Radioactive "Moral Hazard": DOE loans, and guarantees, $6.5 billion for two new reactors for a 0%, $0.00 credit subsidy fee!
Southern Alliance for Clean Energy reports in a press release entitled "New Documents Confirm Utility Giant Southern Company Gets Sweetheart Deal from Energy Department for Multi-Billion Nuclear Loan Guarantees for Vogtle Reactors":
"As revealed today in an Energy & Environment News story by Hannah Northey, the credit subsidy fee for utility giant Southern Company and its utility partner, Oglethorpe Power, for billions of dollars in taxpayer-backed federal loan guarantees, is nothing, $0. This shocking information was disclosed two months after the Department of Energy (DOE) finalized terms of $6.5 billion worth of loan guarantees that were offered as part of an $8.3 billion package to build two new nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle in Georgia. A third partner in the project, MEAG, has yet to have their $1.8 billion loan guarantee finalized."
Please register your disapproval of this nuclear sweetheart deal, at taxpayer expense and risk, to President Obama, your two U.S. Senators, and your U.S. Representative! You can be patched through to your Members of Congress via the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121.
Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE) has posted a blog linking to a CREDO petition initiated by NIRS, calling on U.S. Senators Boxer (D-CA) and Markey (D-MA), strong nuclear power wathdog who, respectively, chair and serve on the Environmental and Public Works Committee, with jurisdiction over nuclear power matters, to request a Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigation into the ZERO credit subsidy fee "no money down" scandal. At the bottom of the CREDO petition site is a link to NIRS' GreenWorld blog post about the Vogtle 3 & 4 sweetheart deal, at taxpayer expense.
The SACE blog also links to a clever and insightful "by the numbers" blog written by Sue Sturgis, Institute for Southern Studies Editorial Director.