Nuclear energy costly for Iowa

To the editor:

MidAmerican Energy is pressing the Iowa Legislature to pass a bill that MidAmerican could not get passed last year: HF 561, which would allow MidAmerican Energy to bill Iowa consumers in advance for new MidAmerican nuclear reactors, and let MidAmerican keep the money regardless of whether any nuclear reactors are ever constructed.

Want to see how well this has worked elsewhere? In 2006, the Florida legislature passed a bill that allowed investor-owned utilities to charge ratepayers for construction costs for new nuclear reactors before they were built and producing electricity. Progress Energy in Florida has since spent $1.1 billion on planning and development for its Levy nuclear project. Progress?s ratepayers had already footed $545 million of this bill through the end of 2011 and they will be forced to pay the remaining $555 million, despite the increasing possibility the reactors will never be constructed. Progress Energy just announced that it plans to cancel the construction contract for its proposed nuclear reactors in Levy County, which will leave customers with a bill of hundreds of millions of dollars without a single watt of electricity generated or delivered.

So now MidAmerican Energy wants the Iowa Legislature to do the same thing that Florida did in 2006.

A recent analysis of an amended version of this bill by the Iowa Utilities Board staff confirmed that this bill fails to protect consumers and actually creates incentives for utilities to behave in a manner contrary to the public interest.

Iowa doesn?t need this bill. Since 2008, utility companies have noted a decline in electricity consumption due to more efficient appliances and a deeper shift in consumption patterns. This drop in electrical use increases the probability that the ?baseload? energy need, which MidAmerican has cited as the reason for its new nuclear plant, will never actually materialize.

There are other, far less expensive and less risky ways to meet Iowa?s future needs for baseload electrical energy. What Iowa needs right now is wind and solar energy investment, which has been shown to create far more jobs in any state than centralized radioactive nuclear energy does. We should be investing in research and development of REAL green renewable energy, not in financially risky and inefficient nuclear energy.

The energy marketplace is moving away from nuclear energy quickly. By the time a MidAmerican plant is built, if one ever is built, few other industrialized nations will be investing in nuclear. But if the Iowa Legislature approves this bill, it will keep Iowa stuck in nuclear?s radioactive financial hold for generations to come. We can do better than that, and we should.

? Patrick Bosold, Fairfield