New York State Aiding Nuclear Plants With Millions in Subsidies

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/02/nyregion/new-york-state-aiding-nuclear-plants-with-millions-in-subsidies.html

[font face=Serif][font size=5]New York State Aiding Nuclear Plants With Millions in Subsidies[/font]

By PATRICK McGEEHAN | AUG. 1, 2016

[font size=3]Utility customers in New York State will pay nearly $500 million a year in subsidies aimed at keeping some upstate nuclear power plants operating, regulators in Albany decided on Monday.

The subsidies were included in an order from the Public Service Commission to establish new rules on how power consumed in the state is generated. The policy, championed by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, calls for half of the state’s electricity to come from renewable sources, such as solar or wind, by 2030.

Mr. Cuomo’s ambition to have New York seen as a national leader in reducing pollution from power generation has been complicated by the declining fortunes of the operators of nuclear plants. A long slump in the price of natural gas, a fuel for other generators, has hurt the profits of many nuclear plants, prompting plans to shut down some in New York.

Exelon has said it may have to close its R. E. Ginna and Nine Mile Point nuclear plants unless it receives financial help from the state. Another company, Entergy, had said that it would close the James A. FitzPatrick plant, which neighbors Nine Mile Point on the shore of Lake Ontario in Oswego County, by early next year.

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It says something that existing nuclear plants apparently cannot compete without subsidies.

[NNadir]

1. Oh reaaaaaaalllly. And the useless solar industry and useless wind industries...

Last edited Tue Aug 2, 2016, 08:27 PM - Edit history (1)

...are not subsidized?

The difference between the small support nuclear energy gets, is that nuclear energy has saved significant number of lives and produced energy at a scale of tens of exajoules, making it the world's largest, by far, source of climate change gas free primary energy.

The solar and wind industry just soaked up in the last ten years, two trillion bucks, or 2/5 of the GDP of Japan, and only a few billion dollars less than the GDP of India, a nation with 20% of the world's population.

As a result, how many exajoules of energy does the wind and solar energy industry produce each year?

For two trillion bucks, did the vast "investment" or better put, squander, in the solar and wind industry slow the accumulation of dangerous fossil fuel waste, or, despite the tortured apologetics of the people who support it, did the accumulation of dangerous fossil fuel waste accelerate?

Does the wind industry compete with the gas industry?

Which one of the little bullshit spewers about alleged "nuclear subsidies" are willing to pay for the "subsidy" on the gas, coal, and oil industries paid in lung tissue, death, and destruction of habitats?

Which one of these whiny stupid people give a shit about the 7 million people who will die this year, 19,000 of them today, because the wind and solar industry have proved ineffective at displacing dangerous fossil fuels?

Nuclear energy saves lives, and has been responsible, according to one of the world's leading climate scientists, for preventing the accumulation of over 60 billion tons of carbon dioxide.

In a sensible world, a world in which scientists and engineers were respected, and not just by dilettantes cruising the pop literature to search, in a semi-literate fashion - for another ten thousand "solar breakthroughs" to announce, the world would be massively investing, at government expense if necessary, in nuclear energy to save what still can be saved, which is, by the way, less and less each year we dither with stuff that hasn't worked, isn't working and won't work, specifically so called "renewable energy."

For the two trillion bucks squandered on the so called "renewable energy" industry in the last ten years, we could have easily built 200 or more nuclear plants, depending on whether we had to kiss the asses of complete idiots with useless safety systems, or whether we could be satisfied with nuclear plants that are infinitely safer than dangerous fossil fuels, like, um, the 400 we built 20 years ago.

That would represent between 10 and 15 exajoules of primary energy available each year to people born yesterday when they are great grandparents.

But we don't live in a sensible world. We live in a world where belief in outright lies and falsehoods are spewed continuously, for example the continuous misrepresentation of peak power as though it were average continuous power whenever the failed, expensive, useless and unsustainable solar and wind trash is discussed.

The result of this selective attention and this lying is written clearly and unambiguously in the planetary atmosphere.

June 2016, 406.81 ppm, June 2015, 402.80 ppm

Of course, rather than give a shit about climate change, the partisans of the failed, enormously expensive, useless and unsustainable mine dependent so called "renewable energy" scheme would rather lie on their useless bourgeois asses and complain that natural gas is allegedly "cheap" and that clean energy, sustainable energy, nuclear energy, might get a dime here and there.

