The nuclear power expansion fee that will show up on Georgia Power bills in January will be bigger than the utility indicated when lobbying for the levy, according to plans filed Friday.
Georgia Power said the initial fee will add $3.73 to the typical monthly residential bill in 2011 -- more than double the $1.30 figure the company and its supporters used when it convinced the state legislature to allow the fee.
In the Public Service Commission filing, Georgia Power also said the fee will ratchet up to $9 over the following four years, rather than six as it had suggested last year.
However, the total amount collected through the fee to help pay for two new reactors will remain unchanged, Georgia Power said. It's the initial amount and pace of the increases that differs from the company's previous indications.
Company spokeswoman Christy Ihrig said the faster time line more accurately reflects when the company believes it will incur costs on its Plant Vogtle reactor project.
Fee opponents said the public was tricked.
"It's the old bait and switch," said Angela Speir, executive director of Georgia Watch and a former PSC member. "Georgia Power told legislators it would be one thing, but when ratepayers get their bill, it's something else."
AARP spokesman Will Phillips also criticized the change.
"Georgia Power sold the legislature (on the fee) as a way to help customers avoid rate shock," he said. "And now, in this economy, the increase they propose to give to customers in January 2011 is more than twice what they estimated."
"After Georgians all across the state have been voicing their concerns about this and other rate increases, we wonder if Georgia Power is even listening," Phillips said.
After the $3.73 addition to a typical bill next year, the fee will add another $1.44 in 2012, $1.50 in 2013, $1.22 in 2014 and 82 cents in 2015, according to Georgia Power, with the additions cumulative.
When seeking approval for the fee, it had used figures that called for the fee to increase roughly $1.30 per year for seven years.
The new fees will come on top of whatever basic rate increase Georgia Power wins from state utility regulators later this year. The company has asked for more than $1 billion in increases, phased in over 26 months beginning in January. The proposed rate increases would add $18 per month to the typical household bill.
Georgia Power's nuclear fee is intended to pay about $1.6 billion in financing costs for constructing two reactors at its Vogtle nuclear plant near Augusta. They are scheduled to be complete in 2016 and 2017 and are on pace to become the nation's first new reactors in decades.
The reactors will cost an estimated $14 billion total, of which Georgia Power customers will pay a little less than half: Co-op and municipal power customers will pay for the rest.
Under state law and utility regulatory policy, power customers don’t typically pay for new generation facilities until the plants produce power. But in 2009, Georgia Power convinced the legislature to pass Senate Bill 31, which changed that for nuclear reactors.
SB 31 was one of the most intensely lobbied measures in years. Company lobbyists and the bill's sponsors all used the $1.30 per month initial increase figure to sell it.
The company said the early collection would reduce rate shock and shave the reactors’ final cost to ratepayers by about $300 million.
Georgia Watch, AARP, radio consumer advocate Clark Howard and conservative blogs like Peach Pundit and Political Vine all opposed SB 31, saying it shifted risk to ratepayers and forced some consumers to pay for plants they will never use.
From Grist.com:
Up until the late 1970s, many environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, heralded nuclear power as an emissions-free energy source. That cheery outlook came to an abrupt end in 1979, when equipment failures and human error caused the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history, at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Penn. Throughout the 1980s, medical reports linked cancer incidence to radiation exposure at nuclear power plants and in underground uranium mines. Then came 1986 and the darkest days of the nuclear industry, when the notorious Chernobyl meltdown exposed 75,000 people to high-level nuclear radiation. Such events made the licensing of new nuclear plants nearly impossible in the United States, because no communities wanted them built in their backyards and no investors wanted to face the high operating costs and the possibility of disaster.
Even more alarming from an environmental standpoint is nuclear waste disposal. Used uranium rods remain "hot" (radioactive) for between 10,000 and 250,000 years. "Scientists have absolutely no idea about how we can contain these radioactive materials for that long a time," says David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists. "A country 200 years old is facing a mighty big problem when it's creating waste that must be isolated from the environment for at least 10,000 years. Scientists simply don't have enough evidence to know what the effects will be down the road."
After uranium is burned, the rods are kept in pools of water at the plant for five to 10 years until they're cool enough to be sealed in concrete and steel containers and stowed underground. (Many plants keep their waste in holding pools for decades without transferring them to containers -- a cheaper but far more hazardous storage option.) However, the containers themselves won't last for more than several hundred years, which is why Yucca Mountain, Nev., has been proposed as a geologically isolated long-term sarcophagus for nuclear waste. Since 1982, over $50 billion has been poured into researching the geological suitability of Yucca Mountain for such purposes. Environmentalists argue that the choice of Yucca Mountain has been based more on political convenience than environmental suitability, and that too little time has been spent evaluating the possible radioactive contamination of the aquifer beneath the site.
Environmentalists are also concerned about the transportation of spent uranium to Yucca Mountain. The Department of Energy has admitted that any human standing within two yards of storage tanks for an hour will be exposed to radiation levels equivalent to a chest x-ray, which can be dangerous for pregnant women. "What if you're stuck in traffic next to one of these trucks carrying nuclear waste?" asks U.S. PIRG's Aurilio. The nuclear energy industry argues that these concerns are exaggerated. "This volume of waste is absolutely manageable," says Thelma Wiggins of the Nuclear Energy Institute. "All told, over the last 40 years, the waste fills an area no bigger than a football field that goes five yards deep."
Great Britain, which has amassed less nuclear waste than the U.S., doesn't agree that there's nothing to worry about. Most of Britain's nuclear plants, which account for a whopping 30 percent of the country's energy supply, are scheduled to reach the end of their legal lifespans within the next decade. And yet the British Parliament voted last year to block the industry's effort to expand the life of the plants or allow new ones to be built. Instead, it is launching a phase-out campaign much like the one proposed by Makhijani: increasing natural gas production, improving energy efficiency by creating incentives for green buildings and energy-efficient companies, and increasing investments in alternative energy resources such as solar and wind.
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