Sunday, March 24, 2002

Remora

The romantic hero degenerates into a mere bundle of boorshness in Dostoevsky's Pere Karamazov. Having gone through the Byronic geste of having no limits, Pere Karamazov really does live without limits -- except those fears generated by the police and superstition. We thought of that dissolute father of four, today, reading another story about the ideological and fiscal corruption of the Bush administration -- surely, Bush is ushering in the age of Gall, the age of limitless affronts to democracy, honesty, and good taste. Pere Karamazov was moved to act by his capacity for lust. Dick Cheney is moved to act by his taste for collusion, something that develops in those who find positions in the higher echelons of the power industry. The story in the NYT, today about Exelon Corporation (Ex-es and En-s are seemingly Texas Greek), the controller of 20% of the nuclear power in this country, details how by a gosh almighty fortuitous circumstance, the Bush folk and Exelon's management rehabilitated of one of their dead in the water schemes to get nuke power rolling again. The age of Gall is particularly galling because it is presided over by a man who, every day and in every way, demonstrates the wisdom of the American people in not electing him. Exelon, according to the Times, cast its bread on the Republican waters, and just as in the Bible, got back threefold. Cheney for reasons that have to be protected by executive privilege saw pebble bed reactors as worthy recipients fo American bucks. And guess what? Exelon has the world monopoly on pebble bed reactors. Wow, is that lucky or what?

Is LI being unfari? Exelon has an explanation:

"Don Kirchoffner, a spokesman for Exelon, said campaign contributions had nothing to do with the pebble-bed reactor's mention in the report. "We didn't influence anybody," Mr. Kirchoffner said. For Exelon, the paragraph [in Cheney's report, extolling pebble bed nuke reactors] was seen as "a good thing," Mr. Kirchoffner said, but he insisted that the mention of the reactor's design did not necessarily represent a boon for the corporation.

"A good thing for the industry and the country was the fact that the administration came out with a recommendation for new forms of nuclear power, and our pebble-bed modular reactor is a byproduct of that," Mr. Kirchoffner said. "We just happened to have it. They took a look at what we gave them and they said this kind of makes sense."

Exelon owns and operates about 20 percent of the nation's nuclear capacity. Its co-chief executives, John W. Rowe and Corbin A. McNeill Jr., who has since retired, were among a group of about 75 energy executives who met with Mr. Cheney in March 2001. Along with other participants of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's trade group, Mr. McNeill also met that month with Karl Rove, President Bush's chief strategist, and Lawrence B. Lindsey, the president's top economic adviser. "

However, far be it from LI to suspect that the half a million diverted into Republican pockets by Kirchoffner's employer had anything to do with the Cheney report. While companies are expected to cough up the dough in our pirate democracy, still, let's get real. These are people who have to restrain themselves from recommending nuke reactors in all the national parks. These are people who itch to see the global climate raised just to see if they can do it. Hell, buy a bunch of a/c stock and you are sitting pretty. This was a decision in line with the century long conservative policy of socialism for the rich -- especially if the rich have reactors. Cindy Folkers of the Nuclear information and resources service has produced a nice comparison of our government investment in different energy technologies. There is a canard that is sometimes heard on the WSJ editorial page -- which is where canard come home to roost -- that somehow, the energy biz was forced by the government to fork over incredible billions to create worthless green energy sources, like ethanol. But that isn't the truth. The truth is, nuke money comes from the government, goes into the energy industry, and in return the industry builds vast, costly behemoths that reinforce a dying grid idea -- that power will be generated from these expensive hubs and that end users will simply, passively recieve it. So here is what happens on the subsidy scene when the pretence is made that deregulation is going to give us consumer choice. There is this thing called stranded costs. These costs are for things like, well, pebble bed nuke plants. Stranded as in help me, I'm an old energy company too weak to get up myself. And our compassion is poured out upon them -- part of the deal of deregulation is taxpayers doling out sums to power companies of up to 25 billion dollars, in the case of California, for all that overbuilding, or ill planned building, they did in the seventies, eighties and nineties. It is only fair, of course. As in fair return on investment, the only justice Bush's people seem to recognize. It is interesting -- the conservative outcry about restitution that is owed to black americans for slavery is now standard boilerplate on the chicken wing circuit, but there's an awful lot of silence about the restitution owed to energy companies. The one isn't real, the other is all too real. So guess which one gets discussed most on the talk radio shows?

Anyway, thus speaks Folkers:

When comparing U.S. government subsidies for nuclear, solar, and wind, the nuclear power industry has received the majority (96.3%) of $150 billion in investments since 1947; that�s $145 billion for nuclear reactors and $5 billion for wind and solar. Nuclear subsidies have cost the average household a total amount of $1,411 [1998 dollars] compared to $11 for wind. The more money we spend on nuclear power, the less greenhouse gas reduction benefit we receive, while we hurt sustainable technology investment.

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