In the spring of 2009, we fought to stop AmerenUE from undoing the CWIP legislation–“we” being consumer protection groups, large manufacturing companies, lots of Dems and even a few Republican legislators. And, oh yes, Governor Nixon.

At the time, I wrote that Nixon: “is not opposed to more nuclear power, but he is opposed to ratepayers shelling out up front and then watching the shareholders take the resulting profits.” That’s what the fight was about, whether Ameren could undo a 1976 law that forbids it to make consumers pay upfront for the risky enterprise of building a nuclear plant.

Labor wanted the plant and the job of building it for the next ten years, and Nixon has apparently decided to help the unions out. But he intends to have his cake and eat it too. That is, he’d like to pretend he still supports CWIP, while pleasing the labor base by undermining CWIP. He’ll accomplish these contradictory goals by helping Ameren get $40 million of ratepayer money to assist the utility in paying for federal permit costs.

A year and a half ago, Nixon promised to veto any legislation that would undo the CWIP law. But now, now he says that a new plant would bring lots of jobs and, get this, he’s not helping undo the CWIP law, he’s just helping with the permitting process.  Never mind that the permit does Ameren no good unless it can undo CWIP, because if we don’t pay upfront, Ameren can’t finance the humongous, technically tricky project. Yes, I know that Nixon says Ameren has “formed a coalition with other electrical cooperatives and utility companies that plan to invest in the nuclear plant.” That might make getting financing a little bit easier, but it won’t be enough. And yes, I know that Nixon says this $40 mill will only kick in if Ameren gets the permit and it will cost each ratepayer less than a couple of dollars a year. (But that’s just to get the forty million. Paying upfront for another plant will cost ratepayers at least as much, probably a bundle more, than investing in green solutions to our coal addiction.)

A comic strip called Frazz in the Saturday Post expressed my opinion of Nixon’s reasoning. Frazz, a determined young athlete, stands next to his bike, helmet on, with rain pelting him and says: “True, it’s not the best day. But it could be the last day for awhile that’s even this nice.” An eight year old boy who’s a friend of Frazz winces and says: “All that logic and so little sense.”

Holy Schlomoly. Talk about strange CWIP bedfellows:

Wonder why some Republicans are a little hot under the collar over the full-court press put on by opponents of the Ameren/CWIP bill in the Missouri Legislature?

It might be because one of their former leaders, ex-House Speaker Rod Jetton, is helping to lead the charge. Jetton, now a political consultant, is involved in a new anti-Ameren-bill group called Missourians Against Higher Utility Rates.

According to Missouri Ethics Commission filings, the group shares an address with Jetton’s consulting office. It is funded, at least in part, by a $78,000-plus donation made by Noranda Aluminum.

Never thought I’d see the day that Jetton was fighting on the same side with us. The Apocalypse must be next.

As predicted, the Senate Commerce Committee passed the CWIP bill.

Two committee members offered amendments. The version offered by Senator John Griesheimer, R-Washington, would have simplified the bill from 24 pages to one page, but the bottom line was the same: it would have repealed the CWIP legislation the people passed by 63 percent in 1976. That was a no go. The version that was passed was written by Senator Kurt Schaefer, R-Columbia, who actually made a few substantive changes.

The new bill, written by Sen. Kurt Schaefer, R-Columbia, gives the Public Service Commission more time to decide on whether or not to approve a new nuclear plant. The original bill allowed three months for the process – the new bill makes it 12 months for initial approval and another 11 months for the facility review process.

The new bill also requires the utility to obtain the necessary permits before applying for the facility review.

Big deal. On Monday, I wrote that:

The bill has been “fixed”. Sort of. Like a slovenly woman who has painted one fingernail to dress herself up.

This bill still has a runner in its stockings, a slip with torn lace peeking beneath the skirt, mismatched shoes, smeared lipstick, frizzy hair, and too much mascara. For instance:

– It would allow electric companies – not just AmerenUE, but every utility company that builds a new power plant – to get automatic rate increases every three months without having to hold hearings to justify the higher prices.

– Over the 10 years of construction for AmerenUE’s new nuclear plant, rates would increase between 29 percent and 40 percent, according to an estimate by the Missouri Public Counsel’s office, which represents utility customers before the Missouri Public Service Commission. That increase, coming during a recession and before the plant produces its first watt of electricity, could drive some businesses into bankruptcy and further depress the state economy.

