Crain's Chicago Business: "Exelon wants a market that's not quite so open"

Crain's Chicago Business concludes its editorial critical of Exelon's request for a $1.5 billion ratepayer bailout from the Illinois State Legislature, in order to prop up several of its uncompetitive atomic reactors:

Funny thing about competitive markets: Sometimes prices go up and sometimes they go down. Yet Exelon's recommended solution to helping its existing plants is greater governmental intervention in the form of mandatory surcharges. If the company wants Springfield to mandate higher rates for its generation facilities, it should become a regulated company—with a set return on investment—and abandon the fiction that it's all about an open market.

Crain's also gets in some good licks regarding Exelon's hypocritical position opposing wind power subsidies (lobbying to eliminate them as unwanted competition for its nuclear division, while its own wind power division took advantage of them -- a position that got it kicked out of the American Wind Energy Association!), as well as its generation of forever deadly radioactive waste (which the public also subsidizes, by the way; energy economist Mark Cooper at Vermont Law School has calculated that the first 200 years of radioactive waste management will cost ratepayers and taxpayers $210-450 billion! That figure alone doubles the cost of nuclear generated electricity, except that the externality has never been accounted for!).