Despite recent claims by the industry that its reactors are now economic in the face of rising natural gas prices, it is once again poised at the federal trough, hoping for more subsidies. The study is to address federal loan and price guarantees, special tax considerations, and direct federal investment as means of encouraging new nuclear projects. Evidently, the tens of billions lavished by taxpayers over the past five decades on the development of nuclear power wasn't enough to make the industry viable. Now they demand additional economic and regulatory subsidies to help nuclear plants compete in deregulated electricity markets.
Industry calls for the resurgence of nuclear power bear the echo of history repeating itself.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s utilities rushed to build nuclear plants based on electricity demand projections that never materialized. The dirty little secret is that the nuclear construction binge placed upward pressure on electricity rates and ultimately led to the deregulation morass that California and other states are now stuck in. Without exception, nuclear plants exceeded cost projections, often by billions, and frequently took more than a decade to construct. Ratepayers were left with excess generation capacity and high rates and many were saddled with debt from canceled plants that have yet to produce an electron. Unless economic and political rationality prevails, opportunistic calls for a nuclear revival may raise the real specter of future increases in electricity rates, as well as greater safety and environmental threats from accidents at aging reactors and through the handling and storage of high-level nuclear waste.