Opposition grows in the US to further funding for the development of the Department of Energy's Advanced Light Water Reactor (ALWR) program.
(453.4478) WISE-Amsterdam - On 20 May, 69 House members (both Democrats and Republicans, many of them outspoken advocates of nuclear energy) called for terminating the ALWR- program and providing no additional funding in fiscal year 1997, because "continuing to appropriate funds for the ALWR program sends the wrong message that this Congress is willing to overlook subsidies to mature, profitable industries while asking worthwhile constituencies to sacrifice in order to balance the budget". Chairman Myers of the House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee has been a strong supporter of the ALWR program in the past and is expected to provide additional funds in fiscal year 1997. The House Budget resolution, passed mid-May, contained specific language in support of continued funding for the ALWR program alongside deep cuts in spending on renewable energy technologies. The budget resolution language was written by Budget Committee Vice-Chairman Robert Walker who has been an outspoken advocate for the ALWR program and other federal subsidies for companies involved with nuclear power development.
The ALWR-program, created under the Energy Policy Act (EPACT) of 1992, is due to be completed at the end of fiscal year 1996 and has received more than $230 million in federal support over the past five years. As the 69 members wrote in their letter to Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee chairman Meyers:
"While many of us have supported nuclear research and development in the past, this year's tight budget priorities and the lack of private sector interest in building new nuclear reactors make it difficult to understand why DOE wants to expand the program beyond its original mission."This program is a textbook example of corporate welfare. Companies receiving money from DOE for new reactor development include Westinghouse, General Electric and Asea Brown Boveri. These companies receive money not only for engineering work, but also to cover user fees charged by the NRC for the design certification, or generic licensing, of new reactor technologies. This type of regulatory subsidy is unique within DOE and totally without justification. Already, one of the main recipients of the ALWR program money, General Electric, has announced that it is canceling its Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (SBWR) after receiving $50 million from DOE due to concerns that "extensive evaluations of the market competitiveness of a 600 MWe size Advanced Light Water Reactor have not established the commercial viability of these designs." The remaining reactor scheduled to receive ALWR support, Westinghouse's AP-600, is a similarly sized design and faces the same market conditions that led GE to cancel the SBWR (see box). Last year, proponents argued that FY 96 funding was necessary to complete the fifth year of a five-year program. This year, DOE outlined plans to request funding for the next three fiscal years. Extending this program runs in direct violation of EPACT, which specified that: designs must receive Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) certification by the end of FY 96, no company could receive money for more than four years and recipients of any ALWR money must certify to the Secretary of Energy that they intend to construct and operate a reactor in the United States. The remaining ALWR design is not due to receive NRC certification until at least 1998 and has already benefitted from at least four years of support. Furthermore, the reactor vendors benefitting in this program have abandoned domestic markets and are focusing exclusively on exports to Asia. Westinghouse, for example, identifies China as a prime market for its design despite the fact that they are currently prohibited from exporting the AP-600 to that country. The ALWR program has become an export-promotion subsidy for GE, Westinghouse and ABB in direct violation of the intent of the Energy Policy Act. The letter ends:
"We are not asking you to terminate funding for the ALWR program as part of an anti-nuclear agenda. The federal government has spent more than $47 billion (in $1995) on nuclear fission R&D over the last five decades and Congress has fulfilled its commitment to support Advanced Light Water Reactors. If the designs supported by DOE for the past five years are promising, then the private sector should willingly invest in their development, deployment and promotion. If not, then it is inappropriate to provide new taxpayer subsidies to support products that have no market potential."
Source and Contact: Public Citizen Critical Mass Energy Project, Matthew Freedman, 215 Pennsylvania Ave. SE, Washington 200003, USA.
Tel: +1- 202-546-4996.
E-mail: cmep@citizen.org or
the CMEP Home page at http://www.essential.org/CMEP
GE tries to buy Nucleonics Week issue
GE announced on 28 February 1996 its plan to kill its ALWR program, saying that "extensive evaluations of the market competitiveness of a 600MWe size ALWR have not established the commercial viability of these designs".GE quickly realised what it had done and tried to limit the damage by saying that the company had not intended to suggest that there was no commercial niche for other 600MW ALWR's and and acknowledged that the announcement made it look like GE was "taking a poke at Westinghouse".
GE was so concerned about the implications that it offered on 28 February to pay for the cost of Nucleonics Week's pulling back and reprinting of all copies of the February 29 issue of the newsletter, with the phrase reworded so that only 600MW BWRs would be implicated by the GE market analyses. Nucleonics Week declined the offer.
(Nucleonics Week, March 7, 1996)
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