US Panel Extends Nuclear Power Tax Credit (thehill.com)

Slashdot reader mdsolar quotes The Hill: The House Ways and Means Committee voted Wednesday to remove a key deadline for a nuclear power plant tax credit... The credit was first enacted in 2005 to spur construction of new nuclear plants, but it has gone completely unused because no new plants have come online since then...

It would likely benefit two reactors under construction at Southern Co.'s Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Georgia and another two at Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Generating Station in South Carolina. Both projects are at risk of missing the 2020 deadline... "When Congress passed the 2005 act, it could not have contemplated the effort it would take to get a nuclear plant designed and licensed," said representative Tom Rice (R-S.C.).
Although one Democrat criticized the extension by arguing that nuclear power "does better in a socialist economy than in a capitalist one, because nuclear energy prefers to have the public do the cleanup, do the insurance, cover all of the losses and it only wants the profits."

Comments

Mature technology

[mdsolar]

Can't survive without subsidies. Like the buggy whip industry....

Wouldn't need subsidies

[tomhath]

Let it succeed or fail on it's own merits. Instead of doing everything you can to block it based on irrational and unscientific fear.

Re:Wouldn't need subsidies

[Shane_Optima]

The "nuclear is expensive" claim is only true because the anti-nuclear lobby has made it that way. If breeder reactors were used, modern fail-safe designs used (unlike Fukushima's reactors) and a "opportunity cost of human life" approach used to dictate safety regulations, then it would be much cheaper than coal and most renewables. The problem is that everyone views damage from radiation as being much more dangerous than global warming, acid rain, oil spills, toxic heavy metal poisoning, etc. so we overspend and obsess over it ways that we never do over coal.

(On the international stage, there are also entirely legitimate concerns over weaponization and nuclear proliferation.)

Re:Wouldn't need subsidies

[Shane_Optima]

Nonsense. Do you know how many years dioxins last before they degrade? Neither do I. Because no one cares about babysitting extremely toxic chemicals, even if it were demonstrated that they wouldn't degrade for hundreds of years. Toxic heavy metals will last for millions or even BILLIONS years! OMG! Won't someone please think of those babysitting costs??

Also, the "thousands of years" argument always indicates a profound ignorance of the time value of money.

Also: keep it on site. Nuclear doesn't generate tons of waste, that's the whole point. It uses very, very little fuel. It can all be stored on site, unless the plant is closed down, which in principle it wouldn't ever need to be because nuclear is by far the cheapest method we have of generating power.

Nuclear power has gone from too cheap to meter to too expensive to matter and it has nobody to blame but itself.

Painfully ignorant. Do you understand that nuclear power works in exactly the same as coal except instead of trucking in tons of coal you simply put a pile of fissile material under the water and let it sit there for a very long time before you need to refuel ? The only expense is the initial refining of the U235 but after that you can breed more fuel.

Beyond these relatively small fixed costs, nearly every single dollar that nuclear costs more than coal is due to increased safety regulations. Some of those regulations we obviously need. One of those safety concerns (namely, security and proliferation concerns) is actually quite worrying. But it is completely wrong to argue that nuclear is intrinsically more expensive than paying to dig up and cart around thousands and thousands and thousands of tons of coal.

Re:Wouldn't need subsidies

[AmiMoJo]

Japan is closing its breeder reactors. They didn't work, always broken or having serious accidents. They want to try again, with the goal being a working demonstrator by 2050.

So good luck getting people to invest in a technology proven to need a great deal of development and decades to come to fruition, assuming it works next time.

Re:Wouldn't need subsidies

[Shane_Optima]

Hysterical.

Do you actually believe Fukushima was a "serious" public safety incident? How would you classify the BP oil spill, which killed a dozen people and affected thousands of square miles? How would you classify the multiple ongoing coal mine fires around the world that will be burning for at least the next hundred years and have resulted in entire towns being evacuated ? How would you classify children and pregnant women being advised not to eat too much tuna because of the brain damage they or their unborn children might develop as a result from the mercury absorbed by the fish... mercury that ultimately came from millions upon millions of tons of coal we've burned?

