Which Energy Industry Gets the Biggest Subsidies?

Does the study include the value to the nuclear industry for insurance subsidy through Price-Anderson? If not, that would probably bump nuclear's overall position up by a few percentage points. But to be fair, the other industries probably have some similar indirect subsidies as well, so it might not change the story very much.

And in regard to that last comment by Bezdek: are there any nails left unhammered into the coffin of the Reagan legacy?

Good question on nukes. The study does not include the insurance subsidy, nor does it include the large amounts of money that electricity users ended up paying in the bills after the costs of the original overruns and delays were added to the bill. So the amount of taxpayer money that went to nukes (outside of federal outlays) will be higher than this study shows.

I don't think it's fair to add overrun and delay costs on as "taxpayer" costs. Sure, every consumer is a taxpayer and every taxpayer is a consumer (roughly speaking), but any business might incur overrun or delay costs on its customers, so treating those like "taxpayer" costs doesn't seem right.

For example, if an Exxon refinery is delayed going on line, then that adds something to the cost of gasoline, but I don't think we'd want to add that as a "hidden subsidy" to the oil industry.

Now, if you're talking about the issue as a drain on the economy and a source of inefficiency, okay, throw in those costs. But if the issue is how money gets moved through the government to the industries, that's a different angle and appropriately narrower.

A different but related question would have to do with the way that politics leads to external costs like overruns and such. If licensing is a red-tape nightmare, that's a problem. But if licensing is too easy, and then construction runs into other problems and is delayed because the licensing didn't require enough advance planning, the problem occurs in reverse. Et cetera.

I agree that these are different costs. But the reason for mentioning them is that many people have a vague sense that the nuclear industry has been the beneficiary of huge amount of subsidies. In fact, that's one reason why this study was done. It was commissioned by the Nuclear Energy Institute (the industry's trade group) to dispel the myth that nukes have gotten huge federal subsidies. The study's author acknowledges, however, that there is a grain of truth in the public's perception, in that electricity consumers have paid far more than originally promised, thanks to the rather large cost overruns.