Photo by Lennart Tange | CC BY 2.0
That teeth-jangling noise you can hear are the fingernails of nuclear power corporations scraping across window ledges in a last, desperate attempt to cling on. It’s a lost cause. Nuclear power is falling to its none too premature death. It just won’t go quietly.
Instead, like Steve Martin’s unforgettable character in The Jerk, the mantra for nuclear corporations has become “I’d just be happy to be in there somewhere.”
The only chance for nuclear energy companies to stay relevant, and even alive, is to squeeze ratepayers. It’s their last, selfish recourse to prop up aging, failing and financially free falling nuclear power plants that should have closed years ago (and in fact should never have been built in the first place.)
Consequently, even as we tentatively celebrated First Energy’s just announced early closures of its four nuclear reactors — Davis-Besse (OH), Perry (OH) and two at Beaver Valley (PA) — we knew that something more devious was afoot.
And indeed it was. Just 24 hours after First Energy’s shutdown announcement, its subsidiary, First Energy Solutions (FES) which runs the nuclear plants, was already appealing, cap in hand, to the US Department of Energy for salvation. The shutdowns, it appeared, were conditional. The reactors would close but only “if there are no buyers or remedies found by their respective dates.”
FES quickly followed this with a late-night March 31 Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing. (Parent company, FirstEnergy, is not part of the bankruptcy proceedings.) Then, on April 4, the company’s chief lobbyist reportedly dined with President Trump, just as FES was attempting to score a bailout to pre-empt the shutdowns by claiming the closures would cause a grid emergency, something the grid operator has exposed as nonsense.
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