Exelon Nuclear's corrupt lobbying activities, seeking massive public bailouts, lead to multiple federal investigations, as radioactive risks mount

Exelon is not only the largest nuclear utility in the U.S., it is the biggest electric utility in the country. As reported by Midwest Energy News, multiple federal investigations, including by the Securities and Exchange Commission as well as a U.S. Attorney's Office and grand jury, have been launched into Exelon Nuclear's lobbying activities involving Illinois state legislators and Chicago officials.

In the past several years, Exelon lobbyists have secured large-scale bailouts for its dangerously age-degraded atomic reactors in New York ($7.6 billion over 12 years; an Exelon lobbyist brazenly bragged, at a dirty energy industry conference, about the 750% return on investment!), Illinois ($2.35 billion over 10 years), and New Jersey. Its "nuclear hostage taking" tactic, as longtime Exelon watchdog Dave Kraft of Nuclear Energy Information Service (NEIS) of Chicago calls it, is to "threaten" to close reactors by date certain, unless massively bailed out.

The threat is to the workers' jobs at the nuclear power plants, but also to local tax revenues, once reactors close for good. NEIS, Beyond Nuclear, and our allies say "yes please!" to the reactor closures (thereby averting core meltdowns, stopping high-level radioactive waste generation and worsening contamination levels), but have simultaneously long called for just transitions, for both the workforce, as well as the host communities. In September, Exelon did close Three Mile Island Unit 1 in Pennsylvania for lack of a bailout; it is using that to try to leverage bailouts at its several other decrepit atomic reactors across the Keystone State. Exelon is also seeking bailouts for reactors in Maryland, and elsewhere.

In fact, it is leading the effort to secure $23-39 billion in federal "tax extender" subsidies for old reactors, a money grab opposed by Beyond Nuclear and 70 other groups. But for such bailouts, numerous reactors (four in NY, three in IL, etc.) may well have already been shut down (see Beyond Nuclear's "Reactors Are Closing" website page for a full list).

Reactor closures must happen ASAP, for Exelon is a toxic company in more ways than one. As documented by the Japan Times, Exelon management so abused its own control room operators at the Byron nuclear power plant in IL, that some committed suicide, while others sickened and died. Similarly, Exelon has punished whistleblowers, driving them out of the company and blacklisting them from the U.S. nuclear power industry. As documented by Beyond Nuclear, Exelon's massive leaks of tritium into the environment, at nuclear plants like Braidwood in IL -- which it then concealed for a decade -- put its unsuspecting neighbors at severe risk. (The safety risks continue to this day at Byron and Braidwood, as attested to by a former U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission professional engineer.) Exelon even has the infamy of being the only company expelled from the American Wind Energy Association, for lobbying the federal government to end wind power subsidies that Exelon itself was taking. Such a rogue corporation puts our entire country at risk, not only our pocketbooks as ratepayers and taxpayers, but also our health and safety, downwind and downstream (as well as up the food chain and down the generations) from its fleet of two-dozen high risk reactors!

"The best democracy money can buy" risks, to borrow the phrase of investigative journalist and anti-nuclear watchdog Greg Palast, of Exelon's corruption, also threaten democracy and rule of law.

Most of this week's "Beyond Nuclear with Kevin Kamps" Sputnik International Loud & Clear radio half-hour show was devoted to Exelon's corruption and catastrophic risks.