Putting Our Irradiated Eggs in One Basket

A few weeks ago, I was invited by some North Carolina groups to speak via proxy at the Duke Energy Stockholders meeting in Charlotte.  As you may have heard, Duke is involved in a very ambitious plan to merge with Progress Energy, creating what will become the largest utility in the U.S., with investments from the Midwest to Florida.  Duke is also engaged in building more nuclear and coal plants, despite its lip service to alternative energies.

I was intrigued by Duke’s CEO, Jim Rogers.  He spoke quite eloquently throughout the meeting and, after the business meeting, invited questions from the stockholders.  Instead of standing at the podium and microphone, he came down to floor level where people lined up to ask questions.  He stood no more than ten feet, and in some instances closer, to all the individuals who lined up to speak.

Rogers is an interesting and complex man with an ideal persona for the job at hand.  He is obviously well educated in all the areas of Duke Energy, but, more than that, he is an expert at talking to people, expressing empathy for their concerns and promising to "look into" all sorts of things.  He comes off as a grandfather, counselor, educator, and all-around wizard of energy.  Despite his wit and charm, we must remember that Jim Rogers is the head of what is becoming a too-big-to-fail utility that is putting the majority of its eggs into the nuclear and coal basket.

When it was my turn to speak, almost an hour and a half into the question and answer period, Mr. Rogers was still attentive and engaging, although he seemed not really interested in replying to my comments.  I pointed out to him and the stockholders in the room that, like Duke, TEPCO, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, was the largest utility in Japan, in fact one of (if not) THE largest in the world and had indeed become too big to fail.  With the ongoing disaster at Fukushima, TEPCO has collapsed as a company on virtually all levels.  There are discussions about bailouts, nationalization and government payments for the cleanup and compensation.  TEPCO stock has fallen to historic lows and will likely never recover.  The CEOs are being asked to step down, workers are taking pay cuts and the whole company is in ruins.  Tokyo, which received virtually ALL its power from TEPCO has had to resort to rolling brownouts and massive changes in energy use . . . a good thing, in reality, but a sudden shock for a culture that has given new meaning to "light the night" habits.

Will Duke go the way of TEPCO if we have a nuclear disaster?  With the merger, Duke will now own four of the six most dangerous reactors in the state.  According to the NRC safety record, the plants at Oconee, in Seneca, and H.B. Robinson in Florence have been cited numerous times for safety failures on multiple levels.  Both plants have aging reactors.  Statistics show that nuclear accidents are most common at the beginning of a reactor's life (like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island) and at the end (like Fukushima).  These are the most vulnerable times.  Duke will now be the owner of reactors at both ends of this safety risk spectrum . . . with new reactors scheduled to come on-line in the next decade and aging, old reactors being expected to operate well past their design capacity.

Will the U.S. nuclear industry and utilities learn nothing from the disaster at Fukushima?  Will our legislators continue, through legislation and energy policy, to put our state at risk by putting all our energy development into these dangerous, dirty and expensive technologies?  Where are the massive investments in offshore wind, solar and energy efficiency?

Monopolies are monopolies for a reason: so they can continue doing what they are used to doing, only on a bigger scale.  In this instance, bigger is certainly not better—for anyone . . . ratepayers, taxpayers, or stockholders.