Extra Nuclear Funding in Budget Bill Quietly Passes

The FY05 Omnibus Appropriations conference report (HR 4818), passed out

of conference committee Saturday, includes as part of the Energy and

Water Development section $50 million for the Nuclear Power 2010 program

--  five times what the Bush administration requested.  This money is

the pool from which funds are drawn to support 50 percent of the cost of

the three Early Site Permit applications in Virginia, Illinois, and

Mississippi, as well as the three consortia that have announced their

intention to apply for a combined Construction and Operating License.

One consortium, NuStart Energy Development, has requested $400 million

in COL support over the next few years, and a second, led by Dominion,

has asked for $250 million.



"This is yet another example of the Bush administration subsidizing a

mature industry that should sink or swim on its own merits after fifty

years of market failures," said Michele Boyd, legislative director of

Public Citizen's energy program.  "The money would be better spent

developing truly clean and renewable forms of energy generation."



Nuclear power will not alleviate our major energy problems of the day:

high oil prices and a reliance on oil imports from politically unstable

regions.  Only 1.4 percent of our electricity is generated from oil, so

greater reliance on nuclear power will have essentially no impact on

demand for oil.



For more information, please visit www.energyactivist.org



###



===================



For Immediate Release: Nov. 22, 2004

Contact: Tyson Slocum (202) 454-5191; Erica Hartman (202) 454-5174



D.C. Regulators Should Counter PEPCO's Rate Hikes by Halting Disastrous

Deregulation Experiment



Public Citizen Urges the Re-Purchase of PEPCO's Power Plants



WASHINGTON, D.C. - D.C. government regulators are powerless to protect

consumers from PEPCO's proposed 17.7 percent electric rate hike because

deregulation has allowed unregulated companies to set higher prices,

Public Citizen said today.  The consumer advocacy organization is urging

the D.C. Public Service Commission (D.C. PSC) to reject the requested

rate hike and work toward re-regulation, so the District once again will

have the regulatory power to ensure that prices consumers pay are tied

to the true costs of producing power.



The only way for D.C. to adequately protect consumers is to re-regulate

the region's electricity system by ordering PEPCO to re-purchase the

power plants it sold to Atlanta-based Mirant, because the commission is

less able to control rates if PEPCO is buying power from another entity

than if PEPCO re-acquires the plants it sold. Such a move would restore

the city's ability to regulate power prices and implement the cost-based

rate system that successfully protected consumers for 100 years.



Further, taking steps to re-regulate the system would be consistent

with national trends; nine states have either repealed or delayed their

deregulation laws in the past couple of years. Those states are Arizona,

Arkansas, California, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon and

West Virginia.



"This would put D.C. on the path of lower costs for consumers while

maintaining reasonable profits for PEPCO," said Tyson Slocum, research

director for Public Citizen's energy program. "Controlling rates is

particularly important for those on fixed or lower incomes, because they

are hit even harder by rate hikes."



PEPCO voluntarily sold four of its six D.C.-area power plants to Mirant

in December 2000. Mirant, which has paid $17.8 million to settle

allegations of Enron-style market manipulation, filed for Chapter 11

bankruptcy protection in July 2003. The sale of PEPCO's power plants

meant that D.C. no longer had any ability to regulate power prices as it

had for 100 years, because the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that states

cannot regulate prices from power plants unless they are part of a

vertically integrated system.



PJM Connection  -- regional transmission organization coordinating the

movement of electricity in all or parts of Delaware, Illinois, Indiana,

Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee,

Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia -- is the largest

centrally controlled dispatch area in the United States. PEPCO must buy

all its power through the PJM market, and power prices in PJM have

skyrocketed 75 percent under deregulation, with inflation-adjusted

electricity prices rising from $25.92 per megawatt hour in 1998 to

$45.33 per megawatt hour over the first 10 months of 2004.  These high

prices are rising far above the actual cost to produce electricity,

meaning unregulated power companies reap record profits while consumers

pay more.



"The sole reason PEPCO is seeking a rate increase is because PEPCO is

now forced to buy its power from unregulated power producers like Mirant

in the regional PJM market," said Slocum.



The D.C. PSC originally supported PEPCO's decision to sell its power

plants in an attempt to foster competition for consumers. The problem

is, "competition" isn't occurring in D.C. or in any states that have

deregulated.



For example, consider the benchmark used to measure the relative

success of such "competition": the share of D.C.'s residential consumers

who have chosen an alternative electricity supplier to PEPCO. The

highest "choice" rate achieved in D.C. was in December 2002, when 12

percent of the city's residents "chose" an alternative supplier to

PEPCO.  Nearly two years later, by October 2004, nearly 10,000 fewer

D.C. residents were "choosing" an alternative supplier, reducing the

share of residential customers "choosing" to 7 percent.  Nationally,

just 5 percent of residential consumers in the remaining 15 deregulated

states have switched suppliers because wholesale prices continue to

climb and retail competitors have shown little interest in serving

residential consumers.



There is little cost savings in choosing alternative providers serving

residential consumers in the District. The average annual price per

kilowatt hour for residential customers is 5.04 cents with PEPCO; 6.4

cents with Pepco Energy Services (PES), an unregulated subsidiary of

PEPCO, when 51 percent of the power comes from renewable energy sources;

7 cents with PES' option of providing electricity generated 100 percent

from renewable energy sources; 4.53 cents with Washington Gas Energy

Services (WGES), an unregulated subsidiary of Washington Gas, D.C.'s

regulated natural gas company; and 4.58 with WGES' option of providing

electricity in which 5 percent comes from windpower.



Although consumers may save a nominal sum by selecting an alternative

supplier, most residential consumers haven't made the switch because

they will be even less protected than if they were to stay with PEPCO.

For instance, the prices charged by alternative suppliers are wholly

unregulated, and alternative suppliers can raise prices dramatically

after a contract ends.



Under PEPCO's proposed rate increase, PEPCO's residential customers

will pay an average of $120 more per year on bills of approximately $690

per year.



"Deregulation is clearly a failed experiment in D.C's electricity

market," said Slocum.  "It is time to recognize this colossal error and

stop a trend that harms consumers instead of helping them.  We urge D.C.

to work towards fixing this broken system."



For more information about PEPCO and deregulation, go to

www.citizen.org/cmep/pepco.



###



Public Citizen is a national, nonprofit consumer advocacy organization

based in Washington, D.C. For more information, please visit

www.citizen.org



===================



*** N O T I C E ***



National Academies Survey on Public Outreach for Radioactive Waste

Transportation Study



The National Academies -- which advises the federal government on

technical matters of science, engineering, and medicine -- is conducting

a survey gauging the public's concerns regarding the transportation of

radioactive waste.  The information gathered in this survey will be

employed to craft public outreach materials on a forthcoming study on

this issue by the National Academies.  The survey is available at:

http://www8.nationalacademies.org/survey/nap/napinternetsurvey.htm



Please note that Public Citizen has not necessarily endorsed the

contents of this report, as they are not publicly known at this point.



Questions about the CMEP ListServ can be directed to CMEP-request@LISTSERVER.CITIZEN.ORG.

Contact: Brendan Hoffman, 202-454-5134; Erica Hartman, 202-454-5174



To learn more about this and other Public Citizen Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program campaigns, visit our website at http://www.citizen.org/cmep/



-Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program