Peter Bradford opines that since the 1950s, U.S. nuclear power has commanded immense taxpayer and customer subsidy based on promises of economic and environmental benefits. Many of these promises are unfulfilled, but new ones take their place. More subsidies follow (Fact check needed here !!).
Today the nuclear industry claims that keeping all operating reactors running for many years, no matter how uneconomic they become, is essential in order to reach U.S. climate change targets. Economics have always challenged U.S. reactors (Fact check here too). After more than 100 construction cancellations and cost overruns costing up to US$5 billion apiece, Forbes Magazine in 1985 called nuclear power the greatest managerial disaster in business history ... only the blind, or the biased, can now think that most of the money ($265 billion by 1990) has been well spent (via competition with natural gas?). U.S. AEC Chair Lewis Strauss in the 1954 promise that electric power would be too cheap to meter is today used to mock nuclear economics, not commend them. (Exaggeration, but still true in the sense of generation)
As late as 1972 the AEC forecast that the U.S. would have 1,000 nuclear power reactors by the year 2000. Today, we have 100 (99) operating power reactors, down from a peak of 112 in 1990. Since 2012, U.S. power plant owners have retired five units and announced plans to close nine more. Four new reactors are likely to come on line. Without strenuous government intervention, almost all of the rest will close by mid-century (Gross exaggeration and not true).
Because these recent closures have been abrupt and unplanned, the replacement power has come in substantial part from natural gas, causing a dismaying uptick in greenhouse gas emissions, (with no guarantee of price stability).
To justify their current subsidy demands, nuclear advocates assert 3 propositions. First, they contend that power markets undervalue nuclear plants because they do not compensate ..
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