Vermont Yankee fiscal woes, July 20, 2013

In a report in the Vermont Digger  (h/t to my wife, Anneke) Andrew Stein says:

A source inside the Vernon plant says managers are telling workers that the company could lay off 10 percent of the facility’s roughly 650 workers.

This news comes shortly after Entergy announced that it anticipates decreased earnings in the second quarter of 2013, dropping from $2.11 a share last year to an estimated $1 per share. Representatives of the Louisiana-based company said in a news release that the decrease is due to “substantially higher income tax expense.”

Mark Cooper, a senior economics fellow at Vermont Law School, published a paper Wednesday titled, “Renaissance in Reverse: Competition Pushes Aging U.S. Nuclear Reactors to the Brink of Economic Abandonment.” Cooper drew from the Wall Street reports of Moody’s, UBS and Credit Suisse for his analysis.

“Economic reality has slammed the door on nuclear power,” Cooper concluded. “In the near-term old reactors are uneconomic because lower cost alternatives have squeezed their cash margins to the point where they no longer cover the cost of nuclear operation … In the long term new reactors are uneconomic because there are numerous low-carbon alternatives that are less costly and less risk (sic).”

In 2013, the fair value of the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant fell 69 percent, from $517.5 million to $162 million. UBS Securities downgraded Entergy Corp.’s stock from “neutral” to “sell.” The Swiss financial services firm also projected the closure of an Entergy nuclear facility in 2013, saying “Vermont Yankee is the most tenuously positioned plant.”

 Such exciting news.   Entergy has  been acting like the monster  that cannot be killed.  Now its capitalistic colleagues, the banking corporations, are beginning to attack.   Their blows may be lethal.  What will happen with a work force reduction of 10 %?   Will the works be told that have to become more efficient?

Related articles

• Vermont Yankee owner: ‘Expect workforce reductions’ (vtdigger.org)
• Entergy predicting layoffs after quarterly earnings report (vttoday.com)
• How many Vermonters does it take to run a nuclear power plant? (GreenMountainDaily.com)