The nuclear power industry has paid the full cost of the Yucca Mountain fiasco with a 0.1 cent per kilowatt-hour fee. That fee has generated between $500-800 million per year since it was first imposed in 1982.

The fund currently contains a surplus of close to $20 Billion dollars in IOU's.

In addition, the only nuclear waste clean ups that have been federally funded were on federally owned sites, not privately owned commercial sites. For those, there is a legal requirement to put away a special fund to pay for plant decommissioning.

The second step should be to abolish all subsidies for coal, oil and nuke power. I mean no more $1 leases for coal mining on federal land, no more wars for oil and no more taxpayer funded nuclear waste repositories or clean-ups.

Yeah, I guess we are both a couple of grumpy old men – at least I am.

I am quite willing to try digging a little deeper into this issue as long as we agree to be governed by real numbers and not wishful thinking. As you clearly pointed out, German emissions over the period of 2002-2005 were essentially flat, and that was a period of time when the effect of reunification was essentially over, but the feed in tariffs were ostensibly going well. Of course, there is the possibility that some of the projects had not yet started producing, so let’s see if we can find more recent data points.

My current understanding is that the tariffs have done a great job at creating an industry where there was not one before, but I am not so sure that the industry is sustainable without the support or that the emissions benefits are what some might wish they were.

Many people who write about this program talk about how little it costs the average consumer, but that is only because the amount of power actually produced at the elevated tariff rate is quite small in comparison to the total amount of power consumed. If there were more power being produced (and more emissions being avoided) the cost would be far higher on a per customer basis.