And that’s just the ladder in the stockings and the slip. The P-D editorial paints the whole ugly picture and it’s worth a read.

In the 6-4 vote, two Republicans joined senators Joan Bray, D-St. Louis, and Jolie Justus, D-K.C., in voting against the bill: Senator Jim Lembke, St. Louis, and Senator Luann Ridgeway, Smithville. Tim Green, D-St. Louis, co-sponsored the bill, presumably to satisfy construction trade unions.

The committee vote is over now, but Griesheimer is unhappy on just about every count. He told Tony Messenger that “‘If this bill hits the Senate floor as it is now, it’s dead on arrival.'” Presumably, he thinks his version would have stood a better chance in the Senate than Schaefer’s. Why, I do not know. Furthermore, he and Lager are disgusted with the bill’s opponents for hitting the air with an ad during the last Mizzou game of the NCAA tournament. Griesheimer characterized the ad as having “lies and distortions”. Feel free to decide for yourself whether that’s so:

So we lost the committee vote (thanks, by the way, to Bray, Justus, Lembke, and Ridgeway), but the prospects don’t look good for passage in the full Senate. Even if it squeaks out of there, Nixon’s pen is poised. And if worse comes to worst, there’s always the possibility of another ballot initiative to stop Ameren and the other utilities from this power grab.

They may think they can arrange to deal themselves a regulatory royal flush, but we’re not playing poker with them. We’re playing bridge–and holding the high trump cards.

On the CWIP front, we may be about to lose a battle, but we’d have to be a sorry bunch of incompetents to lose the war. And we’re not that.

The imminent battle is the vote on Monday of the Senate Commerce Committee. A month ago, the committee looked set to vote down Ameren’s money grab. Committee chairman Brad Lager, R-Savannah, said at the public hearing: “As is, I couldn’t even get this bill out of committee, much less out of the Senate.” A week later, I was part of a small group that lobbied Senator Tom Dempsey, R-St. Peters, to vote against the bill. He didn’t commit himself personally, but he did observe that the bill was unlikely to make  it out of committee.

Part of the reason it was floundering there was opposition from Kurt Schaefer, R-Columbia. As he questioned Ameren CEO, Tom Voss, and his colleague, Tom Burns [on the left], the freshman senator catalogued all “the serious flaws of this bill as it pertains to consumer protection”.

And Ameren, fearful of getting singed by it, tried to get a federal judge to stop it from running during the NCAA Mizzou game. No dice, said the judge. It would be a prior restraint upon free speech and the ads contain information about an important public issue.

I couldn’t say whether senators have started getting many calls about it yet, but I can say that if the legislature passes this crap, a ballot initiative for 2010 is sure to follow. And with the economy slumping along, voters are likely to vote again to ban CWIP by an even larger margin this time than the original vote in 1976. Here’s an indicator of the truth of that claim: AARP did a robocall questionnaire on the issue last Monday and got three times the response they would normally expect from such an operation.

Republicans would be foolish to enact this legislation. Charlie Shields may think he can afford it. He’s from St. Joe, where people don’t even know what AmerenUE is, and he may figure that his constituents won’t cotton onto the fact that SB 228 is going to be picking their pockets sometime down the road. But once this issue hits the state ballot, Missouri voters are going to find out what a piece of garbage the legislature passed. Republicans–and Democrats–who have voted for it may find themselves scrambling to avoid being on the wrong end of the electorate’s pitchfork.

Nobody, but nobody, would be stupid enough to invest in another nuclear reactor for eastern Missouri. AmerenUE CEO Thomas Voss knows that. He told the Post-Dispatch last July that unless the ratepayers pony up in advance, it can’t happen.

“We just couldn’t do it. The risk would be too great. We don’t think people would lend us the money. We don’t think our board of directors would approve it. And we don’t think our stockholders would think it’s prudent.”

So why should ratepayers should get stuck with such a turkey? Voss’ answer–Lager joked at one point in last week’s Senate hearing that Voss had said it nine times so far–is that he isn’t “emotionally attached” to the project. He’s just feeling it out in the legislature, he says–to see if we can be suckered into it, I’m sure he meant to add.