Not saying Fukushima was a walk in the park, but in this conversation our scale of seriousness should calibrated with the dangers and deaths we've incurred in oil and coal. There is absolutely zero perspective in these matters, as you've brilliantly demonstrated with your (presumably intended to be devastating) one word rebuttal.

Which Democrat?

[rsilvergun]

Not that I'm disagreeing with him/her. I don't like Nuclear because America doesn't have the balls to properly regulate and punish businessmen who flaunt safety. The risks are too great. It's not NIMBY. Make it public run or show me you're willing to throw people responsible for lesser disasters like oil spills in jail for 10-20 years and we'll talk. Until then it'll be like always: privatize the profits, socialize the losses.

Black swan events

[Solandri]

Three Mile Island was the only major commercial nuclear accident in U.S. history. Nuclear power in the U.S. has generated 24,196,167 GWh between 1971-2015. At an average price of 12 cents/kWh, that's $2.90354 trillion. So the approx $3.4 billion in cleanup and lossses from TMI is 0.117% of that. Or in other words, at a retail price of 12 cents/kWh, the historical cost of cleaning up nuclear accidents in the U.S. is 0.014 cents per kWh.

In contrast, subsidies for different energy sources are 23.1 cents/kWh for solar, 3.5 cents/kWh for wind, and 0.2 cents/kWh for nuclear. (Tables ES4 and ES4. Solar received $4.393 billion in subsidies while generating 19,000 GWh. Wind received $5.936 billion while generating 5,936 GWh, and nuclear received $1.66 billion while generating 789,000 GWh.) That's right. The subsidy for solar is 1650x more expensive than cleaning up nuclear accidents. The subsidy for wind is 250x more expensive.

Nuclear decommissioning costs are already paid for by the NRC's Financial Assurance fund. A portion of the revenue from electricity sales are placed into this fund.

The problem with insuring nuclear plants is just a quirk of statistics. The more times you roll the dice, the narrower the bell curve becomes and the more predictable the average outcome. e.g. A 1d100 has an equal chance to produce any result between 1 and 100 - the probability distribution function is a straight line. 2d50 produces a triangular PDF, with the values in the middle tending to be more likely. 10d10 produces an even more compact PDF - a narrow normal curve with results in the middle much more likely than the extremes. And 100d0.5 will always produce 50 - its PDF is just a single peak in the middle.

This is a problem for insuring nuclear plants - because they produce so much energy you don't need very many of them. Whereas there are thousands of coal plants, and (potentially) millions of solar installations, there are only operating 100 nuclear plants in the U.S. So insuring a nuclear plant represents a greater risk for the insurer. Even though the mean outcome will be that there is 1 accident every 30 years, the chance of a 2nd or 3rd accident is still significant and the amount the insurer has to pay out may easily surpass how much they've collected in premiums if they assume the statistically most likely outcome of a single accident.

The insurance company's response is to increase the premium to also cover that 2nd or 3rd event even though they're unlikely. In contrast, with thousands of coal plants they can be much more confident that there will be (say) only 10 accidents every 30 years, and 20 or 30 accidents is extraordinarily unlikely. So the premiums can be lower, even if the average risk (mean) is exactly the same. If there were some way to build thousands of small-scale nuclear plants instead of 100 large ones, private insurance wouldn't be a problem. You get around this problem by creating the largest insurance pool possible, which in this case would be nationalized insurance covering all 100 nuclear power plants.

Statistically, per unit of energy generated, nuclear power is the safest power source man has invented.

Re: Black swan events

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, the pro-nuclear brigade, still stuck on the idea of a reactor in every house and glowing bottles of plutonium at the Red Rocket.

The economics don't work, and neither does the infrastructure. The promises of power too cheap to meter was always a lie.