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> They think that government will guarantee income of their customers. As is customary, for nukes. Actually, you think they think. Do you have any evidence tho
by credit_guy 4y ago
> They think that government will guarantee income of their customers. As is customary, for nukes.
Actually, you think they think. Do you have any evidence though?
Because I have evidence of the contrary.
They are a publicly traded company. They need to disclose their business rationale in their SEC filings, which are posted online [1]. If they lie in their statements, they are liable to go to prison (like the CEO and CFO of Enron). And they clearly are at risk of a class action lawsuit. It is very unlikely you'll find intentional outright lies, or intentional material omissions in SEC filings, not just in the case of NuScale, but of all publicly traded companies in general.
So, I took a look at their more important filings, e.g. [2]. The statement about Government funds is on page 209:
UAMPS, our first customer, has received a $1.4 billion DOE cost-share award to support deployment of a NuScale LLC VOYGR-6 power plant.
Such a plant has a capacity of 0.5 GW. $1.4 billion is not unreasonable at all for 0.5 GW, it is even competitive with solar (the utility-scale cost of solar is about $1 BN/GW, but the capacity factor is only about 30%, so you end up with a cost of about the same capital cost for 1 GWh, but nuclear is steady, while solar is not). You will not find any mention that NuScale thinks they can extract more than that from the Government. Instead you'll find the opposite:
We may be unable to charge UAMPS, our first customer, for some costs we have incurred and we may be required to reimburse UAMPS if we fail to achieve specified performance measures.
[1] https://ir.nuscalepower.com/financials/sec-filings/default.aspx https://ir.nuscalepower.com/financials/sec-filings/default.a...
[2] https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001822966/21dbdfdf-e1c5-4701-a907-0aecd72b0f52.pdf https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001822966/21dbdfd...
- ncmncm 4y agoNuScale obviously does not expect to coerce money from ratepayers. Their customers, as I said, do: UAMPS, here. But you demonstrate my point: you and I are being made to kick in a $1.4B subsidy to UAMPS, thence to NuScale. NuScale didn't risk anything: that $0.5B was tripled via their first "sale", without a single kWh delivered to anybody. They have been on the public teat all along.