{"id":33158,"date":"2018-04-06T05:44:44","date_gmt":"2018-04-06T10:44:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=33158"},"modified":"2018-04-06T05:44:44","modified_gmt":"2018-04-06T10:44:44","slug":"nuclear-companies-are-just-happy-to-be-in-there-somewhere-and-theyll-gouge-the-ratepayers-to-get-there","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=33158","title":{"rendered":"Nuclear Companies are Just Happy to be in There Somewhere and They\u2019ll Gouge the Ratepayers to Get There"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nuclear Companies are Just Happy to be in There Somewhere and They\u2019ll Gouge the Ratepayers to Get There<\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n
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Photo by Lennart Tange | CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u2019s a lost cause. Nuclear power is falling to its none too premature death. It just won\u2019t go quietly.<\/p>\n

Instead, like Steve Martin\u2019s unforgettable character in\u00a0The Jerk<\/em>, the mantra for nuclear corporations has become\u00a0\u201cI\u2019d just be happy to be in there somewhere.\u201d\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

The only chance for nuclear energy companies to stay relevant, and even alive, is to squeeze ratepayers. It\u2019s 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.)<\/p>\n

Consequently, even as we tentatively celebrated First Energy\u2019s just announced early closures of its four nuclear reactors \u2014 Davis-Besse (OH), Perry (OH) and two at Beaver Valley (PA) \u2014 we knew that something more devious was afoot.<\/p>\n

And indeed it was. Just 24 hours after First Energy\u2019s 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\u00a0\u201cif there are no buyers or remedies found by their respective dates.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nuclear Companies are Just Happy to be in There Somewhere and They\u2019ll Gouge the Ratepayers to Get There\u00a0 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\u2019s a lost cause. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3],"tags":[1361,5493,19699,17149,578,19698,5004],"class_list":["post-33158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-energy-2","tag-bankruptcy","tag-counterpunch","tag-first-energy-solutions","tag-linda-pentz-gunter","tag-nuclear-energy","tag-nuclear-power-companies","tag-nuclear-reactors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33158"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33158\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33159,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33158\/revisions\/33159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}