Report: Footing the $20B Nuclear Projects Bill
WASHINGTON, D.C.///March 14, 2013///Saddled with an “advance cost recovery” financing arrangement that allows the nuclear industry to make them pay in advance for the construction of new reactors, electricity ratepayers in South Carolina, Florida and Georgia, are faced with a stark choice today: Either “eat” roughly $6 billion already invested in costly new nuclear reactors or shell out even more when the region’s increasingly “uneconomical” reactor projects pile up $20 billion or more in excess costs. That is the main conclusion of “Public Risk, Private Profit, Ratepayer Cost, Utility Imprudence,” a major new report by economic analyst Mark Cooper of the Vermont Law School Institute for Energy and the Environment. Cooper also concludes that the dire prospects ahead for ratepayers in the Southeast U.S. should send a clear warning to ratepayers and lawmakers in other states – including Iowa, Missouri and Utah – that have toyed with adopting “advance recovery financing” (sometimes called “construction work in progress” or CWIP financing) to erect traditional large-scale nuclear reactors and so-called “small modular reactors,” which recently received the Golden Fleece Award from Taxpayers for Common Sense.Read the full text of the March 14, 2013 news release here.Read the Cooper report here.Listen to the streaming audio of the March 14, 2013 telenews event.