Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman and the “What, Me Worry?” tagline  may have been the world’s first meme (if things from the 70s can be memes). Today, FirstEnergy’s chairman, Chuck Jones, is channeling Neuman when it comes to paying to clean up poisonous coal-ash ponds and radioactive reactors that it’s transferring to FirstEnergy Solutions (FES).

The judge overseeing the FES bankruptcy rejected FirstEnergy’s initial attempt to evade its environmental responsibilities. Trying to appease skeptical investors, FirstEnergy now argues there’s zero risk that it will ever be called upon to pay these cleanup costs. Really? Then why did the utility giant fight so hard in the first place to get releases from future liability?

Mr. Jones’ claims rests on a few wild assumptions. Ohio and Pennsylvania would both need to pass expensive nuclear-bailout laws to keep the plants running.  Projections of the plants’ future earnings for the next 40 years would need to be accurate (unlike FirstEnergy’s past assumptions on this point– that’s why the nuclear unit is in bankruptcy).  When the plants are closed 40 years from now, moreover, the nuclear waste will be held in place for another 60 years, and the estimates for the cleanup costs a hundred years from now will need to be on the mark.

Where’s the Math?

Bailout proponents claim that without HB 6’s massive subsidies 1,300 people will lose their jobs at the two uneconomic reactors along the shores of Lake Erie. Ignored are the employees that would for years be busy decommissioning those plants. And according to Americans for Prosperity, the bailout “does not guarantee that the plants are ultimately a fit for the strategy of a new corporation or group of investors.” In other words, the bailout may initially enrich FES’s hedge-fund vultures but be “a long-term financial loss for Ohioans.”

Compare those 1,300 nuclear jobs to the 81,000 people employed in Ohio’s energy efficiency industry, who would stand to lose their jobs if HB 6 passes and the Energy Efficiency Resource Standard is eliminated.

The “bailouters” claiming theirs is a “jobs bill” may want to take an arithmetic refresher. 

Isn’t This Getting Old?

HB 6 would be the fifth time Ohioans have paid for FirstEnergy’s uneconomic power plants:
(1) when the plants were built
(2) when the retail electricity market was restructured under SB 3 in 1999 and the utilities received billions of dollars in “stranded costs” payments
(3) when utilities were allowed to add the plants back into their electricity supply plans under SB 221 in 2008
(4) under PUCO-approved bailout rulings, which EDF is currently appealing to the Ohio Supreme Court

And here we are again, with HB 6. 

When will it be time to say – enough is enough? How about now?