The new and smaller nuclear plant design being pursued by the Tennessee Valley Authority was denounced by a taxpayer advocacy group Wednesday as a wasteful, government subsidy for a technology that remains in question.
Taxpayers for Common Sense awarded its “Golden Fleece Award” to the U.S. Department of Energy for paying more than $500 million to private companies to develop small modular reactors. Babcock & Wilcox and Bechtel Corp. are developing the new mPower reactors, which can largely be built in a factory and then assembled and located underground to cut their costs and improve their safety. TVA has agreed to locate up to four of the new units on the Clinch River in Oak Ridge, if the new design is approved.
Ryan Alexander, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, said the federal government has already spent billions of dollars subsidizing nuclear energy, including similar smaller reactors that power U.S. Navy submarines.
“We cannot afford to pile more market-distorting subsidies to profitable companies on top of billions of dollars we already gave away,” Alexander said in a report released Wednesday.
The watchdog group said government-subsidized nuclear technologies have a history of failure. But John Keeley, media relations manager for the nuclear industry’s prinicpal trade group, Nuclear Energy Institute, said the government is simply partnering with private companies which are spending billions of dollars themselves on needed new technologies.