Why do they complain? Because nuclear energy works?

Basically, these people are disgusting, useless and illiterate assholes, all.

They clearly can't think. They are very dangerous people, as 70 million people died, all unnnecessarily, from air pollution since 2006, and they couldn't care less.

Have a nice evening.

[kristopher]

3. Opining on wind and solar you sound just like Donald...

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2016/08/02/3804159/all-your-birds-are-dead/

[kristopher]

2. "It says something that existing nuclear plants apparently cannot compete without subsidies"

It certainly does.

BTW, the headline should read "Billions".

New York's Woeful $7.6 Billion Nuclear Bailout Package
byKarl Grossman

The New York State Public Service Commission—in the face of strong opposition—this week approved a $7.6 billion bail-out of aging nuclear power plants in upstate New York which their owners have said are uneconomic to run without government support.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo—who appoints the members of the PSC—has called for the continued operation of the nuclear plants in order to, he says, save jobs at them. The bail-out would be part of a “Clean Energy Standard” advanced by Cuomo. Under it, 50 percent of electricity used in New York by 2030 would come from “clean and renewable energy sources” ­with nuclear power considered clean and renewable.

“Nuclear energy is neither clean nor renewable,” testified Pauline Salotti, vice chair of the Green Party of Suffolk County, Long Island at a recent hearing on the plan.

“Without these subsidies, nuclear plants cannot compete with renewable energy and will close. But under the guise of ‘clean energy,’ the nuclear industry is about to get its hands on our money in order to save its own profits, at the expense of public health and safety,” declared a statement by Jessica Azulay, program director of Alliance for a Green Economy, based in upstate Syracuse with a chapter in New York City. Moreover, she emphasized, “Every dollar spent on nuclear subsidies is a dollar out of the pocket of New York’s electricity consumers­residents, businesses and municipalities” that should “instead” go towards backing “energy efficiency, renewable energy and a transition to a clean energy economy.”

The “Clean Energy Standard” earmarks twice as much money for the nuclear power subsidy than it does for renewable energy sources such as solar and wind....

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/08/02/new-yorks-woeful-76-billion-nuclear-bailout-package

[OKIsItJustMe]

4. It’s a matter of headline writing

If you were given a job, making $25,000 a year, which you expected to keep 40+ years, would you tell people your new employer will be paying you a million dollars?

[OKIsItJustMe]

5. New York State Has a Plan to Rescue Nuclear Power

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602079/new-york-state-has-a-plan-to-rescue-nuclear-power/

[font face=Serif][font size=5]New York State Has a Plan to Rescue Nuclear Power[/font]

[font size=4]Ratepayers will subsidize unprofitable nuclear plants in order to reach the state’s clean-energy goals.[/font]

by Richard Martin | August 2, 2016

[font size=3]With the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo, New York’s Public Service Commission enacted a landmark Clean Energy Standard that calls for propping up the state’s ailing nuclear plants with a multibillion-dollar subsidy. It’s the most significant step yet by a state government to rescue nuclear power providers, which have been buffeted by low-priced electricity from natural-gas plants.

Under the new plan, ratepayers will subsidize the operation of three of the state’s four nuclear power stations through 2029, providing funding that will average about half a billion dollars a year and could total $7.6 billion. The plan also aims to slash carbon dioxide emissions by 40 percent and produce half the state’s electricity from renewable sources by 2030.

The plants’ operators had publicly stated that they planned to shut down if regulators didn’t come up with public funding. Entergy, which owns the James A. FitzPatrick plant, situated on the shore of Lake Ontario, said it would shut the plant down by early 2017. Exelon, owner of the R.E. Ginna and Nine Mile Point plants, has said it would close those plants in the next few years without state support. (The Indian Point Energy Center, located near New York City, is not included in the new subsidies because, the commission stated, power prices are higher in its region and the plant is not in danger of closing.)

Experts at a Department of Energy conference on the future of nuclear power in May concluded that as many as 20 nuclear plants in the United States could shut down over the next decade, and their closure could dramatically increase emissions of greenhouse gases.

