Comments on: Early Fossil Fuel & Nuclear Energy Subsidies Crush Early Renewable Energy Subsidies

By: Energy Subsidies: Fossil Fuels vs Renewable Energy | Stock Market News - Business & Tech News

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 17:12:24 +0000

[…] writer. It also, I just noticed, uses an image from CleanTechnica. We’ve covered fossil fuel vs nuclear vs renewable energy subsidies many, many times. But it’s still a topic that I think gets far too […]

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 20:25:00 +0000

i may be reading your critique wrong, but if i’m not, i think you’re not realizing that a TON of money was put into nuclear R&D long before a power plant was built, and that construction of nuclear power plants is no quick or cheap matter.

again, maybe i’m not reading your point right, but the numbers above don’t strike me as off.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 19:55:00 +0000

I can’t speak to fossil fuels, but their analysis of nuclear subsidies is out of whack.

“As a percentage of inflation-adjusted federal spending, nuclear subsidies accounted for more than 1% of the federal budget over their first 15 years [i.e. 1947–62], …”

Sanity check: The first nuclear power plant (Shippingport, 60 MW) went on-line in 1957. The next I could find was Dresden-1 (200 MW) in 1960. Obviously, whatever the government was spending for bombs and naval reactors, it wasn’t doing much of anything to subsidize power plants. The authors even say as much in another graph: “<0.001 MMBTU increase / subsidy $ [for the 1st 15 years]".

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 22:46:00 +0000

Too true..

By: Susan Kraemer

Susan Kraemer — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 22:38:00 +0000

Great story. It is also true that we were a much more unified nation from 19th century, and so we were able to invest big in what we perceived at the time to be the common good.

The railroad to transport coal, the “miracle of oil”, then “free energy” from nuclear. Just like we invested in dams and hydropower (that would be interesting if included). They cared. There was no Somalia-wannabe propaganda like the Koch brothers are attempting now, back then the public good made sense even to idiots.

Now we won’t even keep the bridges they left us operational.