As for why this bill would be a sucker’s bet: it retains Ameren’s guaranteed monopoly and its 8 percent annual profits while shifting every conceivable burden to the consumers. It’s so brazen that Missouri’s last Public Counsel, John Coffman, and its current Public Counsel, Lewis Mills, once they got past opening and closing their mouths like fish, in disbelief, couldn’t find enough bad things to say about it. Here’s Mills:

Let’s consider the pros and cons of the plan. The pros are that another nuclear plant would provide reliable power for the future (if we should happen to need it) and it would provide jobs, jobs, JOBS–though not till four years from now when construction starts. By that time, as Irl Scissors, erstwhile environmental lobbyist turned nuclear proponent, testified, Missouri may well be desperate for jobs as our state is projected to have the third worst job loss picture in the nation.

But if you’re not one of those gettin’ the jobs from this plant, you could be gettin’ the shaft. A hospital administrator, for example, testified that hospitals are under increasing pressure in Missouri to treat people who lack health insurance. Just because the state kicked poor people off Medicaid doesn’t mean they stop getting sick. And if utility rates go up a million dollars a year for a hospital group, they can’t pass that extra drag on their income along to Medicare or Medicaid.

Kip Smith, CEO of Noranda Aluminum, Ameren’s biggest customer and a stabilizing force in the economy of Southeast Missouri, said that, because of global economic forces, U.S. aluminum companies are going out of business at an alarming rate. Noranda is likely to become one of those casualties if its rates go up.

But the rates won’t go up much, according to Voss–just one to three percent a year probably. The problem with that projection is that Voss can say anything he wants. Until Ameren is willing to share its figures with other interested parties–at least a couple of whom expect more like a forty percent raise in rates overall–we have no way to know how reliable the utility’s figures are. John Coffman suggested that if Ameren is confident in those figures, then the company should allow a cap of one to three percent in rate increases to be written into the bill.

As if that would happen.

Instead, Coffman noted that he counted a hundred different provisions in the bill that shift risk to the consumer. (As Mills pointed out, the bill is an Ameren wish list.) The most intolerable of these burdens is that Ameren would be allowed to raise rates every three months. Voss protests, however, that the PSC could deny the utility any of those raises. Even if you trust the PSC to actually be interested in our welfare, you must realize that the it would only have three months to determine whether or not any given rate hike was justified. And that is insufficient time. If the PSC did not specifically prohibit a raise within that ninety day window, the commission could not later return to the matter and force Ameren to lower the rates. The PSC would have only the three month window in which to speak or forever hold its peace.

Shades of the Wall Street Bailout. If we little folk are going to take on all the risks and burdens of a venture, why not just socialize it? The rational way to proceed would be, at the federal level, to nationalize the failing banks we bail out and, at the state level, to give the Missouri ratepayers ownership of AmerenUE. And let’s not have any pearl clutching over that suggestion, either. Fair is fair.

Otherwise, we can skip the whole boondoggle.

It’s an especially alarming scam when you remember that all the perks in the bill would apply to the proposed Callaway plant AND to every other large utility project from here on out. Let me repeat that: from now on, every new plant would be built with ratepayer funds up front. There would be no investigation once new plants went online into whether any of the money spent had been injudicious and should be disallowed. We would just hand Missouri utilities blank checks with the starry eyed hope that they would behave more sensibly than, say, Citigroup and Wells Fargo did when they got blank checks from the Feds. Missouri utilities could take our hard earned dollars and tear them into confetti if they chose, because they couldn’t be held responsible.  No judicial review could ever happen.

At last week’s hearing, senators listened to Monsanto, Noranda, and hospitals moaning about the free ticket to ride that Ameren wants. The chair of the Senate committee, Republican Brad Lager, observed that as the bill stands, he couldn’t even get it out of committee much less past the entire Senate. I can’t help but wonder if Ameren proposed this joke as a way to make us feel grateful when it backs down and settles for something more “reasonable”, i.e. a less flagrant giveaway.

It won’t surprise me if Ameren compromises somewhat and the Republicans on the committee act all pleased and vote in favor of the bill. If that scenario occurs, it will be time to put this travesty before the voters. Again.

Tuesday I attended the (four hour long) Senate committee hearing on Senator Delbert Scott’s bill to undo the legislation that forbids utilities to charge customers up front for new plants. And guess what I learned: we need another nuclear power plant! Oh, there was little doubt about that. Senator Brad Lager, R-Maryville, chair of the committee, started the proceedings by noting that we would “hear some insights from our friends at Ameren” and he urged witnesses opposing the legislation to tell the committee “what would need to be changed for you to be supportive of it.”

