Tampa Bay Times: "Levy nuclear plant more costly than a natural gas facility" ... by gimleteye

Read this piece in the Tampa Bay Times, digging into the comparable costs of nuclear versus natural gas. It is something that Miami-Dade ratepayers ought to consider, in the face of the FPL tsunami pushing two new nuclear reactors at Turkey Point.

Some choice excerpts:

"What building a new nuclear plant does really well, the analysis showed, is fatten a utility's bottom line. Duke Energy would pocket as much as 10 times the profit from the Levy project as it would from a natural gas facility." 

Including nuclear in an "all of the above" strategy "has become kind of a last refuge of scoundrels," Bradford said. "If we're talking about world hunger we don't talk about an all of the above strategy. We don't say, 'Lets fight world hunger with caviar.' "

The environmental costs of fracking are not included in the Times analysis.

There is a curious footnote to fracking that relates directly to Miami-Dade. In the early 2000's, federal litigation that resolved successfully in the favor of polluters and the EPA surrounding changes to the Safe Drinking Water Act set off the natural gas industry to an unanticipated boom.

The litigation involved the leakages of Miami-Dade's underground injection control wells used for municipal waste disposal. In other words, our pollution lead to the explosion of economic interests related to natural gas. That's another story you will never read in the Miami Herald.