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Wall Street Journal poll Most popular spending cut is subsidies for new nuclear plants

Joe Romm has a post at Grist about some poll results about subsidies for nuclear power - Wall Street Journal poll: Most popular spending cut is subsidies for new nuclear plants.

It is no big surprise that Americans don’t want cuts in Social Security, Medicare, or K-12 education. But the new WSJ/NBC poll does have some surprises:

The survey found that the most popular potential spending cuts were subsidies to build new nuclear plants, with 57 percent support….

Of course, nuclear is absurdly over-subsidized (see “Nuclear Pork—Enough is Enough“). In fact, a new report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, Nuclear Power: Still Not Viable without Subsidies (the source of the chart below), finds:

Government subsidies to the nuclear power industry over the past fifty years have been so large in proportion to the value of the energy produced that in some cases it would have cost taxpayers less to simply buy kilowatts on the open market and give them away ….

New nuclear power plants look to be even more uneconomical:

* Nuclear Bombshell: $26 billion cost—$10,800 per kilowatt!—killed Ontario nuclear bid
* Exelon’s Rowe: Low gas prices and no carbon price push back nuclear renaissance a “decade, maybe two”
* The staggering cost of new nuclear power
* GOP wants 100 new nukes by 2030 while Areva has acknowledged that the cost of a new reactor today would be as much as $8 billion