There were proponents and opponents of SB 228, but even the opponents, most of them, started by saying, “I know we need this plant and I support that idea.” Then they’d add something to the effect: “But, geezarooney, could you please not hand the credit card numbers and savings account information of every ratepayer in eastern Missouri over to AmerenUE to do with as it pleases?” Admittedly, the witnesses exaggerated less than I just did, but polite moaning about the way this bill hands Ameren the keys to the consumer kingdom was the motif of the day.

I’ll have more to say about their testimony and about how the committee sweated Ameren CEO Voss. That’s for a later posting. My more immediate goal is to answer Senator Lager’s assumption that nothing is wrong with this bill that some (major) tweaking wouldn’t fix. Horsehockey. Nothing could be changed to make it more palatable because it assumes we need another nuclear plant, when, in fact: We. Do. Not.

The arguments for building one generally fall into three categories. The first is that demand is rising, and we must be prepared to meet it.

Investing in energy efficiency, though, would easily offset the rising demand because the increase in usage is so piddling little and dwindling every year. Increased efficiency, according to numerous studies since 1992, could whittle our usage so that it would be well below what it has been. Melissa Hope, speaking for the Sierra Club, testified:

Our electric and gas utilities, with their financial resources and expertise, have the power to save their customers energy and money, reduce pollution and the need for expensive new capacity, and mitigate climate change. They could offer customers free home energy audits, rebates on energy-efficient lighting, insulation and appliances, etc. But they have no incentive-indeed they have a positive disincentive-to do so.  CWIP gives the incentive to do just the opposite – it encourages high cost, large energy supply sources.

“Achieving all cost-effective energy efficiency” is the goal of the National Action Plan for Energy Efficiency, a public-private partnership coordinated by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy. According to NAPEE, efficiency programs could save our country 20% of its electricity and 10% of its natural gas consumption.  In fact electric energy use is already dropping.

Note: DOE projections for annual growth in demand: 1.7%, 1.3%, to 1.1% annual growth rate.  The current demand is also dropping and that is before the downturn in the economy. [boldface hers]

Ameren CEO Voss testified that Ameren is committing $30-$50 million a year to helping its customers use power more efficiently. Really? If so, that ought to take up the slack nicely–especially if we use federal stimulus money not only to weatherize public buildings but also to build windmills and install solar panels.

But, said former Republican representative Ed Robb, building enough windmills to provide adequate power would require 250 square miles, and much of our land isn’t suitable for producing wind power. (Kudos to Robb for the most unintentionally entertaining statement of the day, by the way. He urged building the plant for the jobs it would provide. But, Senator Lembke pointed out, those jobs are at least four years down the line. How can we create jobs in the meantime? “Cut the corporate income tax,” said Robb. There was no follow up from Lembke on that obvious truth.)

Besides the fact that windmills take up too much room, what if you want to run your dishwasher or send an e-mail on a calm, windless night? Alternative sources aren’t necessarily there for you when you need them.

Those arguments are disingenuous on a couple of levels. To say that alternative sources aren’t dependable is akin to telling somebody he has to eat all the perishables in his house today or lose them. Yeah, if he doesn’t have a refrigerator. But perishables can be stored in the 21st century. And so can electricity, including the power that alternative sources generate.

Here’s another miracle of modern science: electricity can be transported over large distances. There’s this other state called Nebraska. Montana too. Boy, do they have wind. Wyoming’s state tree is the telephone pole. There are no forests up there to block the breezes. Currently (excuse the pun) moving power from the Northwest to Missouri or New Jersey is tricky because of our outdated power grid. Enter President Obama, speaking about the economic stimulus package:

“But we’ll also do more to retrofit America for a global economy,” he added. “That means updating the way we get our electricity by starting to build a new smart grid that will save us money, protect our power sources from blackout or attack, and deliver clean, alternative forms of energy to every corner of our nation.

It’s true that creating a smart grid will take years. But so will building another nuclear plant–a minimum of ten years for the plant. Suppose Ameren’s customers invest billions, only to discover that we have a white elephant, unnecessary because windmills have been built in North and South Dakota–or Texas–and the smart grid is already moving the electrons to St. Louis. Europe has updated its grid, and now the U.S. is about to follow suit.

A future with a smart grid in it is also the answer to the very real concern that a carbon tax may be imposed in this country to force us to cut carbon emissions. Right now, this state gets 80 percent of its power from coal-fired plants. A carbon tax might drive our rates up 40-50 percent, so nuclear proponents argue for another plant since it would create less carbon footprint than coal-fired plants. That’s true. But it would also create a lot more carbon footprint than a windmill.