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[Bill USA]

6. But, but, they said it was electricity "too cheap to meter"!!

[OKIsItJustMe]

7. “Too Cheap to Meter”: A History of the Phrase

(Please note, NRC material—copyright concerns are nil.)

[font face=Serif][font size=5]“Too Cheap to Meter”: A History of the Phrase[/font]

June 3, 2016
Thomas Wellock
Historian

[font size=3]Donald Hintz, Chairman of the Nuclear Energy Institute, said at 2003 conference that the nuclear industry had been “plagued since the early days by the unfortunate quote: ‘Too cheap to meter’.” Those four words had become a standard catchphrase for what critics claim were impossibly sunny promises of nuclear power’s potential.

Not so fast, Hintz countered. He noted that Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss, in a 1954 address to science writers, had coined the phrase to describe fusion power, not fission. Nuclear power may be a victim of mistaken identity.

Hintz was not alone in this view. Over the past four decades, antinuclear and pronuclear versions of what Strauss meant by “too cheap to meter” have appeared in articles, blogs, and books. Even Wikipedia has weighed in, on the pro-nuclear side. Reconciling the two versions isn’t easy since Strauss wasn’t explicit about what power source would electrify the utopian future he predicted.

The text in question:

“Transmutation of the elements,–unlimited power, ability to investigate the working of living cells by tracer atoms, the secret of photosynthesis about to be uncovered,–these and a host of other results all in 15 short years. It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter,–will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history,–will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds,–and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age. This is the forecast for an age of peace.”*

…

It is likely, then, that nuclear critics and proponents are partially correct. “Too cheap to meter” was a prediction for a fission utopia in the foreseeable future. But Strauss was speaking for himself.

“A serious governmental body ought not to indulge in predictions,” he said to the science writers. “However, as a person, I suffer from no such inhibition and will venture a few predictions before I conclude.”

He may have believed that he could step away from his Chairman’s role, indulge in speculation, and that history would note the difference.

* Lewis Strauss’s full speech is available in here. “Too Cheap to Meter” is on page 9.[/font][/font]

[Bill USA]

8. interesting!

[NNadir]

9. Not quite as interesting as airheads raising the point more than half a century...

...after the point.

Every year for the last 50 years, nuclear opponents have been predicting a grand so called "renewable energy" nirvana.

Where is it? Right now, two trillion bucks into the rabbit hole of so called "renewable energy" in the last ten years, climate change gas concentrations are rising at the fastest rate ever observed.

406.81 ppm, June 2016; 402.80 ppm, June 2015

More fossil fuels are being burned than ever.

More people are dying from air pollution than ever.

Rather than focus on their millions of continuous garbage predictions about the grand future of so called "renewable energy," hundreds a day for 50 years, they continuously raise the "too cheap to meter" remark about nuclear energy's future made by a person with no scientific or engineering training and a penchant for right wing positions in the 1950s.

No scientists, and no engineers ever said that nuclear energy would be "too cheap to meter."

I would note, with disgust at the collapsing environment, that no other form of energy is expected to be "too cheap to meter." It is merely another case of small minded and poorly educated people engaging in nuclear exceptionalism. If a nuclear event even threatens to injure someone, they'll burn millions of metric tons of dangerous fossil fuels to post on the internet all about it.

By contrast, if 70 million people die every damned decade from air pollution, they'll have nothing to say.

Their claim is that unless nuclear energy is perfect, every other far less perfect forms of energy will be allowed to kill at will at a massive scale.

Similarly they will claim that if nuclear energy isn't free, they will subsidize the rich at the expense of the poor to massively subsidize a scheme that has not worked, is not working, and won't work, so called "renewable energy."

So called "renewable energy" isn't "too cheap to meter." The gas and oil burning hellholes in Europe, Germany and Denmark, that shoot their mouths off so loudly about so called "renewable energy" have the highest electricity rates in Europe.



European residential electricity prices increasing faster than prices in United States

Nuclear opponents are not only completely and totally ignorant about the hard sciences, about which they know zero; but their knowledge of the soft sciences, in particular economics is incredibly weak.

Have a nice day tomorrow.

[diane in sf]

10. What a waste of money.