US Panel Extends Nuclear Power Tax Credit (thehill.com)

Many a surfer at "Old Man's" in San Onofre has gotten cancer from the ocean there.

The House Ways and Means Committee voted Wednesday to remove a key deadline for a nuclear power plant tax credit...

 The credit was first enacted in 2005 to spur construction of new nuclear plants, but it has gone completely unused because no new plants have come online since then...

It would likely benefit two reactors under construction at Southern Co.'s Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Georgia and another two at Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Generating Station in South Carolina. Both projects are at risk of missing the 2020 deadline... 

"When Congress passed the 2005 act, it could not have contemplated the effort it would take to get a nuclear plant designed and licensed," said representative Tom Rice (R-S.C.). 
 
Although one Democrat criticized the extension by arguing that nuclear power "does better in a socialist economy than in a capitalist one, because nuclear energy prefers to have the public do the cleanup, do the insurance, cover all of the losses and it only wants the profits."

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 Are we sure we want nuclear power plants all over the place?

 Investigators recently issued search warrants at the offices of San Onofre majority owner Southern California Edison.

State regulators were hunting for records on whether the deal was struck in secret.

The pact forces customers to pay 70 percent of the costs to shutter the facility following a 2012 radiation leak without a full investigation by state regulators into who was at fault.

That $3.3 billion tab is about one third of the $10.4 billion decades-long bill customers must cover because of the shutdown.

That works out to about $1,600 per customer meter, spread out over the next decade or two.

Counting Customer Costs For San Onofre Closure: $10.4 Billion

 Lets not ignore the reality that nuclear power plants are messy dangerous things to have around.

 "We may never be able to move these," said Gary Headrick, co-founder of San Clemente Green. "These storage containers are not reliable."

 BLOW THE WHISTLE if you have inside knowledge: text 858-224-BARK

No Radiation

Jeff Bezos (Amazon) is concerned and is doing something about it!

 Amazon will open a 100-turbine, 253-megawatt wind farm in Texas by the end of next year -- generating enough energy to power almost 90,000 U.S. homes.

 Amazon already has wind farms in Indiana, North Carolina, and Ohio (plus a solar farm in Virginia), and 40% of the power for AWS already comes from renewable sources, but Amazon's long-term plan is to raise that to 100%.

But several of the world's largest tech companies are already pursuing their own aggressive renewable energy programs, according to Fortune. 

Google "has said it's the largest non-utility purchaser of renewable energy in the world. 

Apple claims that in 2015, 93% of its energy came from renewable sources, and its data centers are already 100% run on renewables (though that claim does rely on carbon trading). '

Facebook, which also uses Texas wind facilities, is aiming for 50% of its data center power to come from renewables by 2018. 

Even slightly smaller companies like Salesforce have made big commitments to renewable energy."
  
Last year for the first time utilities actually bought less than half the power produced by wind farms -- because tech companies, universities, and cities had already locked it down with long-term contracts.