The advocacy group Taxpayers for Common Sense yesterday awarded its “Golden Fleece Award” for wasteful spending to the Department of Energy’s cost-share program for small modular reactors. In November DOE announced that B&W would be the recipient of a five-year cost-share program to help design, license and commercialize SMRs. But the group criticized the effort in its “award” announcement yesterday. “The nation is two days away from the across-the-board budget cuts known as sequestration. But at the same time we are hearing the Department of Energy and the nuclear industry evangelizing about the benefits of small modular reactors,” Ryan Alexander, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, said in a statement. “In reality, we cannot afford to pile more market-distorting subsidies to profitable companies on top the billions of dollars we already gave away.”
But yesterday B&W strongly refuted what it called “misinformation” in the Taxpayers For Common Sense announcement. “The Babcock & Wilcox Company (B&W) has invested substantial resources in its small modular reactor (SMR) program because we believe in the promise of this technology. The U.S. Department of Energy wisely decided to support SMR development with a cost-share program so that this beneficial technology can be brought to market and new American jobs can be created,” states a B&W release in part. It goes on, “Governments throughout the world invest in the development of advanced energy technologies that will deliver cost, safety and environmental benefits to their citizens. In order to maintain the United States’ position as the global leader in this industry, our leaders have for many decades supported promising new ideas that have led to innovations in emissions control technologies, nuclear energy, biofuels, hydro power, wind, natural gas and other areas. Support from the Obama administration and the current Congress has been bipartisan and equally strong because SMRs hold the same potential for game-changing innovation.”
