building a permanent radioactive waste dump." This is a sunk cost, and will need to be p
1) Poker, North Dakota style. Using a logic that only an industry trade association could understand, the US state of North Dakota has announced plans to close $50m/year in loopholes to oil and gas. Great! End subsidies that make no sense, such as lower taxes on low production "stripper" wells that have been exploited by nearby activities producing at much higher rates. But no reform is free, so the state officials are offering reduced tax rates on oil and gas in return. The rub: the reductions will cost the state an estimated
1) Don't Prop up USEC. Henry Sokolski of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center and Autumn Hanna at Taxpayers for Common Sense weigh in at the National Review Online on a proposed $2 billion dollar loan guarantee to finance new enrichment facilities for the United States Enrichment Corporation (USEC). USEC is the privatized residual of the government-run Uranium Enrichment Enterprise that ushered in the US nuclear era. In Another So