Washington is making a bad investment with proposed legislation providing tax credits to financially-struggling nuclear power plants, a coalition of anti-nuclear groups told members of Congress in a letter last week.
Proposed bailouts for nuclear plants, which includes around $6 billion in the Joe Biden administration’s trillion-dollar infrastructure bill, “misdirects resources while perpetuating climate injustice,” said the group of anti-nukers led by the Nuclear Information and Research Service in a letter to congressional leaders dated Aug. 23.
“Providing billions of dollars in subsidies to nuclear power will only put short-sighted economic interests ahead of human lives, racial justice, the health of our environment, safe drinking water, and a thriving, equitable economy,” the letter said.
If Biden’s infrastructure bill — which is through the Senate and is scheduled for a vote in the House in late September — became law, Congress would direct the Department of Energy to “establish a process” to auction off tax credits to nuclear plants that post a net operating loss.
The infrastructure plan “does not consider states’ renewable energy and energy efficiency targets and programs, with which these subsidies could interfere,” the Aug. 23 letter said. Neither that infrastructure bill nor the $3.5 trillion partisan budget Congress is working on “plans for how to phase out and replace uneconomical nuclear reactors with renewable energy sources by the time their respective programs expire,” the letter said.
Instead of spending money on nuclear subsidies, the letter said, the federal government should invest in renewable energy technologies.
Regardless of whether Congress goes ahead with the proposed bailouts, it won’t stop the march of plant closures slated for the remainder of the year.
Exelon announced Aug. 4 that it will close Illinois’s Byron and Dresden nuclear plants in the fall after its own bailout negotiations with the state legislature failed. The Palisades plant in Michigan is next on the chopping block in early 2022.
