Please stop the bailout of an Ohio nuclear energy company called United States Enrichment Corporation (USEC). It is an experimental company with a junk-bond rating from Moody’s and no customers. It has spent nine years and $2billion unsuccessfully trying to produce functioning nuclear enrichment machines from an unproven Department of Energy design (Who in their right mind would do this?). If it ever succeeds technically, it’s technology will already be obsolete or nearly so, making commercial viability even more unlikely.

When are we going to start governing based on principle, Mr. Speaker?

If this project obtains the $2billion taxpayer-guaranteed loan that it seeks (and for which it has already been rejected once), and then goes bankrupt, its 400 jobs will cost taxpayers up to $5 million each.

When is this going to stop, Mr. Speaker? When is the U.S. government going to stop playing “World’s Worst Venture Capitalist Ever”?

The Ohio project, Washington insiders whisper, is hardly any worse than Solyndra.

???!!!

Even shakier energy projects, both nuclear and nonnuclear, are sure to get federal energy loan guarantees, so why shouldn?t USEC? After all, they argue, the USEC guarantee, if approved, is unlikely to prompt much public blowback but it?s sure to make interest groups in Ohio happy.

Perhaps, but this ought to be reason for pause.

Before USEC goes the way of Solyndra and even more bankrupt energy projects get federal backing, it certainly would be smarter to consider the alternative of just saying no. This, of course, would require government officials to do more than merely express moral outrage about energy projects that have gone wrong. They?d actually have to show some self-restraint at a time when money is scarce. Surely, this is possible.

— Henry Sokolski & Autumn Hanna, at:
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/281513/another-solyndra-henry-sokolski?pg=1