New York state regulators have set a January 15th deadline - that's Thursday this week - for a new power contract that provides Exelon with rates high enough to keep the plant running. If the utility - Rochester Gas & Electric - wishes to secure a long term contract for power, the cost will more than double.

The plant has the usual twisted history on the ownership end. Constellation Energy Group bought the Ginna plant from Rochester Gas & Electric in 2004 for the cheap, cheap price of just $401 million and contracted to sell power to the utility/former owner at $44 MWh for 10 years as part of that negotiation. Excelon purchased Constellation in 2012, thus inheriting the plant and its ongoing (through 2014) contract. Hence the more than $100 million in losses from this one plant. Now Exelon maintains that Ginna's electricity must sell wholesale at $71 MWh to earn the company 11% return, somewhere around $60 MWh just to break even this year and next.

Yet average wholesale power price in Rochester for the past 5 years has been $38.83 MWh due to low natural gas prices. If the regulators approve the rate hike the average consumer will be paying an extra $18 more a month to meet the break-even figure. The higher rate being requested translates to an 'extra' $80 million per year over the market price of electricity in the region. Says Jessica Azulay, program director of the Syracuse-based Alliance for a Green Economy...



This is an extraordinary amount of money to be demanded of ratepayers to prop up a private company that has become uncompetitive in the market."

Ginna's not the only nuke Exelon is having financial issues with due to unprofitability. Their Clinton station in Illinois is at risk of permanent shutdown, as are Entergy's Pilgrim station in Massachusetts and FirstEnergy's Davis-Besse plant in Ohio [Moody's]. Unless the owners can convince state regulators to let them charge customers double the market price of electricity. Sadly, the nukes almost always get what the nukes want. They wanted 40-year license extensions, so the NRC passed those out to one and all that weren't scheduled for decommissioning already (four down in 2013). Oh, and decommissioning looks like it'll cost a bundle too.

Given that proposed new nukes are starting in the range of $8-12 billion and rising daily, replacement of the 104 reactors comprising our Gen-I (antique) nuclear fleet is simply not going to happen. Decommissioning is not that good a deal either, and if Exelon chooses to decommission Ginna it's going to cost at least three times what they paid for the plant when they bought it. As a for-instance, Entergy submitted its formal cost estimate for Vermont Yankee's decommissioning last month, at $1.24 billion. Because there is less than half that amount in the decommissioning fund (how did that happen?), they figure they'll just let it sit until the early 2040s (at least) and expect growth of that fund to cover the costs. Which by the early 2040s are likely to have doubled again. The way All Things Nuclear have worked to this point in time should inform us that Entergy is unlikely to remain on the hook for decommissioning costs, or even exist by then. And they will likely have cleaned that fund out one way or another before doing the creative corporate harakiri act.

This is of course unacceptable, and it's not hard to guess who will have to foot the bill in the end to clean up the mess left by our forebears' foolish dive into the Plutonium Economy all those many decades ago. So the ratepayers as well as the general public (as in: taxpayers) get dinged both coming and going, no one in our generations will ever enjoy the full benefits of cheaper, cleaner, sustainable/renewable energy technologies. Whether you're paying an 'extra' $216 a year for electricity or an 'extra' $216 a year in taxes dedicated to decommissioning costs, you're still $216 poorer. But that's just for one plant. There are a hundred more that will also need decommissioning when the owners bail out with their golden parachutes.

One way or another, we will be paying dearly for our nuclear boondoggle well into the latter decades of this century, even if they were all shut down today. Which they of course won't be. If/when one or more melts down and blows up during the remainder of their operating time (or if serious conditions develop in any of the mothballed but not yet decommissioned plants) it'll cost us all a whole lot more than that. Oh, and did I mention the considerable (but always indefinitely deferred) costs of forever-storage for tens of thousands of tons' worth of spent fuel and other high level waste?

I'm noting this dark cloud on the horizon as yet another indicator of how little we the people can expect to benefit economically from the "better, more sustainable future" we and our children will be paying for (because of course rich people won't) for the rest of our lives. In case any brilliant but as-yet unknown political thinkers ever want to seriously advocate seizure of the amassed wealth of this generation's greedheads for the purpose of cleaning up the messes they made while they were busy raping the planet as fast as their slaves could manage. Those trillions could buy a lot of remediation and infrastructure investment for the good of all. And not one of 'em can take it with them when they go. Just saying...

