New Nukes for No Money Down! Why Should Nuclear Loan Guarantees Cost Less Than Student Loans?

[bananas]

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/07/03/why-should-nuclear-loan-guarantees-cost-less-than-student-loans/

July 03, 2012

New Nukes for No Money Down!
Why Should Nuclear Loan Guarantees Cost Less Than Student Loans?
by HARVEY WASSERMAN

The Department of Energy wants to give the Southern Company a nuclear power loan guarantee at better interest rates than you can get on a student loan. And unlike a home mortgage, there may be no down payment.

<snip>

The documents show the DOE has intended to charge the Southern a credit subsidy fee of one to 1.5%, far below the rates you would be required to pay for buying a house or financing an education.

On a package 15 times bigger than what the federal government gave the failed solar company Solyndra, Southern would be required to pay somewhere between $17 million and $52 million. Advocates argue the fee is so low that it fails to adequately take into account the financial risks of the project. Numerous financial experts have estimated the likely fail rate for new nuclear construction to be at 50% or greater.

Furthermore, since a primary lender would be the Federal Financing Bank, the taxpayer is directly on the hook. Guaranteed borrowings are not supposed to exceed 70% of the project’s projected costs, but it’s unclear what those costs will actually turn out to be, as the public has been given no firm price tag on the project.

There is apparently no cash down payment being required of Southern as it seems the loan is designed to be secured with the value of the reactors themselves, whatever that turns out to be. In the unlikely event they are finished, liability from any catastrophe will revert to the public once a small private fund is exhausted.

Southern wanted the terms of the DOE offer kept secret, and we still don’t know everything about it. But in March, a federal circuit court judge ordered that the public had a right to know at least some of the details.

<snip>

[PoliticAverse]

1. Stop the corporate welfare. n/t

[NNadir]

2. Well, we might ask why the State of California, which is cutting it's universities to the bone

can afford 20 billion bucks to fund the solar cults even though there has not been ONE gas plant shut anywhere on the planet because of the extremely expensive solar scam.

Whether that senile old bastard Harvey Wasserman knows it or not - and let's be clear he knows very little except about how to chant the same tired shit year after year, decade after decade - nuclear power saves lives.

It is therefore, worthy of government support, and in fact, in a government not run by appeals to fear, ignorance and superstition of the likes of Wasserman, the government would be building nuclear power plants with outright tax investment.

Why? Because nuclear power remains the world's largest, by far, source of climate change gas free primary energy, and because air pollution and climate change kill people in normal operations.

Building new nuclear power plants should be the same kind of effort that built the Hoover dam.

Harvey Wasserman has been ranting insipidly for more than 3 decades about nuclear power.

Where are all the dead bodies as a result of nuclear power for whom he's been hoping?

In that period, a reasonable estimate for the number of people who died from air pollution, if we rely on the figures from the World Health Organization, with 3.3 million people killed each year about 90 million people died from air pollution.

Does the senile old bastard give a rat's ass about any of these people?

Obviously not.

There is NOT ONE anti-nuke who gives a rat's ass about the 90 million dead from air pollution in the last 3 decades.

Wasserman would rather focus on his delusion that someone, anyone died from Fukushima.

Too bad that the senile old bastard, like his admirers, has been so badly disappointed that it was actually safer to be in a nuclear plant on March 11 of last year than it was in a thousand other places in the same earthquake, not that there is ONE anti-nuke who gives a rat's ass about anything but radiation associated with that tragedy, not the dead in buildings, not the dead in cars, not the dead walking down the street.

The average increase in carbon dioxide concentrations this year, month to month, 2012 compared to 2011 is now averaging 2.24 ppm, meaning that it's on a pace to be the fifth worst year on record, after 1998, 2002, 2005 and 2010.

Heckuva job antinukes!

You must all be very proud.

Does Harvey have anything to say about any of that? Anything to say about the trillions of dollars spent in the last decade to keep the oil pipelines open?

Who cares? Like I said the tired old paranoid scare mongerer is senile, if anyone is senile, and before going completely senile he was just sick.

Have a nice evening. Breath in some coal PAH's for me.

Have a nice evening.

[kristopher]

3. .

[XemaSab]

5. Where is the source for that graph?

I'm curious about what constitutes traditional biomass vs. "modern" biomass and biofuels.

[FBaggins]

6. "Traditional biomass"

When the aboriginal people burn animal dung to warm themselves... they're using "traditional biomass".

As are you when the power goes out and you use the fireplace to roast your hot dogs.

Whether such fuel is properly "renewable" depends largely on whether it's managed in a sustainable way.

[bananas]

7. See the REN21 and UNEP reports

That chart is in kristopher's post on the REN21 report: http://www.democraticunderground.com/112719061

I posted direct links to both the REN21 and the related UNEP reports: http://www.democraticunderground.com/112718540

edit to add: they also have interactive maps etc so you might want to browse around at REN21 and UNEP websites in addition to reading the report pdfs.

[Fledermaus]

4. If only nuclear power operators were held to the same standard as students for their loans.

Student loans are forever.

Never, never let your children get student loans! ever! They will fuck you.