“The House bill [H.R. 6544] would also extend the Price-Anderson federal accident insurance subsidy, first enacted in 1957 and renewed seven times since then. The program expires at the end of 2025. It isn’t clear why this federal subsidy for nuclear in still needed when the industry insists its new, advanced reactor designs are ‘inherently’ walk-away safe.”
The U.S. nuclear industry in recent days has hit three cherries on the federal money-and-policy slot machine. The open question is whether the largess (some might call it pork) will have the intended results: revitalizing a moribund industry by hitching its wagon to the feverish fear of climate change and long-run animosity toward nuclear rivals China and Russia.
First, the money–the most tangible of the goodies Congress and the White House have doled out.…
Ed. Note: The news about nuclear is not good, which has been true for the last 70 years. Kennedy Maize at the Quad Report has the latest.
Holtec Decommissioning Scandal (800 MW Palisades)
New Jersey-based Holtec International on January 30th agreed to pay its home state a $5 million fine in order to avoid criminal prosecution for falsifying documents related to a 2018 state-awarded tax break program.
The development in New Jersey could scuttle widespread rumors, most likely spread by Holtec, that the U.S. Department of Energy is about to loan the company $1.5 billion for its project to recommission the shuttered 800-MW Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan. Bloomberg first reported the rumor, commenting that the DOE loan would be “the latest sign of strengthening federal government support for the atomic industry.”…
Ed. Note: A classic Candid Camera episode is where a car without a motor makes a downhill stop at a service station for a checkup. The attendants are stunned to find the car is engineless. Fiction and funnies turned into fact with Trevor Milton, whose hydrogen/fuel cell/electric truck company, Nikola Corp., pulled this stunt with a rolling truck in a promotional video. Kenneth Maize has the story in “Trevor Milton, E-truck Nikola Corp. Founder, Headed to Prison?“
…“It was mostly smoke and mirrors. The company had acquired “gliders,” truck platforms without engines. In one notorious case highlighted by Hindenburg, Nikola in 2018 posted a YouTube video of a battery-powered Nikola cab and trailer … moving rapidly along a desert highway. Hindenburg said the truck wasn’t moving under its own power.