No new deal for EDF as Constellation exits Maryland reactor project

Constellation officially dropped its demand to sell its former partner, Electricite De France, a large portfolio of conventional power-generating stations but exited its partnership with the French utility to build a French reactor at Calvert Cliffs, Maryland. Constellation departed with a $140 million buyout and will get back 3.5 million Constellation shares bought by EDF in December 2008. However, as a foreign corporation, EDF cannot move forward with the Maryland reactor project without a majority U.S. partner. To date, no new candidates have stepped forward. Constellation withdrew due to financial concerns after the U.S. Energy Department asked for a fee of $880 million to compensate taxpayers for the risk they would take on a loan guarantee of about $7.6 billion, a fee Constellation said would doom the project.

"Honey, I Shrunk the Renaissance: Nuclear Revival, Climate Change, and Reality"

In this Electricity Policy article, former NRC Commissioner Peter Bradford writes "The 'nuclear renaissance' has proven to be a promotion that cannot pass economic muster." Perhaps alluding to The Little Prince, he adds "The nuclear renaissance experience looks like a drawing of a python that has swallowed a pig -- a flat line, a bulge and a flat line."

Aborted nuclear loan guarantee causes global ambitions for EPR to "cool"

Peggy Hollinger of the Financial Times reports that Constellation Energy's withdrawal from the Calvert Cliffs 3 new reactor project in Maryland -- due to its unsuccessful attempt to transfer hundreds of millions of dollars of financial risk onto U.S. taxpayers -- has sent shock waves through the French government owned companies Areva and Electricite de France. She writes of the Areva Evolutionary Power Reactor's (EPR) global prospects "...the EPR has suffered a series of devastating blows, and even the [French] government today questions whether it has wasted years of research and billions of euros on a highly complex white elephant."

Watchdogs warn that other nuclear loan guarantee finalists are as much at risk as the now-toppled Calvert Cliffs 3

NIRS, Public Citizen, South Carolina Sierra Club, and former NRC Commissioner Peter Bradford have warned in a press release that the same forces -- skyrocketing new reactor construction costs, decreased demand for electricity, competition from renewables and efficiency, low natural gas prices, etc. -- which just undermined the Calvert Cliffs 3 new reactor proposal in Maryland are also battering away at the new reactor proposals in Texas (South Texas Project Units 3 and 4) and South Carolina (V.C. Summer Units 2 and 3). Calvert Cliffs, South Texas Project, and Summer were the top three federal nuclear loan guarantee finalists after Vogtle Units 3 and 4 in Georgia, which the Obama administration awarded a conditional $8.3 billion taxpayer-backed loan guarantee last February. The audio recording of the full press conference is also posted online.

The U.S. doesn't need new nukes

An excellent conclusion (see headline) and a great lead in this excellent piece in Green Energy News by Bruce Mulliken: "Why would anyone in his right mind want to build a large, complicated conventional power plant when simpler, more sophisticated technologies to generate power are available?"