"...its nuclear unit ...reported a 48% plunge in earnings..."

[kristopher]

Entergy Corp.'s (ETR) first-quarter profit fell 9% as lower pricing for its nuclear power dragged down revenue and operating margin.

The power company is shaping a new strategy after credit-market turmoil and regulatory pushback led it to back off plans to spin-off five of its nuclear plants. It boosted its dividend 11% this month but didn't say exactly what to expect in lieu of the spinoff plan. Results were mixed last year but earnings surged in the fourth quarter as utility segment performance improved.

...The company's utility division profit climbed 24% while its nuclear unit, the second-biggest U.S. generator of such power behind Exelon Corp. (EXC), reported a 48% plunge in earnings as revenue fell on lower pricing.

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20100429-709865.html?mod=WSJ_earnings_MIDDLETopHeadlines

[FBaggins]

1. As a handful of banks have learned...

..."declining profits" is far preferable to climbing losses.

[kristopher]

2. B-A-N-K-R-U-P-T-C-Y

"In our base case (which uses current industry forecasts for construction costs - €3,100/KW, and assumes on-time completion) new plants operating as merchant capacity in a pool system, do not offer an attractive risk-reward to investors.

We estimate that equity investors would earn a return competitive to that offered by other technologies with at best a 37% probability.

We also analyse the economics of new nuclear on perhaps more realistic assumptions – higher construction costs and time over runs – and needless to say we find that equity investors are even less likely to earn an adequate return in a merchant market."

[NNadir]

3. Oh bull. Anti-nukes like the very stupid Amory Lovins have been saying that nuclear...

is economically dead for a half a century.

Anti-nukes are not only scientifically illiterate, morally indifferent, innumerate and delusional, but they have the economic sense of Madoff investors.

It's why anti-nukes sell so many Ponzi schemes.

Quoth dick head Lovins in 1980 in his stupid article in Foreign Affairs (Lovins, Amory; Lovins, Hunter, Ross, Leonard Foreign Affairs : http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/33962/amory-b-lovins-l-hunter-lovins-and-leonard-ross/nuclear-power-and-nuclear-bombs">NICLEAR POWER AND)
NUCLEAR BOMBS>, 1980, pg 1138.

Our thesis rests on a different perception. Our attempt to rethink focuses not on marginal reforms but on basic assumptions. In fact, the global nuclear power enterprise is rapidly disappearing. De facto moratoria on reactor ordering exist today in the
United States, the Federal Republic of Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, Ireland, and probably the United Kingdom, Belgium, Switzerland, Japan and Canada. Nuclear power has been indefinitely deferred or abandoned in Austria, Denmark, Norway, Iran, China, Australia and New Zealand. Nuclear power elsewhere is in grave difficulties...

...We shall argue that the collapse of nuclear power in response to the discipline of the marketplace is to be welcomed, for nuclear power is both the main driving force behind proliferation and the least effective known way to displace oil: indeed, it retards oil displacement by the faster, cheaper and more attractive means which new developments in energy policy now make available to all countries.

Discipline of the marketplace?

Well speaking only for myself, I find it unsurprising that little uneducated dip shit anti-nukes are flaky libertarian types, the sort who hole up in Idaho (or Snowmass, Colorado) with a big pile of guns, and a brazillion gallons of gasoline.

Meanwhile in reality land, uninhabited by a single anti-nuke, the "collapsed" nuclear industry is producing almost 4 times as much energy as the little soothsayer predicted with his "economic" "realities" bull shit wishful thinking 30 very stupid years ago.

Um Amory? What's 2,594.53 divided by 684.38?

Don't know how to arithmetic? Join the rest of the dumb anti-science anti-nuke club.

The only economic consequence of Amory's inability to predict anything at all, his obliviousness and his lack of intellectual heft, is that, paradoxically (and a reflection on why our times are such a disaster) is that the little Ponzi schemer has been able to get dangerous fossil fuel companies (BP, of well fame, Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell, Conoco...) to pay him huge fees to greenwash the dangerous fossil fuel agenda for which Lovins, and every other anti-nuke on earth is an apologist.

The number of nuclear wars since Lovins wrote his dumb ass free association for retards is, by the way, zero.

Have a nice arithmetically delusional evening.

[bananas]

4. "regulatory pushback led it to back off plans to spin-off five of its nuclear plants"

Some people are just too naive to understand this:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x238403

New York Rejects Entergy’s Spinoff of Nuclear Plants (xpost)

From LBN yesterday:

New York Rejects Entergy’s Spinoff of Nuclear Plants (Update1)

Source: Business Week (Bloomberg)

Entergy Corp.’s plan to raise at least $3 billion by spinning off six nuclear reactors into a separate company was rejected by the New York Public Service Commission.

The commission voted unanimously today at a regular meeting in New York City, after its staff and state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo argued the transaction would hurt the public by creating a “debt-laden” company with fewer financial resources to meet obligations to dismantle the plants.
...
Enexus “would not be a financially viable entity in the long term” because of the debt loads proposed by Entergy, John Stewart, the regulator’s director of utility rates and service, said at the meeting.
...
Entergy’s debt is rated BBB, the second-lowest investment grade, by Standard & Poor’s and Baa3, the lowest investment grade, by Moody’s Investors Service.
...

Read more: ...

dixiegrrrrl has it right:

dixiegrrrrl
Response to Original message

3. Cuomo is very smart.

Companies can and do form subsidiaries, load them with debt while the income stream is sent to the parent company, then declare bankruptcy for the debt laden subsidiary. Investors, pensioners, lose all their money.
A widely used tactic in Argentina, which contributed to the collapse of that country a few years back.
A hated tactic during the Energy crisis in Ca. a few years back.
And recently used by GMC, to the shock of the investors of the "old" company who lost everything.

[kristopher]

5. One of the nuclear industry's most successful tactics

has been to hide the full cost of the power produced.