The other inconvenient by-product of nuclear plants is radioactivity and the cancers that result from it. But that topic deserves its own posting.

So, Senator Lager, this proposed plant isn’t necessary. In fact, the nuclear energy industry is a dinosaur, costly and dangerous. Some of us just haven’t noticed that yet.  

AmerenUE, of course, knew it could count on its “regulator” at the Public Service Commission, Chairman Jeff Davis, to support its exorbitant plan to undo the anti-CWIP legislation we voters passed in 1976 and enable the utility company to force ratepayers to buy another nuclear plant. Oh sure, Ameren has been pretending that the plans for a new plant are still not settled, but the Post-Dispatch wasn’t falling for that hooey:

This editorial is just a place holder. We haven’t decided yet whether to write about one of the biggest issues facing Missouri legislators this year.

Our colleague Tony Messenger did. In a column published Tuesday, Mr. Messenger wrote that executives from utility giant AmerenUE danced around the “gorilla in the room” when they briefed lawmakers on energy issues.

That gorilla would be a new nuclear reactor the utility applied to build in Callaway County. Strictly as an option, of course.

(….)

AmerenUE executives and the Public Service Commission don’t even want to discuss alternative ways to pay for the plant, assuming there is a plant and assuming the commission still is interested in public service, which we very much doubt.

Nor did Ameren have much trouble enlisting union support, with all those juicy construction contracts that it could promise would last for a decade or so. (Too bad that labor and environmentalists find themselves pitted against one another on this issue.)

Besides lining up the PSC and the construction unions, Ameren, having shared lots of shekels with Republican candidates last year, was set to come out, guns blazing. As is usual with this kind of ambush, timing is everything. The trick is to do it right after an election, when the representatives that carry your water for you are furthest away from having to answer for their chicanery.

And then scare everybody: We won’t have enough power! Don’t you see the sky collapsing in shards around your shoulders? Missouri is in terrible shape.  In fact, how’s this for scary?

Department of Energy statistics show that in all three categories of rates — residential, business and industrial — Missouri ranks in the bottom 10 nationally. And over the past eight years, Missouri is one of only three states to show a decline in rates.

“During that period we were dead last out of 50 states,” Wood said.

Ah me and alas. Here we are at the bottom of the heap again. Low rates are a problem we must solve immediately–though it does strike me that raising rates to benefit a corporation that made a ten percent profit last year is an eccentric way to behave in hard economic times.

It’s especially eccentric to do so when you consider–as Jackie Hutchinson of the Human Development Corporation pointed at the forum Monday night about Ameren’s campaign–that St. Louis has 162,000 low income families. Such people pay about 40 percent of their income for utilities–no, you didn’t read it wrong: 40 percent–whereas people at the median income level pay only 6 percent of their incomes for utilities. Even a three percent rise in utility rates would hit poor families like a Louisville Slugger.

Another tactic the nuclear proponents are using is to point out that a nuclear facility is cleaner than coal. Lobbyist Irl Scissors, who worked last year on the ballot proposition to require electrical utility companies to get at least 15 percent of their power from alternative energy sources by 2021, has switched sides. And that’s his claim, that he favors the idea of a new plant because it’s cleaner than coal.

Maybe. Depends on how you define clean. I don’t call a process that creates radioactive waste we can’t safely dispose of clean. Yes, nuclear power leaves less of a carbon footprint than coal does, but it does leave one. Both those sources of power convert only a third of what they burn to electricity. The other two thirds goes up in smoke, added to the environment.

So I wonder why–in fact, I wonder why the hell–are we looking at more nuclear power instead of at more wind and solar? Indeed, why aren’t we also looking at just being more efficient? I’m not even talking about conserving, using less–which would make sense too–but about efficiencies like weatherizing buildings and installing compact fluorescent light bulbs, which use a fourth as much electricity as incandescent bulbs do.  My take on the issue? We don’t need no stinkin’ plant.

But perhaps it’s impertinent of me to be questioning the wisdom of Jeff Davis at the PSC. Understanding these issues is his job.

The PSC chairman said he would support legislation to [make ratepayers ante up ahead of time] only if it included adequate consumer protections and preserved the commission’s authority to disallow costs.

