They call it "stranded costs" and we in Pennsylvania saw our electricity rates jump dramatically for construction costs/cost overrides of nuclear plants, YEARS before the plants even went on line to start delivering power.
I want to be absolutely clear about this. Duquesne Light's (a for profit corporation) customers were forced to pay for outrageous cost overrides, but Duquesne Electric executives and stock holders were not. Dividends continued to be paid as per usual. This is what we progressives call Corporate Welfare. Google stranded costs to see what I'm talking about. The links below also spell out in detail why the sweetheart deals of tax subsidies, tax credits, loan guarantees, procedural simplifications and institutional support as demanded by the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group, translate into all risk, no reward for taxpayers and ratepayers, . The NYT article quotes a Forbes magazine article labeling the construction of the first round of US nuclear plants "the largest managerial disaster in business history."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/27/business/global/27iht-renuke.html?_r=3&src=busln"Identifying the real costs of competing energy technologies is complicated by the wide range of subsidies and tax breaks involved. As a result, U.S. taxpayers and utility users could end up spending hundreds of billions, even trillions of dollars more than necessary to achieve an ample low-carbon energy supply, if legislative proposals before the U.S. Congress lead to adoption of an ambitious nuclear development program, Mr. Cooper said in a report last November.
"At the state level, the industry has also pressed the case for “construction work in progress,” a financing system that requires electricity users to pay for the cost of new reactors during their construction and sometimes before construction starts. With long construction periods and frequent delays, this can mean that electricity users start to pay higher prices as much as 12 years before the plants produce electricity.
“The utilities insist that the construction work in progress charged to ratepayers also include the return on equity that the utilities normally earn by taking the risk of building the plant — even though they have shifted the risk to the ratepayers,” Mr. Cooper said. “If the plant is not built or suffers cost overruns, the ratepayers will bear the burden.”
"The first round of plants resulted in write-offs through bankruptcies and “stranded costs” — investments in existing power plants made uncompetitive by deregulation — which essentially transferred nearly $100 billion in liabilities to electricity users, said Doug Koplow, an economist and founder of Earth Track, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which campaigns against subsidies it considers environmentally harmful. “Although the industry frequently points to its low operating costs as evidence of its market competitiveness, this economic structure is an artifact of large subsidies to capital, historical write-offs of capital, and ongoing subsidies to operating costs,” Mr. Koplow said.