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0 pointsqqqwerty4y ago0 comments

Did you read the report or did you just read the headline? Your source is a report created by the nuclear energy lobby. This is quite literally the most biased source available. And even then, literally from their own data it shows that in 2015, of the total federal incentives dispersed, renewables got 16% vs 8% for nuclear. That hardly feels like "30 times the amount".

And this doesn't even account for the fact that "Renewables" is a bucket that consists of multiple technology types including solar, wind, biomass and storage. So if those were actually broken out into individual categories nuclear would be the biggest receiver of incentives of the bunch.

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qqqwertyOP4y ago

And digging even further. The biggest "incentive" that renewables received was in the "Tax Policy" category. This money is likely the tax incentives that are available to newly built projects. This money is not a government transfer, but rather a tax credit that a project developer users AFTER successfully building a project. These types of incentives are available to nuclear developers, but funnily enough, they received 0 in 2015. Considering these incentives are available to developers of both technology types, I think it is unfair to use them when comparing federal subsidies (after all, if the nuclear industry could actually build a power plant, they would also get this incentive).

However, when you look at the R&D column, which is a direct transfer of cash from the government to industry. Nuclear received over 2.5 times as much as renewables (85B vs 32B). This is even more of a travesty considering "Renewables" is a bucket of multiple technology types. So oddly enough, if I was to take away one thing from this report, it looks like we are not investing nearly enough in renewables R&D. Also, why is coal getting 43B, that sucks.

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