“[I]t is both pleasing and strange to see Joe Romm don a free market, pro-consumer, pro-taxpayer hat when it comes to nuclear. His (post-modernistic) dream is that wind power, solar power, and negawatts can usher in a post-fossil-fuel era. In reality, however, fossil fuels will replace nuclear to a large degree.”

“Perry Just Made Taxpayers Invest in a $25-billion Nuclear ‘Financial Quagmire.’” So read the headline of a recent post by Joe Romm (Center for American Progress). His subtitle: “Nuclear plants are money losers, but Perry is loaning billions more to the last new one being built.”

It is strange. Nuclear is the only scalable CO2-free electrical generation source known to man. Although it is the most expensive way to boil water (and hopelessly uneconomic compared to natural gas- and even coal-fired power), a stubborn, quasi-religious segment of the Climate Malthusians refuses to bulge.…

“Toshiba’s nuclear business has been hemorrhaging money at its U.S. construction projects in Georgia and South Carolina…. The four units are in states with regulated markets and provisions for nuclear projects to receive a return on their capital investments during construction, through consumer electric rate increases.”

The social value of nuclear power may provoke wide debate. But as a business proposition, in countries with market-based economies, nuclear is failing. New construction is particularly disappointing: a new generation of technology widely expected to get costs and construction times down simply has not done so.

Problems at Toshiba

The latest evidence comes Toshiba, a giant Japanese conglomerate and parent of the U.S. nuclear reactor designer and vendor, Westinghouse Electric. Westinghouse’s ruinous investment in nuclear construction behemoth CB&I Stone & Webster has crippled Toshiba’s finances.…

[Ed. Note: The author, an energy-management consultant and a classical liberal, is an active voice for free-market energy policy in the Southeastern US. He is also a board director of the Institute for Energy Research (IER) and its advocacy arm, the American Energy Alliance.

The December 2016 filing below was followed by an agreement between the Georgia Public Service Commission and Georgia Power Company that allowed GPC recovery of $1.55 billion in cost overruns regarding the 2,240 MW two-unit Vogtle nuclear project. (The plant’s original cost estimate of $14 billion is currently at $18 billion, a 28 percent overage.)

Mr. Clarkson has critically written on the Vogtle project since 2012, Politics and the Nation’s Next Nuclear Plant (Georgia Power’s boondoggle under construction). Subsequent posts by Clarkson have been written in 2013; 2014; 2015 (here, here, here, and here); and 2016 (here and here).…

“You must separate out being pro free enterprise from being pro business. The two greatest enemies of the free enterprise system, in my opinion, have been, on the one hand, my fellow intellectuals, and, on the other hand, the big businessmen.” (Milton Friedman)

“Utility regulation is the unholy union of vested privilege and authoritarian ideology that produces the Rosemary’s baby of flagrant cronyism.” (below)

When an economic libertarian criticizes Georgia Power and Atlanta Gas Light (the utilities in my service area), it doesn’t mean that big corporations or business in general is bad. Quite the contrary, business operating in a free market is morally legitimate and has a sound public policy purpose.

What is opposed is the use of government power to enrich an enterprise instead of winning consumers through superior performance in a competitive market.…