Dining Out on the Taxpayer
Nicolas Loris /
In economics, one of the first lessons is that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. But what the federal government has been doing to the nuclear energy industry and the nuclear energy ratepayers is just about the closest one can get to a free lunch.
Charged with managing nuclear waste in the United States, the federal government has not collected one atom of spent nuclear fuel. Instead, the government has collected a whole lot of money. About $30 billion from U.S. nuclear-power ratepayers. Fed up, states governments are beginning to take matters into their own hands:
Several legislatures of states with nuclear power plants are considering stopping or reducing payments to the federal government for nuclear waste management until the proposed Yucca Mountain, Nev., repository opens or another solution to the waste problem emerges.