Surely when legislators replace the 1976 law, which was fifty words long, with a 24 page legal tome, there’s room as wide as Delaware for “adequate consumer protections”. Or room as wide as Tennessee for adequate Ameren protections. Hmm.

So here’s how it stands: Republicans, with the backing of the PSC and labor unions, want to shove this travesty through the legislature. What will Nixon do? He is not opposed to more nuclear power, but he is opposed to ratepayers shelling out up front and then watching the shareholders take the resulting profits. Environmentalists oppose the whole package and will attend the hearing on the Senate bill next Tuesday (which I hope to cover).

Lines have been drawn. As this controversy heats up, much will depend on how vociferous Missouri consumers are about the proposed ripoff.

Now you see what happens when we don’t manage to take the lege back from the representatives of the greedy: we get Senator Delbert Scott introducing SB228 to repeal what the voters, as a result of a petition initiative, OK’d by a two to one margin in 1976, namely that utilities can’t charge us for the building of facilities that aren’t yet in operation. That decades old but still sensible piece of legislation–called anti-CWIP (for construction work in progress)–was a stellar idea, but now AmerenUE, having paid its dues to Republican candidates in the last election cycle, is trying to undo it. How dare the hog-the-money party and its corporate cohorts decide to reverse the will of Missourians.

Ameren wants to build a second nuclear reactor, Callaway II, and it wants its customers to pay as the work is in progress for a reactor that might not come online for ten years. The argument put forth for making us pay in advance is that it will save billions of dollars. What might otherwise cost nine billion dollars will supposedly get done for a mere six. Oh. Well. That’s okay then.

Hold on a second, though, while I explain how the “savings” will occur. Concrete, steel and labor will not be cheaper as a result of the ratepayers being charged in advance. A bill favoring CWIP doesn’t make building the plant any cheaper. What it does save on is interest rates. And, whoa, you might say, nine billion instead of six would be an effective rate of fifty percent. Pretty steep.

That’s because loans are expensive for this kind of venture. It’s risky. Speaking at a forum sponsored by the Missouri Coalition for the Environment last Monday evening, Peter Bradford, an expert on the topic of financing nuclear reactors, pointed out that in the heyday of building such plants, back in the seventies and eighties, half of the plants that got permits to build were canceled. Few lenders want to take on that risk. Hence, the nationwide push by utilities to make the consumer shoulder the burden. In Florida, Bradford pointed out, utility rates are up 10.2 percent for a plant that isn’t due to come online until 2016. By the way, the current bill would allow Ameren to raise its rates every three months.

For the utility company to try to force its customers to take on the risk is simply not fair. Back in 1975,  when Union Electric tried the same gambit its successor is now using, American Public Power Association objected:

“[CWIP] abandons the traditional practice that the capital market furnish capital for the construction of new plants.  Instead, the Commission desires consumers to supply money for the growth of a private business, and the consumer receives no financial return for a company’s use of his capital…The proposal removes incentive for utility management to curb costs.  If a utility is guaranteed revenues for all costs incurred during construction, e.g. labor, equipment, property, engineering studies, etc., some incentive is removed for utility management to operate efficiently and be conscious of costs, because the consumer is supplying the capital, and the risk to management and to the investor is diminished.” (Comments filed with the Federal Power Commission, 4/15/75, pp. 12, 13)

Not only would we the ratepayers be on the hook for any foolish spending the company might will surely engage in once it has carte blanche, we will also run the risk of paying for mistakes, delays, strikes, or material or labor shortages.

Those mistakes that might occur can be humdingers, too. In 1981, at the Diablo Canyon reactor in California, a mirror image reversal in the seismic blueprints was discovered. The builder, PG&E, was forced to spend an additional three billion dollars and three years of repairs before opening. The plant, which had been slated to cost $300 million ended up with a $5.8 billion price tag, not to mention another $7 billion in finance costs.

Building a nuclear power plant is a risky venture. And for taking that risk, what do we Ameren’s customers get? Nothing. Not one extra kilowatt of electricity.

The ratepayers should not be bearing the brunt of the risk. That’s the job of Ameren’s shareholders. The company gets a monopoly with a guaranteed healthy profit margin. The deal on investments in capitalism is supposed to be “high risk, high rate of return, low risk, low rate of return.” But Ameren wants to have its cake and eat it too–guaranteed profits and no risk. It’s corporate welfare.

In fact, the company does not need this welfare because it does not need to build another nuclear reactor. More on that topic tomorrow.